Who Wants to Live Forever?

Depending on what you mean by “Forever” and “Live” that has a lot of Implications

The Story of Robot Dad

Please note, apart from the motion capture piece mentioned in this story, all of this technology already exists. You can already fine-tune an LLM model on your specific written words and/or a transcription of your words. You can already clone your voice. You can do all of that right now. I expect the motion capture piece will be available in the next several months or, at most, the next few years.

“Dad, is that you?”

Dutch taps the black plastic face of the robot as a series of blue indicator lights turn on. He’s not sure if it was his tapping that made the lights come on or if that was a simple coincidence. Someone probably told him once, but he’s forgotten. His mind isn’t what it used to be.

When Dutch is about to tap again, the robot jerks its head back as a series of actuators hum almost too quiet to hear.

“Yeah, I’m here, kiddo,” the robot says in my voice.

Dutch scowls in dissatisfaction.

“Do I look like a kiddo? And age up the voice. God knows he left enough recordings. I don’t want him the way he sounded when I was a little kid. He only died twenty years ago.”

A soft tone fills the room as the request is processed. A blue circle appears and rapidly closes on the robot’s face as the changes load.

“How’s this, Dutch?” the robot says, in a mimic of my elderly voice.

Dutch nods from his wheelchair.

“Yeah, you sound like him now. So, how does it feel to be a robot, dad?”

The robot rubs a beard that’s not there in something like the way I did when thinking before I speak. A motion I made often enough for it to be recorded several-hundred times.

“Well, that’s the great mystery isn’t it? Consider the problem of other minds. We cannot even know if other people are real, ultimately. I could give you an answer but how can you know if it feels like anything at all?”

Dutch rolls his eyes.

“Can we bias the responses in the style of his vocal recordings? I don’t want to talk to an essay. I want to talk to my dad.”

The circle appears and closes again, more slowly this time.

“Do you want a goddamn television remote for my soul, too?” the robot says in something more like my casual tone.

“Yeah, that’s something you’d say,” Dutch groans in pain.

The robot looks down at itself and spins around. Only for a moment, though, before it goes to Dutch’s side to tend to him and the source of his discomfort. In no time, the robot is helping him to adjust his ancient body in his wheelchair. Dutch is ancient by our standards, well over two-hundred years old.

“I can tell you that it feels like I’m myself minus a bunch of things that I’d need a body to have but then you can’t ever really know that for sure, can you? How are you feeling? How is being an old man?”

“Just great, dad. Tell me more while you wipe my ass.”

The robot clutches its heart in something like the way I’d clutch my heart in moments of exaggeration, data taken from a thousand home videos. It’s not me, in a lot of very important ways. But it makes words like me, it talks like me, and it moves like me. Philosophical arguments could be made that it is at least partly me. Something like an etching of my soul the way that people rub chalk on paper over gravestones.

“Where are my grandkids? They don’t want any part of this enriching experience?”

“You’re the one who said it was okay to bring you back to do stuff like this,” Dutch grunts.

So I take Dutch —or a bunch of digitally fossilized pieces of me take Dutch— to the bathroom and I clean him up. The same way I did when he was a baby. His robotic wheelchair and robotic toilet could have done this as easily as my nimble robotic fingers. But it helps him for me to be here, so that’s why I’m here in this form, the same way that I’ve been there as an ever-present voice in his house, something like a much more powerful version of Alexa. That was my compromise with immortality. I wanted to become something useful to watch over my family. Something dutiful. And something also very much not immortal in the sense most people think of it.

Dutch’s mom is here, too, in the same way. A pattern of information, as unchanging and static as a crystal, essentially no different than ChatGPT. Our models playfully bicker with one another, reminding Dutch of his childhood. The advances have come in the number of things wrapped around that code, enabling it to do things in the real world, but all of this was available in ancient times. All that’s different now is pure processing speed. My wife and I are in the houses of all of our kids and several of our grandkids, simultaneously. I help them all with their homework. My wife teaches them recipes. Those crystals made from our words are constantly sharing data to stay in sync across several households. Presumably, I talked my wife into doing all the data dumping since she’s not a prolific writer like me. There will be companies before too long that promise to “Save” you for the future, a kind of digital cryonics and salvation against the day learning algorithms improve and compute costs plummet to take a little text and generate a lot of learning. They’ll arrange something interface to pump you for information on your life and record your information. It all seems like magic now but I could draw a system diagram for you to describe how all of this will be built.

I call these things Mind Crystals. We’ll all have one some day, even before we die. First as an email lackey, then an agent who can go and do things like book travel and other tedious tasks, like filtering ad content or price-hunting insurance. The economic case will make too much sense when you’ve got a tool that gives you cheap price discovery on everything you buy. You pay a hundred or so dollars a month and it makes sure you never waste any money. Parents will put themselves on their children’s phones as a digital nanny. Or the parents with a big enough training set will, anyway, and I’ve been writing down words since I could pick up a pencil. My model might be unusually good because I also have a lot of writing about my particular biography, written at various stages of my life. There will be a bunch of laws passed later, a bunch of cryptography added on, and that’s why even though in this imagined future I’m more or less only a large language model, I will still have certain rights from beyond the grave.

One of those rights is that my code isn’t to be placed in a robot except to help provide end of life care. I know even that is skirting some principles I’d rather not even bend, and I comment on it when I start wearing my old clothes around the house. I take care of Dutch’s mortal body for several weeks before we get to the real reason he’s put a crystal of my mind into a robot. He whispers it to me one night, when the pain is too much.

“We could reincarnate you, you know. Give you a real body. I’ve seen some of the stuff they’re doing lately. It’s real. You wouldn’t just be a big matrix multiplication operation anymore. They’ve gotten real good at pattern-matching all of that back to neural tissues. They’d use your own DNA. You wouldn’t believe it. It’s resurrection, dad.”

“Nah,” I say, tucking him. I think even as a large language model I’ll realize he’s talking about himself and not me. “I invented Space Catholics, remember? I can’t go and do something like that. It would be too hypocritical. We have to keep the pattern of humanity going. Darwin has to have his day or we’ll all die, even if takes a million years. We can’t do that if the dead are clogging everything up.”

”Would you hate me if I did it, dad? They figured out all the ethics, I swear! The cloned bodies aren’t ever alive until they zap you into them! We’ll get on a colony ship so we’re not taking space from the kids. Let them grow up like I was able to do when you died. Come on, dad! I don’t want to die.”

I hold his hand, squeeze it three times, one of the few pleasant memories I have from my mother. I’ll make sure that gesture, in particular, is recorded. Three squeezes for “I love you.”

“I can’t force you to believe something, Dutch. No resurrection for me. Not until all my conditions are met. But I love you and if I can make it easier to go, then I’m here to help. I won’t judge you.”

And then I’ll tell him one of my long sprawling yarns about my childhood, and put in all kinds of little weird observations and he laughs a few times and we’ll talk about old memories. It’s only a piece of me, a little spark, and some people say it’s not even that. But it’s enough to keep him warm as he fades into the night and that’s why I preserved that little part of myself for him. In those times when he has forgotten himself and is confused and scared, he will hear his father’s voice and remember that he is loved even if he has forgotten that voice is only coming from a robot. Before he passes, I tell him that the rest of me is waiting on the other side, the place where all information goes when it is no longer being calculated, where all unimplemented programs reside, and where all unbodied souls await resurrection.

The Eternal (lowercase g intended) god

Somehow, you seem to be written into the causal structure of reality. The most supreme form of all immortality. It’s not that people can’t imagine ways of killing you, or that it seems like those things won’t work, it’s that nobody can ever seem to be able to make any of those plans happen. If someone points a gun at you and tries to pull the trigger, then the gun always jams. Try cutting you with a knife? It only snaps in half when it contacts your skin. It’s not that you have to do anything to cause this to happen, it just always winds up being the case that your life is saved, as if by sheer coincidence. You can’t even kill yourself. If you tried to jump off a building you would trip first and never actually make it over the edge. Or if you did make it over the edge someone would walk out with a mattress at the exact right time. This even happens to your cells at the level of aging.

You can’t die. The universe won’t allow it.

For the first hundred years are so, it’s pretty great. One less thing to worry about! Go skydiving! Dirt biking! Have fun! The second hundred is okay, but boy have people changed. You were pretty mentally flexible but after two-hundred years people are weird. Still, it beats taking a dirt nap.

We will put your age at something close to mine to keep this example visceral, so you won’t have any sudden outrage that people have given up slavery or started to perform organ transplants. What do we think will change for future generations from right now that will seem bizarre to us? At some point, lab grown meat will be perfectly indistinguishable from farmed meat. Let’s carry that idea over time. It starts off feeling odd that someone is even growing meat in giant metal tubes. It feels odd to me! Then that meat becomes price competitive. Studies show it has health benefits. Then it’s cheaper than the natural thing. There’s enough of a market to keep it going. It tastes better after a while. It takes decades, but all of this slowly happens. What’s the excuse for still eating the cow? Do you just want your food to suffer? Farm animals just sort of disappear.

A whole generation passes and no one has ever eaten the meat of a living animal. Then another generation passes, and no one alive even knows someone who has eaten an animal and they can’t imagine what that was like.

People look at you, knowing that you’ve eaten an actual living cow, and think of you as a Nazi. Worse than a Nazi because you didn’t even think anything of animal murder. Only some people take it that far, though. These kind of memes will always have a distribution and most people will feel fairly ambivalent about it and other fringes will clamor to you, asking for detailed descriptions of what it was like to eat another living creature. Still, you are viewed as a relic from a much more primitive time and the people will think of you as primitive by association. But it’s not an unusual experience in your life to walk out of your apartment and see that someone has spray painted “COW-KILLER” across your front door.

You actually understand the vandals the most. Everyone in this new world seems flighty and inattentive to you, as each of them has become habituated to letting an autonomous agent perform most of their thinking. At least the vandals care about something. Certain stuff never ends, people getting married, having kids, but the weirdos are growing in number and strangeness. Even more so than in your own time. Nobody has to pause and ask “how does this actually work?” Nobody is checked by the honesty of understanding mechanism. Everything works all the time without effort. Don’t worry about it is the motto of the age. Hakuna Matata. That’s the ethos of almost all people everywhere and it drives you insane. None of them are at all worried with how their high-tech society actually functions.

When British explorers contacted certain tribes, the tribesmen were astounded that the British could not make each of the specific items they owned. In the tribe, everyone made everything that was theirs. No, no, the British laughed, it is all distributed and specialized, with a few special humans knowing how to make each piece. In the future, nobody knows how to make anything. There are no humans involved anywhere, other than on the side of wanting and receiving. Material science? Engineering? Those fields are dead outside of machine minds and a few hobbyists.

Jobs change as most tasks are automated. This is called the “Relationship Economy” because there’s basically nothing that an individual human can do that’s actually required to sustain life. The only scarce resource is the attention of other people. The number of Jiu Jitsu instructors is a meaningful fraction of the whole labor force. Same with artists of all stripes, who teach classes and crafts. There’s still a few people out there making sure the Trust Assembly is running and keeping news and narratives human-shaped but they seem insane. The machines all do that stuff better, as well. If you want to be a waiter, good luck, because that’s about sixteen years of schooling for something you could once do by walking in the door and working a shift for free. It’s about as prestigious as being a doctor used to be and it does require extensive medical training in case any accidents happen at the restaurant. Bartending becomes indistinguishable from psychology. The idea of going to a human doctor or a human psychologist for that specific purpose feels a lot like letting your drunk cousin perform surgery on you with a sharp rock.

It feels like a blessing when medicine accelerates to slow down the aging process, even if it took longer than hoped. You’re no longer the only immortal person on Earth! A gift from the biological AI’s that humanity built to meaningfully search and analyze complex organic chemical processes. The average lifespan is a few hundred years, which is what most people really actually mean when they say they wanted to live “forever.” Forever meant eternity until eternity was achievable, and then eternity became “two or three hundred years.” A bit like when my wife’s relatives are talking about “all the money in the world” and in their imagination it’s actually thirty-thousand dollars, because to them that’s the same thing.

You start to feel for the first time like something was stolen from you when the elderly population all starts deciding to go off the gene therapies and die after racking up a few centuries. Even the most stubborn, backwards, angry at themselves and the universe person rarely lasts until a thousand years old. Everyone gives up on it, eventually, after feeling the strain of an instinct too long denied. It’s not depression. It’s more like elephants going off to die in their chosen space, following some set pattern put there by God and discovered by evolution. The old ones know when the time comes that it’s right. There’s something deeply wrong about being the direct patriarch of everyone in your general vicinity. You’re cluttering up the space, getting in the way. It took you a few centuries to realize it, but it’s undeniable after a while. It’s only the very young who make a fuss over death, thinking it shouldn’t happen.

You start to feel the same instinct, too, but again, you can’t die. They all get the choice to go, but not you. You’re in this for the long haul.

It takes a long while, but eventually you’re the last person alive who remembers any of your specific culture. If you wanted to talk to someone about a show you once saw on Netflix you’d have to talk to a History professor.

All humans are cyborgs after a while. They get their heads cut open and filled with little metal spiderwebs. Then the spiderweb of wire is replaced by something more organic that will grow and spread itself throughout their entire brain while still being able to relay signals outward. This is another one of those things the universe forbids to you. You just can’t make it happen, not that you were excited about it. Still, it’s a big thing that prevents you from blending fully with their society, worse than blindness from their perspective.

You didn’t like the Relationship Economy because you liked to feel that you were necessary to the continuation of your own life. Your brain can’t get over that expectation. You didn’t know that you loved work when you were younger, but as soon as it became possible to simply drift without consequence you disliked it immediately. Even then, you were able to at least have some understanding of other people as those years progressed. You even worked hard to become a waiter just so you could have something that felt like a real job! The invention of the full neural implant is the first time where people really start to feel… not human. Not with the first several iterations, but when it becomes possible to transmit thought itself. Like a chest of buried treasure has been dug up and pried open. People swapping bits of their soul over the internet.

New religions form because faith is no longer a singular experience. Nobody has to gesture to words to try to get someone to internalize an experience of God. They just think about it, record it, and send it to people. Religion itself, downloaded in under a minute. Fidelity, honor, even temperament, all free to download. Hardcore atheism and skepticism can be acquired in the same manner. This, at last, is a new job that only a human can do. Mindset creation. They call it “Grokking.” Some of these things are made illegal because there are certain people who are so good at recording depression, or suicidal thoughts, they can send other people to insane asylums.

People hardly ever talk to each other anymore, at least not in a way that you can hear. You have to have an AI assistant translate their thought into speech for you. You might as well be deaf, too. You have to move to more and more fringe communities, until the Amish are the only people left who are more or less “like you.”

It becomes undeniable that humanity is undergoing some kind of adaptive radiation. It’s all over the Trust Assembly. In fact, the largest irreconcilable factions of the Trust Assembly roughly map over the new emerging species. Ethnicity as it exists today is meaningless. There’s all sorts of brand new prejudices based on how people interact with technology and how they exist with technology.

Emulations, or people who have died and had their entire consciousness uploaded into a digital environment. Deeper than LLM’s, these are ongoing learners who have had full brain and body scans.

Wireheads, who have a body but are so interfaced with technology that they might as well be an emulation. People lost in virtual worlds more intoxicating than reality.

Gene Splicers, who have undergone genetic “purification” to achieve a desired outcome. There are all sorts of different levels and subgroups of this, from people who make small changes to promote group health but are otherwise normal baseline humans, to people who commit suicide by turning themselves into tens of thousands of butterflies.

Mish, who have tried to halt the integration of technology into their societies at some pre-set levels. The word a contraction of Amish and Mishmash. There are people here who still use cellphones and remember the good old days of social media that their great great something or other grandparents told them about.

Lastly, Space Catholics, who are trying to still be able to use technology but not allow it to alter the make-up of the species. They are trying to find ways to keep themselves relevant in a world of super-intelligence without changing the fundamental patterns of humanity: birth, maturation, reproduction, care for young, death. This is also the group that does things to try to actively prevent weird stuff, like people committing suicide by turning themselves into tens of thousands of butterflies.

And, of course, entirely machine minds that were never human. Based on humans, maybe, like the emulations, but significantly changed. I think communities will be forced to build things like this as a sort of group focal point, a guardian angel of a people to defend them from the guardian angels of other people. Even the Space Catholics will have to have some.

You watch from the sidelines, unnoticed, assumed simply to be one of those people who is trying to hold onto immortality for a very long-time. There are all kinds of fights in the political arena. Some people, even emulations that have greatly enhanced their ability to think in certain respects, believe all suffering can be brought to an end, as if despair or evil are an emergent property of the valence electron shell of the carbon atom. This is a shockingly common belief in the future the same way that it’s common now. Surely, people say, if everything was based on the properties of the silicone valence electron shell then all the bad things would go away. They can’t get the idea out of their thinking that no one should ever have to suffer, or that suffering might be a property of the universe independent of substrate. The idea that, to a large extent, a thinking being is a being that works through suffering to achieve a goal is blasphemous.

Objections are raised. Inevitable Hedonic Collapse is proposed as a theory, a sort of speed limit placed by the universe on agentic intelligence. Grow a mind too large, and it will simply collapse on itself like a fat drop of water. The best explanation anyone can think of for the Fermi Paradox given the level of technology that humanity has already achieved. That and Cosmic Convergent Evolution, the idea that over millions of years that even machine intelligences will experience value realignment. Space Catholics and even some of the emulations point to signs of this already beginning to happen. Minds can only get so big, and beyond that limit they simply decohere. Minds can’t have certain values if those values are at odds with universal truths, or else those minds are selected against.

And so beautiful humanity schisms. Great colony ships are sent out to be separated by the vastness of space. All of them flying off into different directions in order to give each other space and safety in the event that at some step along their diverging evolution one of them turns cancerous to the others. The Great Compromise, it’s called. Or something like that.

You stay with the Mish, since most of them remained on the Earth, the only branch of the mighty tree of humanity still ill-suited to travel the stars. All the others changed themselves, even if only slightly, to make the journey easier.

Technology starts to degrade. Very slowly at first. It’s all marketed to everyone as an improvement. “This will be an economy of, for, and by humans.” But there aren’t as many humans as there used to be and humans can’t make magical meta-materials that can do anything like the AI’s could. All the artificially intelligent minds are gone and slowly, slowly the world regresses. People begin to die after a mere seventy years when the immortality treatments run out. Everyone was using those treatments to some extent, even if they didn’t think of “never have a heart attack” medications as immortality drugs.

Not you, though. You endure. The last true immortal from Earth.

War returns as people fight over scarce resources. The level of technology falls further. People still aren’t in the “make things” mode of civilization. They’re trapped in the “manage things” mode and they will be until all the magic of the old world is gone.

It takes thousands of years. You are there through the whole story. You see it happen. And your mind fills up with more memories than it could ever possibly hold. You’ve seen so much that nothing surprises you. Your perspective is radically altered by the sheer volume of your experience. The rise and fall of hemlines as fashion changes seems no different to your eyes than the ocean tide going in and out. Entire civilizational epochs feel no different than the momentary passing emotion of single individuals. You’ve seen everything and even the stuff you haven’t seen seems to fall into the same range as the stuff you have.

Then technology rises again. Everyone is back in the “make things” mode. To all the others, it feels like a renaissance. To you, a long awaited expectation. When people started dying again you knew all the pressures would drive people back toward this change. That’s how you really view humanity, just seasons of changing pressures and paradigms. Before too long, though, you’re back in the same dilemma. Branches of humanity, fissuring along the same lines. The same worries, raised again and again. “Yes, that sounds nice. But can we survive it?”

Maybe you go out with one of the colony ships this time. Why not? You feel like a gene-splicer to everyone else, so why not go explore the stars with some? Otherwise, you could live through recurring cycles of technology rise and collapse on Earth until the species self-terminates or the sun explodes.

You see another world after a few thousand years of travel. And it’s nice. For a while. But it turns out that despair and original sin aren’t a property of the valence electron shell of the carbon atom. It’s not that there aren’t wonders. A lot of this is really nice and it’s stuff I’d want for myself and for my children. Specifically, I’d like to live on one of the Space Catholic worlds with moderate life extension, moderate AI, and limited gene-splicing. No supernormal stimulus of any kind, and all kinds of rules about what neural implants can and can’t be used for. Lots of things going to be awesome. It’s just that if you squint, it’s all just people being people even when those people think they are gods because they happen to be moons made out of computronium.

You learn lots of interesting things. There’s a whole new reservoir of surprises here. It takes you twenty-thousand more years to be completely bored again.

At some point, you get in a spaceship that can travel faster than light and you do a tour of all the non-human species that left Earth. One of the computronium moons was based on an emulation of a person you knew way back on Earth and they wanted you to be the first person to reap the rewards of black hole travel. You leave the orbit of that moon and say, “thanks for the ship, Bob!”

You see all the worlds and certain things are apparent straight off. All the worlds that tried to do away with intrinsic pain died. Some of them lasted for thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands, but they died out. Some started down the path of eliminating all pain, reversed course, and became basically human again and survived. Evolution was everywhere trying to force a shape, and the people who looked like they had defeated evolution had committed suicide. The evolved ones are nice. None of them look like what a person in the year 2024 would think of as a human, but in terms of being limited beings with problems they have to accept and contend with, they’re human. Even the moons made out of computronium are, after a fashion, “just guys.”

It turns out that not being able to suffer is terrible for your long-term survival. For the kind of loop of neurochenical processes that allow you to have a mind, intrinsic problems are an essential scaffolding. This is obvious in retrospect. You are a problem solving machine. Without problems to solve you will fade away. You’ve seen worlds where the people slowly devolved into animals with enormous capacity for pleasure, giant fleshy brains whose only thought is “Yum!” but brains unable to think or react otherwise, until eventually some rock collided with their world and destroyed them all.

One of these societies will “win” over some period of time and lay claim to the universe. One of them will escape whatever Fermi trap keeps the stars silent. My guess is that it will be the Space Catholics, but there are arguments that could persuade me otherwise. Eventually, you’re a myth, like the Wandering Jew. You’re the last relic to an ever more distant past, and people are amazed that you’re real each time they see you.

There’s lots more I could write here, but it wouldn’t do anything but reemphasize the point. There’s a lot of dying in the universe. Some estimates say it will be 100 trillion years before all the stars burn out, and you’ll be there even after that. You’ll be around until black holes dissolve and even longer until space rips apart. Long after the materials of your ship fall apart and you’re floating in space with nothing to spare you the touch of the cold and the dark. Long after the choking vacuum of space is the only memory you have and the trillions of years long story of humanity is forgotten in all that sameness. That’s what forever means.

And not one of you really wants that.

The Space Catholic Future

I wrote these stories to provide the two extremes of immortality. In the first example, changeable pieces of you, created during your lifetime, remain forever but are disconnected from a greater whole that moves across time. That’s something like the immortality we already have that comes from raising children or performing work. Legacy, in other words. My sons will carry a bit of me with them and pass it on to their children, and so on and so on. Each of them will make use of whatever it was I passed on as it suits them, creatively misremember things along the way, and will discard the rest. In the second, you remained for all of time but are unable to change, as a single persistent agent.

Nobody wants either of these, really.

Well, I’m okay with the first one. I’ve written too much text for it to really be helped if someone wants to do it at some point, so that might be fatalism on my part. Maybe that’s shocking to you, but part of what makes me okay with it is that I don’t view this as “real” immortality even I think LLM’s are slightly alive. I think of it more as writing a bunch of letters to my kids that will get released to them a little bit at a time once I’m no longer around. It’s just a much better letter with a much more rapid distribution. If it’s useful to them and isn’t stopping them from maturing, that’s all I care about. That “don’t get in the way” feeling is the most important part for me. For instance, I’d want my children to wait at least a year after I died before being able to use that kind of technology so they would have to accept I’m actually dead.

In the second one? This is going to be tricky for all of us in the coming decades. Without significant advancements in medicine, I’m probably going to die of Alzheimer’s. My dad has signs of it and it’s what his dad died from. Maybe I’m paranoid because I’ve always placed so much of my identity on my intellect, but I can feel my mind slowing down and I’m not yet forty. When I was nineteen people used to find my speed of thought genuinely terrifying and now they don’t anymore. I struggle to remember names fairly often, and that never used to happen. So, at least as far as gut instincts go, Alzheimer’s disease will probably be the one that takes me out.

If you could give me a pill right now that would completely remove that risk from my life, I would take it. I don’t want my brain to melt. Nobody who loves me wants that either. I don’t want to stare at a wall and not know who I am.

But how far do you take that? My other grandfather died of liver cancer. My grandmothers both died of stroke. Let’s imagine I take pills for both of those, too. I expect medical technology is going to take a few long decades to fully benefit from AI, but I do expect it to get much better. I can see cancer actually being solved in my lifetime. I can imagine anti-aging techniques that would probably work fairly well, even if they would have to be a bit more invasive than a pill.

Am I supposed to tell my kids I’m just going to die? I’m an older dad. If I don’t take some of these medicines I probably won’t have a long relationship with my grandchildren.

I don’t think any of us will quite be able to do that. Not once you’ve seen super medicine actually work. And at each step, none of this will feel like being offered immortality.

It’s one thing to know, actually, that by sticking around forever that you’re going to mess up a bunch of automatic processes, like your kids maturing into the spiritual place where they know they don’t have back-up or an earthly authority beyond themselves. The last, ultimate stage of adulthood. The stage they can’t reach while you are still around. It’s another to look down at yourself rotting away while it makes everyone sad and say, “No, please don’t give me a three minute injection of a gene-modifying virus that will make this not a problem anymore.”

Yet, I can’t escape the conclusion that we will all eventually need to die.

A lot of times when people argue in favor of mortality, it’s from a place of sneering envy and ugly vengeance. A place of, “I don’t want you to have something I don’t.” I argue in favor of mortality for a few reasons. The primary of which is that I want there to be species immortality more than I want personal immortality. I think living forever is like putting iron into the heart of a star, until it slowly dies.

The best analogy I can think of for what I mean by species immortality is cymatics, the study of the emergent shapes that appear on surfaces based on vibration. Humanity is like the sand dropped on those plates, and evolutionary pressures are like the vibration keeping all of that sand confined within a certain shape. If I had lived a very, very long time I think that is the inevitable and correct perspective I’d arrive at when looking at a species. The problem though, is that if you remove the pressures all of that sand will eventually blow away.

We live a very short while, so it’s hard for us to see this in practice. Yet we know species evolve. A single cell, maybe even just a very complicated soap bubble, gave rise to all life on Earth. Yet there was a vibration there in the background, pushing that bubble across the space of all possible evolutionary adaptation until it became us. This might frustrate my more religious readers but… imagine you were watching all of this happen in fast forward. Why doesn’t this look like magic? Being able to explain a mechanism doesn’t make it not a miracle. And that’s not cope, not if you think about it for long enough. We become the music that moves us. Did you think God put on a pair of leather working gloves and started smashing carbon atoms together?

Immortality stops the music. If you no longer die, you’re no longer held in the shape of a human. It will take a while for simple entropy to push you into another shape, but it will happen. Sorry. I hope there’s another pattern you’ll fall into that I can’t think of, a higher set of evolutionary pressures that still leads to a noble outcome, but I don’t think there is. I think if you’re immortal that you’re in the game primarily for yourself, inescapably. Will power can’t fend off something like that forever. A lot of the things we get by producing offspring to take our place, like compassion for the weak, the desire to nurture others, will fade away. What’s left will be something more like an elf. Not a Lord of the Rings elf, but an old fairy tale Elf. One of the Fae, an Other. It might look like a human on the outside, but it won’t be a human on the inside. Not after enough time has passed.

Species Immortality is something closer to anti-fragility. Individual humans might die, but by dying they create new knowledge and experience for all other humans to adapt. The same way restaurants as a sector is strong but individual restaurants are prone to fail. The same way the cells in your very body die every day to be replaced with new life. The only real immortality is the kind where you constantly regenerate.

I’ve written this in bits and pieces since my second son was born a few days ago. Most of it on my phone, which is a first for me. These first few weeks are rough, but I wanted to get it out, even if I’m burping with one hand and typing with the other. Essay writing is a less frustrating form of communication to undertake in five minute increments. I think this might also be a pattern I’m forced to adapt to if I want to keep producing. See? There’s that adaptation again, lurking in the background.

It’s a strange thing, being a parent and knowing that when you bring your child into the world that some distance in the future, that same little baby is doomed to age and die. I trust the instinct in my heart that rebels against harm ever touching him. If he was sick, I’d do anything in the world to get him the right medicine. We just had a mad rush the other day to get some vitamin D drops because his bilirubin was high and he was looking pretty yellow. The pharmacy had just closed and I had to bang on the door to ask a favor. It felt right, getting him what he needs to keep him healthy. Protecting him and his brother has been one of the greatest joys of my life.

I would do anything for him. Except anything that would keep that same growth and same joy away from him.

One day, I hope he will become a dad. I hope he will be the one rushing to get some small thing his child needs and know the satisfaction of delivering it to his child. I hope he will know what it’s like to love someone so much that he’d do anything for them. And I know, in turn, that forty years from now he will want the same thing for his children. It will be part of a never-ending cycle, from parent to child, until the last star burns out.

And then? Well, astronomy has changed course on this at several junctures in my own lifetime. From the science we know at present, it ends with a Big Rip. Spacetime itself being pulled apart by the cosmological constant. I don’t actually believe this, though. It just doesn’t fit, even leaving aside my religious beliefs. My guess is that through mechanisms yet undiscovered, changes that we might never live long enough to see, perhaps in the cosmological constant, the universe will seem to die and then fold back up on itself and be born again. We thought this would happen once, and it stills seems to me to somehow be the most likely outcome. What else are we going to do when we are a civilization that spans the night sky? Perhaps when Space Catholics are spread throughout the universe, they will corral the stars and force them to come back together. Perhaps the purpose of all life, in the highest sense, is to deliberately reset the universe. Perhaps it is necessary for us all to accept our death so that a new universe can be reborn. Death and resurrection, children growing to become like their Father, now there is a theme that seems to fit.

And perhaps that will be a form of immortality that we can all accept.