Ev Cooper - Immortality: Physically, Scientifically, Now
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IMMORTALITY:
PHYSICALLY, SCIENTIFICALLY, NOW
A reasonable guarantee of bodily preservation,
a general discussion, and research targets.
by
Nathan Duhring
© 1962, by the 20th C. Books Foundation
[Copyright Expired 1990]
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62 22423
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Forewarning 1
Chapter 1: Introduction 7
Chapter 2: Research to Date 19
Chapter 3: In The Cave 41
Chapter 4: Immortality and Automata in Fiction 45
Chapter 5: Immortality as Evolutionary Adaptation 54
Chapter 6: A Philosophy for Immortality 68
Postscript 80
Selected Bibliography 90
Chapter Notes 92
20th Century Bibliography 95
Request for Your Opinion 97
Index 99
THE FOREWARNING
by
Nathan Duhring
20th Century Books
1500 Harvard N.W.
Washington 9, D.C.
I wish to warn you immediately, in a very direct and personal manner, of what is to follow. I think I can do this best by telling you of this book’s origin.
About five years ago several of us who have been active in Great Books formed a separate educational program to improve on the original by making it more contemporary, scientific, and germane to the existence of modern man. For the first time we had to think for ourselves in surveying modern literature from poetry to astrophysics and in judging what was significant. Three years later in spreading out from the accepted giants of our time like Einstein, Freud, Frazer, Sherrington, Pavlov, and Russell we began to read closely and to analyze and discuss Wiener and other cyberneticians.
Being a fervent addict of Joyce and Freud I was well conditioned to reading into any author, especially Wiener, strange and unusual meanings. I claimed that Wiener’s book contained either intentionally or unintentionally ── I had no way of telling which ── a message about immortality. The deduction I drew was that immortality might eventually become a down to-earth physical reality via science. And that in fact is this book’s thesis. My job in the rest of the book is in large part to tell you why this may be a startling but reasonable hypothesis, and to tell you how you can practically go about best guaranteeing your physical immortality even if you die before the methods of reanimation and prolongation are perfected.
I hope I am not exaggerating when I say this is an astounding and virtually unbelievable discovery. And I don’t mean that I made this discovery. I’m just telling you about what has been discovered and certain probabilities concerning these discoveries. It is astounding considering the fantastic power and desire and hope of immortality through most of history. The desire has been so strong when one considers the religious hold of this hope on humanity and the anguish of innumerable writers such as Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Dostoievsky, Camus and Pascal, that it makes me doubt every word I write concerning this outrageous possibility. And yet what am I to do about the evidence I see before me? Remain quiet? No. I must spell it out and ask you what you think of it.
This I did, first in discussions and later on paper. In discussion I was met with bemused and nervous astonishment by some and blase acceptance by others. After all, for some scientific sophisticates of our time, nothing, absolutely nothing is impossible: total annihilation or immortality.
There was some considerable time elapse between the first discussion and deciding to write about it. One merely verbalized what deductively seemed to follow. Then something of the importance of the idea really began to sink in with time. The importance was reinforced by reading Pasternak, Camus, and especially Unamuno. As alternative ways of achieving the same end by other than cybernetic methods, I reconsidered and further investigated research in physiology and biology. There I saw the possibility of supplementary and alternative methods to the same end. But was I deluding myself?
Since I knew of no one who had written down this particular cluster of ideas, and as I enjoy peppering away on the typewriter, I wrote it down and exchanged it with a very dear person who was then writing a novel. She read it first with calm sympathetic interest, but both of us couldn’t help laughing at such an outrageous hypothesis and the phenomenal changes that might follow. She gave it some thought for a week and at the next session told me a story about a little boy who told gigantic tales, half out of joking and half out of a questionable grasp of reality. I understood, but what was I to do? There was the evidence. There were the statements that every non conformist knows by heart about the creative process: “Every new and good thing is liable to seem eccentric and perhaps dangerous at first glimpse, perhaps more than what is really eccentric, really irrelevant to life … It requires some courage to move alone, often counter to popular prepossessions, and toward uncertainties.”1
Thus, I know of no way but to ask you to read carefully, weigh it part and parcel, deciding for yourself, or telling me where possible, what stands or falls or is in need of supplement and amendment.
Frazer provides the words in which I may rephrase the dilemma and perhaps the solution:
“But drowning men clutch at straws, and we need not wonder that the Greeks, like ourselves, with death before them and a great love of life in their hearts, should not have stopped to weigh with too nice a hand the arguments that told for and against the prospect of human immortality.
“When we reflect upon … the scantiness of our information … we shall be ready to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so profound a problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the most we can do in the present state of our knowledge is to hazard a more or less plausible conjecture.”
And, if this conjecture proves not to fit the findings of science or the rigor of logic, we should like the chameleon be willing to change our color as we move over a new ground of fact and consequence.
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
A handful of prophets: H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, Jules Verne, Capek, and Tsiolkovsky made some startlingly accurate predictions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The more sober members of mankind never held to them seriously, neither then nor now, passing them off as the successes amongst the law of chance. No matter how it came about ── and some of these men were of acute scientific understanding and broad perspective ── many of the possibilities they spoke of did come to pass: rocket travel, atomic energy, automatons that work in offices and run factories ── too many to list.
Now in the last half of the 20th century, to take seriously that physical immortality, here on earth, is scientifically possible is almost as much as dream can encompass, certainly more than sobriety can allow. This is perhaps a necessity, for it is only more absurd to chase after every South Sea bubble. And, ever since prehistoric man first imagined the possibility of life forever, the countless rolling centuries have not given him one shred of material verifiable evidence. Now, however, when some of the scientific possibilities appear on the horizon, someone has to form the question, consider a reversal of the skepticism engendered by centuries of disappointment and prepare the way for the reality of the incredible.
To think that it might come to pass, here on earth, is at first for our secular age, virtually incomprehensible. And yet some of the latest scientific discoveries, especially in the fields of cybernetics and physiology, and some of the best minds of our generation may have guardedly offered the suggestion. This caution on the part of the scientist is natural, for, though the future is in his bones, his method inclines him to caution with definite statements after the fact. Science fiction writers differ markedly. Their function is to express the possibilities imaginatively. The immortality of many of their humans and robots is a commonplace for them. However, our work here is to examine the middle ground between the guarded suggestion and the feverish acceptance. Let us turn to the scientific suggestions first.
The guarded suggestion of Wiener comes best through reading and weighing his books, however, a few passages provide a starting point.
“The metaphor to which I devote this chapter is one in which the organism is seen as message. Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.
“We can continue to live in the very special environment which we carry forward with us only until we begin to decay more quickly than we reconstitute ourselves. Then we die.
“A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
“To recapitulate: the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance. It is a pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
“Any scanning of the human organism must be a probe going through all of its parts, and will accordingly tend to destroy the tissue on its way. To hold an organism stable while part of it is being slowly destroyed, with the intention of re creating it out of other material elsewhere, involves a lowering of its degree of activity, which in most cases would destroy life in the tissue.”
The thesis also:
“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback … In other words, the all over system will correspond to the complete animal with sense organs, effectors, and proprioceptors, and not as in the ultra rapid computing machines, to the isolated brain, dependent for its experiences and for its effectiveness on our intervention.”
The Human Use of Human Beings
Thus to restate and to round out the ideas of Wiener from the rather disjointed quotations, it can be said that there is something more than a rough analogy between some of the newer communication machines and the human being. In many crucial and significant respects they will be precisely parallel. A machine can be made which will correspond to the complete animal, meaning eventually to the complete human. Progress is by no means even. The deductive thinking components may now be vastly superior to the equivalent in men. The compactness, synthesis and mental patterning ability of men however is still presently superior to that of the newer communication machines.
Pattern or message may be the common denominator, no matter how complex that pattern may be. Any pattern or message may be transmitted or transcribed. It may pass through space and/or time and be re created out of other material elsewhere. The particular substance is largely irrelevant. There can be wide variations in this. The important thing for personal identity is the pattern. And if it is recreated and reconstituted in the appropriate form or pattern, our personal identity reappears and life continues. More will be said later about the appropriate form, pattern and structure. The above then is a very general and tentative outline of the cybernetic method. However, a number of other methods with an infinite number of variations are available to science besides the cybernetic method.
A second general category is physiological. Within this general area the regenerative method and the transplantation method suggest some interesting possibilities. They are alternative methods which offer interest and support for our general contention. If one method doesn’t work perhaps another will. The various methods and the research therein has an overlapping effect of helping solve problems in allied fields and aiding in the solution of the general problem. Some of the findings pertaining to the regenerative method may be alluded to briefly. Later in Chapter 2 they will be taken up in greater detail.
The rather simple but significant phenomenon of crustacea and other animals regenerating lost limbs and other organs was known to Aristotle as well as to other observers before him. They often made mistakes in observation and in the uncritical acceptance of information. Aristotle thought that young sparrows who had their eyes put out could regenerate new ones, but despite the individual mistakes they were cognizant of the fact of regeneration. The salient fact is that new parts are made by the body. It carries the significance that if this is done pervasively enough the individual eventually renews himself. To a degree the human body does this every day. Relatively death is held further away.
Specific and rather dramatic examples of this are found in crayfish, crabs, starfish and flatworms. Each starfish has five or ten arms depending on the species, each arm of which may be separated from the others and yet if it has some portion of the central disc the other four or nine arms and the rest of the body will be regenerated. Greater knowledge of this exists concerning sea life and less differentiated animals but it occurs in all life and in man as well, but in a less obvious form. In men the nails and the skin as well as other body cells are continuously being replaced. For most people the hair is continuously being replaced even up to several days after death. Children replace their first set of teeth. Within the body we know that the body fluids, elements and cells are continuously being replaced. It reinforces the notion that the pattern is the thing not the substance which is continually being changed anyway.
Regeneration seems to have some obvious implications for immortality and for evolution. Regeneration in all animals is a mechanism for survival and thus for putting off death temporarily for the animal and relatively permanently for the species. Where the organism is continuously susceptible to the accidental loss of appendages or organs, the species either evolves the facility to regenerate them or fails accordingly. In his struggle for survival it is very seldom, in comparison with the crab, that a man loses a leg. If he does he usually makes an artificial one. It is even less often that a man, in comparison to some amphibia, loses an auditory or an optic nerve, which they can readily regenerate. But where men have continuously used their regenerative powers, as in the healing of cuts and the knitting of bones, he is an example of a life process whose function is continuing survival and forestalling death. There is no logical reason why the forestalling of death could not be continuous if we knew enough about the processes.
A third method is that of transplantation or exchanging and substituting a new organ for the old one. Innumerable types of exchanges have been tried. We mentioned the artificial leg. It would seem there is hardly any limit to the development of artificial or synthetic organs and appendages, varying from better than the original as is often the case with hair, teeth and some internal organs to that which is simply better than nothing as in the case of glass eyes, artificial legs and arms. Heart valves of silicon rubber and steel have been developed to the extent that they are being successfully used and promise help for thousands more. Anyone who thinks there is any limit to the organs that may be substituted should consistently ally themselves with that celebrated movement in the nineteenth century to close the patent office because all of the inventions possible were thought to be exhausted.
Physiologically one of the most studied and known is the corneal transplants for the eye. The rights of operation and removal are deeded over before death. After death the cornea is removed, frozen and stored until needed. They have been used after a storage of two years with no harmful effects noticed. Even the complete heads of some animals have been exchanged. Thus, the suggestion is reinforced that death could be put off indefinitely by successive exchanges, when this science develops to maturity. The devotee of this method might become intimately familiar with showrooms for new synthetic organs and with operating rooms.
Any of these three methods could achieve the aim or goal of immortality. Each may contribute to the achievement of the others or to some as yet undiscovered method. All of them are apparently temporarily holding off or pushing back the absurd wall of death. The research in these fields, which we shall speak of in more detail later, has the same tendency, to undermine and topple, at least a portion of the absurd wall. There is no reason to expect any reversal. According to this reasoning, though much more research is necessary, physical immortality may be inevitable. (Avoiding total annihilation of the species Homo sapiens on this planet, it is just a matter of time and technology.)
Besides these three methods, there are other indicators and processes in nature that increase our confidence in the possibility, or better, the probability of immortality. Several of these may be mentioned before turning to the preference of one of the possibilities of a more practical nature.
Nature is no foreigner to immortality. Each of us is immortal as part of the race or as part of all life. Something of those pristine cells that first developed in the warm seas perhaps a billion years ago continues in us and will continue in others. As humans we are of course interested in conscious continuing life, whereas being a part of the continuing material of the universe is an unconscious and rather useless immortality, except as it indicates to the individual that immortality in principle exists. The problem may be framed in one fashion for the individual so that the virtually endless continuance of the species is available to him personally.
Nature also has the device of reducing metabolic action to almost no action for the preservation of life until conditions for active participation are more favorable. The woodchuck and the bear hibernate for long periods during the winter. Many plants may be frozen all winter many degrees below zero yet recover in spring. A similar principle appears in the seeds which have been stored in Egyptian tombs some four or five thousand years in a desiccated condition, only to burst into life upon being placed in the usual humid spring environment. This points up the fact how long a single individual seed, which in a sense is comparable with an individual, can be preserved. Among the similarities, the differences are numerous but not overwhelming. Both are made of cells. While the human is made of billions of cells, the seed has merely millions of cells. It is rather an understatement to say the human is obviously more complex than the seed. To desiccate a seed, holding it in potential reanimation is possible and suggestive, but to desiccate a human and hope to hold him in potential reanimation we generally say would be impossible. However, since we are interested in humans especially, our attention might be shifted from preservation via extreme dryness to consideration of low temperatures after devoting one more paragraph to hibernation which is most often accompanied by lowering temperatures.
There is the theoretical possibility that a man might extend his lifetime 20 times or 1400 years if he could live like a bat as far as longevity is concerned. It has been found that bats live approximately 20 times longer than animals of similar weight, presumably due to hibernation or reduced metabolic rates while they are hanging inactive in their caves. Introducing true hibernation in man is now only a dim possibility, but enough of one that research is continuing in this direction. One of the further uses postulated is that men would then be able to traverse the untold millions of miles taking centuries of time to reach distant star systems. They would require approximately 1/100th the amount of food and oxygen of an active person.
When it comes to low temperature studies and their relation to organisms the scientific journals are sprinkled with an increasing number of reports on the freezing and revival of small animals both in nature and in the laboratory. What are termed giant multi nucleated spermatids have been frozen to -80 Centigrade and on rewarming revived completely. The same is true of rats, monkeys, and mice though at temperatures just a little above and below zero Centigrade. Audrey Smith, a careful cautious scientist from London sums it up for the present by saying, “No doubt conditions appropriate to entire organisms will in time be determined, but it is difficult to imagine that there are early prospects of storing whole animals in solid carbon dioxide or in liquid air.” The variety of accomplishments, as surprising as some of these, is by no means at an end. The trend can only be to find methods of preservation for longer periods of time and more important even better methods of revitalization.
So far, a number of methods indicating how death may be postponed have just been touched upon. The implication has been that the various methods ── cybernetic and physiological ── have considered possibilities for postponing death temporarily and, when bordering on science fiction, let the thought pass that it might be avoided indefinitely.
However, suppose you wish to be immortal but tomorrow you die from any one of a number of causes. Are you out of luck because successful reanimation techniques are not now available? Are you out of luck because scientists and the communication machines haven’t figured out the practical methods of resuscitation or transmission of human to re created human? The answer is no. There are nearly always alternatives in life. Despite your recent and unexpected demise, all hope is not lost. And in all of this we are talking as a scientist would about his universe and this earth. He talks and thinks in physical and material terms. In terms that he can check, measure, and weigh, and in terms that someone else using the same steps as he, can always get the same results.
The germ suggestion has occurred perhaps many times in imaginative literature, later to be reinforced by scientific research. One location is in Mayakovsky’s, “The Bedbug.” A proletarian lout on a binge with some of his friends is frozen to death by his own carelessness in a Moscow suburb for some fifty years until he is revived by a scientific resuscitation group. The resuscitation is rather crude, reminding one of some Frankenstein movie, but is meant to be a comedy with serious overtones, and the outline of the method is there.
Similarly the outline can be used by the rest of mankind until such time as automata and the scientists figure out a perhaps superior way of maintaining life. Just as the body in the comedy is frozen, so it would appear, in lieu of any better suggestions, that this would be the best way for us to proceed. Present scientific research seems to indicate this would be the best way, in general, to store the body until techniques of resuscitation and the postponing of death are perfected. This method of freezing is then a possibility for eventually defeating death.
There are now, of course, a million questions. Suppose people decided this was their best bet for future physical immortality, it would at least be worth a try, no harm in trying, and they were curious what some later century was like. How would one go about the freezing? Where would the body be stored? If many people tried it, would there be enough room for all the bodies? Concerning the freezing of the body, let us take the hypothetical man whose recent and unexpected demise puts him in line.
This hypothetical person is dead, then. His relatives, or anyone concerned, finds that his wish is to hold his body in frozen storage. (He may have filled out the form found on page 62, chapter 5, and placed it in his wallet.) Thus, he is taken to the freezing plant as quickly as possible and entered for freezing. Probably the ordinary slow freezing of a cold storage locker is the most practical and reasonable. Numerous experiments have been carried out with extremely rapid and very deep freezing, but for complex vertebrates slow freezing appears the better.
After or during freezing the person should probably be put in a suitable casket marked with his name and other relevant information. He could, of course, be left in the cold storage locker indefinitely, but it seems reasonable that there is a more reliable method of long term storage. It is probable that natural storage in the permafrost areas of the earth would be most reliable and least expensive in terms of money and space. Nearly all of Greenland, except some coastal strips, much of Alaska and northern Canada and an immense region in Eurasia is continuous and dependable permafrost. It extends below the Arctic circle to approximately 65 degrees North. The ground temperature at a depth of 30 50 feet is generally below -5 C. The permafrost dips to depths of 2000 feet in Nordvik Siberia ── that’s northern Siberia of course ── and 1000 feet at Barrow Alaska. According to the 1950 Annual Report of the Smithsonian on permafrost, the “Natural cold storage excavations are used widely in areas of permafrost. They are most satisfactory in continuous or discontinuous zones. … Properly constructed and ventilated storerooms will keep meat and other products frozen for years.” Thus, it would be more reliable and much less expensive considering the cost of refrigeration and the many breakdowns that can occur, to rely on natural storage, especially where the wait might run fifty years or more.
In our hypothetical case, the freezing has been done and the problem is to transport the body to a permafrost region, inter it safely, [and] record its location carefully for future resuscitation.
As an enterprising individual may take care of all of the details easily enough, many other individuals prefer to turn such a task over to some institution which has the interest, research, and continuity to comprehend the process over what might be a lengthy period of time. Likewise, it is well if this institution provides a central record deposit and information center for all persons wishing resuscitation and tends as far as is possible to their exact wishes. It should eventually go under the control of the United Nations.
However, until the United Nations becomes acquainted with this procedure, scientifically evaluates it, passes the necessary legislation, and incorporates the program, a scientific and educational program by the name of 20th Century Books will carry on these activities to the best of its ability. This organization can serve a number of functions to do with education, information, and records. Upon your instruction it can record the fact that you wish to have your body frozen upon death and preserved for resuscitation. This can provide a double check in case the statement which would normally be about your person instructing freezing was absent. For example, death by drowning, etc. Second, it can provide an educational program which generally orients one to the 20th century universe and its manifold possibilities. Third it can encourage and keep abreast of the research relevant to the ends of resuscitation and physical immortality. If you die before the breakthroughs in resuscitation and transmission have come, and you are frozen, it can aid in the storage of your body, recording the location and all relevant information. In sum, it can aid in any function necessary to letting people know that such an opportunity exists and encompassing the end of physical immortality if they should so register that desire.
Now let us suppose that it is the year two thousand and something. It is the time when the processes of resuscitation and transmission have been practically achieved. There may be more than one process of transmission. We can hardly predict all the processes which might come into being. The problems of replacing parts may also have been relatively effectively solved. Probably a number of avenues and variations will be open to the living and the dead.
The living might simply replace parts and stave off death interminably. The process of aging control may also be in effect which wouldn’t make it so necessary to replace parts. It would appear that some of contemporary biological research has this in mind.
For those in frozen storage, several avenues may open. The first avenue may be simple resuscitation. If you died of a heart attack, the heart may be repaired or replaced. For those who died of other causes, the problem of resuscitation or reanimation may be even less formidable. This certainly doesn’t mean the problem is simple, or that we know all of the details now, but it does mean that it is theoretically possible [a solution will be found]. It is perhaps immensely difficult; much extension of the research done now will have to be accomplished, but what research has been done is quite hopeful and suggestive.
“Reanimation of ice cold rats is achieved by artificial respiration and simple irradiation with a bench lamp.” (Annual Review of Physiology, Vol. 21, 1959, see researches of Goldzveig and Smith.)
“Smith succeeded in resuscitating golden hamsters from cooling to -5 degrees Centigrade internal body temperature; recovery is possible even if 50 percent of the body water has been frozen.” (Annual Review of Physiology, Vol. 21, 1959.)
It seems reasonable that by sometime within the next century the researchers will have moved from golden hamsters, cats and dogs to successful resuscitation of men, even though they may have been frozen for considerable periods of time. Monkeys have been reduced to zero degrees Centigrade body temperature, cardiac standstill, and resuscitated within one or two hours. So this means that researchers are successfully climbing the evolutionary scale, but the time must be lengthened considerably. If the reports are true that both guinea pigs and dogs have been revived from a frozen condition, after from two to twenty two days and after thirteen days respectively, progress would seem to be going on in the time direction also. Thus, we are assuming that resuscitation may be possible if they have a properly frozen body.
Supposing our hypothetical men are resuscitated, a second avenue may lay open to them. If they have not been asked before death ── or even if they have ── they may be briefed on the latest scientific opportunities and asked again what their choice is among the opportunities available. They may be asked if they wish to go on living in their present body, with parts replaced when necessary, or ── would they prefer another body which might be better? Perhaps our resuscitated man will take one look around in the 21st century, and say, “Put me back to sleep.” It is repeatedly emphasized that his wishes are to be respected. If this is what the person desires then he is to be put to rest again. However, this seems to be an unnatural response. The more normal reaction would likely be to choose his present protoplasmic existence until the individual could personally survey and evaluate the information available. As he does this, he will be able to observe the available alternatives in greater detail.
One alternative may be to be scanned, as Wiener postulates, and transmitted into a more viable human body yet, maintaining his basic individual personal identity.
A second alternative is to be transmitted from his body to a metallic and plastic body which might have many advantages. The basic advantage being that its structure is less susceptible to the aging processes that occur in the protoplasmic body as we know it. Perhaps just as basic and stemming from the nature of the metal and plastic structure is the opportunity for greater efficiency.
At an even further reach of the imagination, inasmuch as patterns are duplicatable, the person in question could simultaneously try several modes of existence, i.e., his form just previous to death, or a plastic metallic form. Comparing existences they could proceed from there in any one of several forms. If both forms continued to exist, Wiener suggests they each would increasingly become separate, distinct and different individuals with the passage of time, due to the difference in structure and the impossibility of duplicate experiences. It is assumed that most individuals, if they investigated the possibilities open to them, would choose the non protoplasmic body.
You will be faced with new problems, it goes without saying. No type of conscious intelligent existence is immune to difficult decisions. But they are nothing that reason and optimism cannot surmount. This has been the way through later evolution, and it is doubtful if it will change within a century or so to come. In the past if a person was negative, extremely pessimistic, or suicidal, he passed into oblivion and the more hardy specimens and their progeny survived. This is probably the way it will be in the future. In these problems of the future, after resuscitation and reanimation, it seems wise not to attempt to go too far, for we have already reached a ridiculous extreme. Our main problem revolves around the possibility and probability of physical immortality and to a minor extent the effects. Some of the future problems, such as the fear of crowding, though, will inevitably come up in conversation. If these and a few others, which will be considered later, are not dispelled, they may have an inhibiting effect on trying for physical immortality.
Thus, what is the relevant significance for you now? In short, it is that you may be immortal now! That is the possibility as it exists. And that you will only become immortal, physically, if you act, make a decision that this is what you desire. It may have to be now, if there is a danger of dying before the breakthroughs in transmission, aging control or transplanting occur. As far as we know, the research will take time, effort and money. And it will take longer since the world is oriented now to death and destruction, or at least treading near to the brink, rather than to consciously lengthening life in general. So if you are in danger of death, and all of us are, the safest and most rational procedure is to prepare yourself for the possibility of immortality by registering your desire to be stored in a frozen state until the necessary research is completed. Prepare yourself by knowing yourself and the manifold possibilities of the universe that are open to you, and register your choice for physical immortality now.
Chapter 2
RESEARCH TODAY
Death and Biology
Death has a multitude of causes. The old morality plays were accurate to the extent that they described the old chuckler coming to men, women and children and all other sentient beings in many guises. People may die like flies in genocidal wars, they may die isolated violent deaths, they may commit suicide or they may just grow old and die. Though the whole species may die of the first, so far it hasn’t happened, and the last: growing old and dying naturally is the more normal condition of men.
Many of the studies of aging and death indicate that it is eventually a chemical, molecular, cellular stochastic process. It may be remembered that amongst the sixty thousand billion cells that compose the average body some five hundred thousand million cells die everyday and have to be replaced. In old age it is common that the replacement rate slows. Death and re creation are a part of every living instant for the body. And death for the whole organism seems to be intimately connected with cellular replacement, cellular division, molecular developments and the reduction of reserve capacities.
Older persons are thought of as becoming more rigid, less able to learn, to change, to mend the older they become. This probably is characteristic of the person as a totality as well as of his separate organs and cells. And within the cells it extends right down to the substances and molecules that go to form the cells. “The hypothesis has been advanced that aging produces greater rigidity in the collagen molecule, because of increased chemical cross linking between spiral strands of the molecule and between the collagen fibrils themselves.”1 In some general sense when the rigidities increase to the extent that the organism’s reserve capacities can no longer meet the contingencies of nature, death gains dominion.
As far as life processes are concerned, they are apparently extremely complex stochastic molecular processes which eventually scientists may control and duplicate. “Stochastic,” or necessary sequence process has become a must term in the vocabulary of both the intellectual and the pretender just as has “syndrome,” “feedback,” “parameter,” “cybernetics” and “entropy.” As biologists learn more about these stochastic processes and the coding of the cells they approach ever closer to the time when they may be able to synthesize protoplasm and life.
Dr. W. M. Stanley, for instance, is quite definite and optimistic about the possibilities of synthesizing life and its effects. “Tailormade living matter will be created in the laboratory and from this `first, long step,’ scientists will go on to control human characteristics of all life.”2 This he postulates will lead to solving political and economic problems and to “bettering the lot of mankind of earth.” Presumably this Nobel Prize winner would grant that if life can be created, eventually, in theory and then in reality, human life could be synthesized.
The human body synthesizes life continuously. Amongst those sixty thousand billion cells that make up an average human, five hundred thousand million, or from one to two percent of all cells are shed and remade every 24 hours. About seventy thousand million of these exit via the intestines. In a way we are continuously cannibalizing or perhaps scavenging ourselves, which in this case is for our own good, for any stop to this process would lead to stasis, chaos and death. Taken from the cellular standpoint and given the intake of food into the body, the synthesis of life occurs by cellular mitosis, or splitting of the cell and a growth process until the new cell has reached the size of its neighbors. This isn’t considered quite so radical as creating life in the laboratory, but there is much mystery attached to it none the less. It is rather remarkable that the body replaces about the same number of cells as die each day. But when a crab loses a considerable aggregate of cells like a leg, how does it come about that the body is able to reproduce another leg? After all even a leg is quite a complicated structure. We feel sure the crab “knows” nothing consciously of the leg being missing. There is no conscious willing to create a leg. The body of the crab nevertheless goes about an accelerated mitotic process, cell after cell dividing and extending until the leg is replaced. It may be that the crab’s body cells in effect contain a coding system which issues directions for regenerative growth until equilibrium is restored. Something similar may occur within the human as he loses cells everyday. The regenerative process is approximately the same whether it is the normal replacement of human cells, the repair of a wound, or the replacement of an entire organ as the leg of the crab, except that the crab evidently has a more extensive coding system.
Evolutionally regeneration has considerable adaptive significance. Where it is “needed” it takes place. Where the crab often loses a leg, but may not otherwise be impaired, his body grows a new one. It is by no means limited to undifferentiated animals but as indicated is carried on and even occasionally improved upon by higher animals. But men seldom lose legs, relatively speaking in comparison with crabs, and when they do they now make artificial ones. This is probably the way it will continue. However, something may come of this regenerative method as scientists learn more about it. It might be that it will become possible to regenerate organs that are worn out, but one shouldn’t hold one’s breath waiting for it. More likely biologists will learn more about these stochastic and coding processes which will likewise enable man to delay death and yet retain a viable structure.
Physiology
Within the field of physiology there are groups of researchers who have developed a virtually metabolic interest in low temperature and its effect on organisms. The practical and theoretical interest of these studies and conditions, “such as hypothermia has led to an enormous increase of literature,”3 in this field. Let us consider nature outside of the controlled laboratory conditions first.
It was mentioned that Siberia and places like Alaska, Northern Canada, and Northern Europe, have plants and animals that survive in and through unbelievably frigid conditions. It gives one pause for thought. How could any cellular structure withstand such temperatures? Wouldn’t the ice forming within the cell burst the walls? Even if they did survive the expansion of water freezing, how would they ever start up again in the spring?
It seems that the cells have a number of devices to ward off the possible ill effects of freezing. It has been found that the chemicals within the protoplasm allow it to go considerably below freezing before solidifying. But when extremely cold temperatures are reached it does of course solidify. Then the organism with resilient cell walls fares the best. Some of the water is between the cells which is an additional factor. But within the cell low temperatures stalemate activity and thus demands for nutriment while freezing and preserving the colloidal chemistry of the protoplasm. The high temperatures are the ones more likely to break down the colloidal systems. And where the conditions are extremely severe, evolution weeds out those cellular structures which cannot meet the demands of the environment.
With the coming of spring the cell is warmed and this heat increases the molecular activity of the protoplasm as heat would for any chemical solution. The molecular activity of the protoplasm thus increases to the point where the cell resumes its normal equilibrating processes. This is natural for life is a matter of chemistry and molecular relations. It is obviously extremely difficult for the researcher to attempt to duplicate nature in this and unimaginably difficult with complex animals. But given one iota the time nature has had with hibernating animals and dormant plants man has accomplished wonders of his own.
There are a number of ways then that the molecular activity can be reduced for holding the organism constant over relatively long periods of time. All hibernating animals reduce their molecular activity and thus the amount of energy they expend during their long sleeps. With a few exceptions, the lower [the] temperature the less [the] energy used until the life processes are held practically stock still. An exception to this as far as temperature is concerned may be seen in the desiccation of seeds and insects. The kernel of grain, we remember, that was held for thousands of years in a dried state, sprang to life when put in moisture at the right temperature. The principle is somewhat similar though. The molecular activity has virtually stopped, in this case by drying, while the colloidal systems or the relations between the elements have been kept relatively constant. Another method, freeze drying, uses both freezing and drying, as the name indicates, with excellent results on relatively small amounts of tissue.
The human imagination has a right to be excited at seeds blossoming after several thousand years of dormancy but this is an infinitesimal span compared to very recent discoveries. At Bad Nauheim in Germany, Dr. Dombrowski has found that bacteria have been held in a dormant condition for approximately 200 million years. (This was when ants were just beginning to evolve as ants.) Not only did nature hold the bacteria in dormancy over that period of time but she is constantly bringing them to life again without the intervention of man.
These bacteria had evidently been trapped and held in ancient salt deposits in a dehydrated condition. Water seeping through these deposits has been loosening the bacteria and warming them enough to rekindle the slightly faster molecular processes known as life. Conveniently the warmed water with reanimated bacteria bubbled forth virtually next to bacteriologist Dombrowski’s laboratory. After discovering that these bacteria were as far as 600 feet below the surface within the warmed water he reasoned that they might have originated in the Kali and Zechstein salt deposits 40 miles distant. With extremely careful procedures to avoid contamination, 180 salt samples were extracted and warmed in hospitable solutions yielding 86 cultures of revived bacteria.4
After this success with local salt deposits he obtained 320 million year old Saskatchewan samples which yielded eight strains of living bacteria from twenty experiments. Having pushed the latency period to over 300 million years attempts are now being made to locate salt deposits over twice as old upon which the same experiments will be performed. It would appear that for our purposes the pushing back of the latency period is merely a technical detail. If bacteria have lain potentially alive for over 300 million years and the larger species are remotely comparable they too may be held in dormancy though as mentioned many times the reactivating problems are formidable.
Before we continue with temperature studies in the laboratories we may mention some recent experiments which indicate that dietary changes may help control suspended animation. Monsanto Chemical Company has reported that by specific changes in the balance of amino acids in the diet chicks have been held in suspended animation for six to nine months. After stopping the suspended animation the chicks matured at their normal rates without any ill effects.5 Mice that had been recently weaned were held at that point in their maturation for an even longer period, a year, and then “triggered” back to natural growth by restoration to a normal diet. It is rather instructive the number of methods that may be attempted to achieve a similar end, however, this particular one gives no evidence so far of holding animals for indefinite periods without aging.
Over the years in the various laboratories there have naturally been a great variety of findings. As far back as 1787 it was found that sperm survived 15 degrees below. Seeds, especially, were found quite capable of withstanding extremely [low] temperatures. Some rudimentary animals like spermatids could withstand -80 degrees Centigrade. Certain other cells withstood slow cooling to -190 degrees Centigrade. Close inspection in the laboratory supported the contention that freezing stopped or held the colloidal relations. It was found that “if the significant amount of cellular water is frozen within the cell the free radicals released on thawing will be in much the same positions they would have been in on irradiation of the unfrozen cell.”6
The theory and application for small rudimentary organisms is fine. But for the application to men there must be evidence that this applies to more highly organized creatures. In part this has been done. In 1951 in Belgrade, Andjus “had resuscitated rats with colonic temperatures between 0 degrees C. and -2 degrees C. and after the heart and breathing had been at a standstill for 40 60 minutes.”7 Andjus had done this with rather elaborate procedures, complicated machines with fearful names, and a reasonable though complicated method of warming the area of the heart first, then working outward. In 1956 Goldzveig and Smith of Mill Hill, London, published “A Simple method for Reanimating Ice cold Rats …”. As alluded to earlier they reanimated their rats with artificial respiration and simple irradiation with a bench lamp. It was found that warming them with one or two 100 W. bulbs was all that was needed and the results were better.8 It seems to indicate that once in a while something can be more simply accomplished with a bench lamp than with a magnetron.
In the Goldzveig and Smith Studies rats, mice and golden hamsters were among the animals used. With the mice the method was to enclose them in Kilner jars for 58 77 minutes at -1 to -2 degrees C. Then the cooling was continued in melting ice. Usually before two hours had passed the rewarming was begun. The lamps, placed in various positions above and below the mouse mounted on a screen, were held just close enough to raise the temperature one degree per minute. By this method 78 out of 104 were long term survivors. That is there were no ill effects apparent in the survivors. Likewise as mentioned in the introduction Smith resuscitated golden hamsters though 50 percent of the body water had been frozen.
Numerous studies have been done also on dogs and monkeys. With the latter resuscitation has been completely successful though the body temperature has been lowered to 0 degrees Centigrade.9
Men also have naturally and sometimes accidentally been subjected to quite low temperatures and to the freezing of large parts of the body with warming to normal and few if any after-effects. However it is only to be expected that the frontier research is to be done with other animals. It seems reasonable that within the next century research will show that first the smaller animals, just as is now true of certain small cellular structures, can be frozen for long periods of time and successfully resuscitated. Gradually it will be shown that more complex animals can be reanimated after being frozen for long periods of time. Smith, Lovelock and Parkes of London phrase their objectives thusly: “We are now attempting to close the gap between these two lines of work (a) by increasing the size and complexity of the isolated tissues cooled to -79 degrees C., as, for example by freezing a whole isolated organ, and (b) by reducing the whole animal to a body temperature below zero.”10
There can be little doubt that the gap will be closed with time. Here it can especially be noticed how research in this area can have a variety of significances. One, they learn more about resuscitation given the frozen animal and/or the frozen organ. Two, the length of storage time is gradually lengthened. Three, more knowledge is obtained of tissues and organs for transplant possibilities. Thus, closing the gap in one field may help close the gaps in other fields of study as well.
Transplantation
To see where transplantation studies may be of importance let us review the possible alternatives for delaying death either relatively or indefinitely. One, was the biological in which the same body of the person would continue provided enough was known of his stochastic processes to enable control of aging. Two, was the possibility that an organism could be held indefinitely in a dormant condition or relatively static molecular activity at low temperature until research and other scientific discoveries had greatly improved reanimation procedures. Three, is the method that is about to be briefly considered in which transplanting of organs is so widespread that the original pattern, the individual, could indefinitely extend his existence. This possibility is theoretically akin to regeneration processes already spoken of. Shortly after this a fourth area of cybernetic possibilities will be discussed.
In transplantation the spare parts must be gotten from somewhere: either growing them as might be envisioned in some brave new world laboratory or as now taking advantage of the death of other organisms. An entering wedge is instanced by corneal transplants. The right to remove these corneas is deeded before death by some individuals. Upon death the cornea is removed, frozen and stored until needed. These corneas have been used after a storage of two years with no harmful effects.
As eye banks store corneas, tissue banks store skin sections, nerves, and other organs which have been found practical to transplant where needed, and organs upon which storage and transplanting research is continuing. As discoveries continue the range of organs which can be successfully replaced will widen.
An aspect of transplanting which is similar to simply exchanging or substitution or replacement is the transfusion of blood and plasma. It is a simpler but somewhat similar process. In this the blood of other persons living or recently dead is transplanted or transfused to the needing organism. It is so common that the possible significance of the principle, if extended, hardly passes our minds. It may be seen also that the method of substitution and exchange drifts off to such procedures as transfusing salt water plasma solutions into the blood when necessary to attempting to exchange the entire heads between organisms.
As skin grafting, cornea and kidney transplants are actually in effect today there is little doubt that the limits of this method are [but] remotely in sight. Extension of this technique cannot help but extend longevity as well as provide an available method of aiding and resuscitating frozen organisms.
Electroencephalography
Electroencephalography or just plain and simple encephalography provides us with a bridge between physiological and cybernetic studies. Simply and roughly put, it is the study of the electric wave phenomena of the brain. It was started by Berger in 1928 when he was able to amplify sufficiently for observation and recording the extremely faint brain waves. Since then Grey Walter has been the most significant theorist in the field with his theory of scanning.
Walter was puzzled for a number of years over what the meaning might be of all the puzzling brain waves. Finally, with the coming of television the thought occurred that the brain may work similarly. That is, the rhythmic waves are part of a type of scanning process, a showering of impulses back and forth, which transfer the incoming visual stimuli, for instance, into conceptual patterns.11 These same patterns can be stored and recalled at will. This didn’t explain all the waves but it did provide something significant for both physiology and cybernetics.
For physiology it provided a new theory explaining naturalistically how the brain functioned in certain areas. For cybernetics it helped provide a way of duplicating in machines the characteristics and capabilities of the human. These researches have continually tightened Wiener’s thesis that the operations of some of the newer communication machines and the human are precisely parallel.
When it comes to human immortality it has been mentioned that if a person may die before the postulated breakthroughs of 2010, and he wishes to have his body stored, it is also wise to have as complete a record as is possible to aid the reanimation force. An encephalogram, encephalograph or brain print might just possibly be of some help. Each brain print is entirely different from every other brain print. It is more individualistic than a fingerprint. This precaution may not be necessary for we cannot know ahead of time the exact methods of reanimation. But it is wise if convenient to hedge against the future if the information might possibly be of use.
Cybernetics
Ultimately our foundations must lie in experiment and verification, especially with immortality: something men desire so passionately. However, when it comes to discussing the probability we often use the general observations of the scientist which he has put in written form. With cybernetics it is convenient to use the writings of Wiener, perhaps the outstanding cybernetician, as a point of discussion and departure. Let us outline the argument again but in more detailed form:
“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback … In other words, all over system will correspond to the complete animal …”12
As far as this work is concerned, we need only ask that the machine and the human are significantly parallel, such that the all over machine system will practically correspond to the complete animal. If it is not implicit within the above it is well to state explicitly that we assume the pattern can be found of the human and can be transmitted, in this particular case, to the machine. The machine with due repair, is immortal. Remember this is but one path to immortality. Other methods and variations are discussed elsewhere. Here we mean to discuss the method and relevancies closest to what we consider the core of cybernetics and relate it to the other researches.
There are some very close relationships for instance among Pavlov, Sherrington, Grey Walter and Wiener. Pavlov in physiology besides reinforcing the idea that behavior is deterministic and mechanical provided the conditioned reflex to tell us how learning occurs and to help map the psychic apparatus. Sherrington’s researches which are intertwined with Pavlov’s did the basic work explaining the synapse and provided a reasonable model of the brain. Grey Walter improved the model with the concept of scanning and gave it physical mechanical reality. Wiener provided both mathematical contributions and philosophical contributions with the aid of Ashby’s experiments on feedback, equilibrium, and purpose. Wiener especially promoted the unity of the movement.
As Wiener points out, cybernetics is a composite movement of electronics, engineering, psychology, physiology, etc., dealing with men and machines, feedback, control, information, messages, and communication. In attempting to duplicate machines similar to men, it only seems reasonable that it will be a vastly complex interdivisional study. It almost seems startling that the duplication has gone as far so fast. Automation which is an aspect of these studies seems to have taken us by surprise, yet ten years ago we were fully warned of its possible benefits and detriments by Wiener and others.
But if the possibilities of men being put out of work or becoming victims of an unthinking, unquestioning organization were stressed, the ultimate implications for immortality were either unthought of, or if thought of, other problems were considered first, or the idea of immortality was merely implied. But the ideas keep coming back, and back again; if men are a pattern, and so are machines similarly, and if communication machines can precisely parallel men, patterns may eventually be transmitted to machines then immortality may be eventually achieved for humans.
Now let us consider in slightly greater detail the possibilities of the cybernetic method and some of its variations. The method implied by the ideas in Wiener’s book might be called the transmitting re creation method. A scanner goes over or through the individual picking up the pattern and transmitting it to any other point where the re creation out of the same type of atoms is to take place. This particular method would be a human to human, one to one relation between all of the atoms of the body, via the transmission device. In theory, it is excellent for storage and for transmission to distant points in time and space, however, as Wiener says:
“The difficulties are of course enormous … Any scanning of the human organism must be a probe going through all its parts, and will accordingly, tend to destroy the tissue on its way. To hold an organism stable while part of it is being slowly destroyed, with the intention of re creating it out of other material elsewhere, involves a lowering of its degree of activity, which in most cases would destroy life in the tissue.”13
It may be added that for those who are frozen there will be less problem in holding the organism stable. The degree of activity will be nil at anything above the molecular level and destroying the capacity for life in the tissue may not be of necessity depending on the capability of the scanning machine. Wiener says this is a very plausible method. If it is true that this unusual cybernetic method is plausible then think how much confidence is gained for the other methods which seem even more feasible and less complex.
Another possibility along this cybernetic line is the human to automaton. The idea comes in mind quite readily that if the scanner can pick up the pattern and re create a duplicate individual it might even be easier and more advantageous to reconstruct the equivalent pattern in the frame of a unitary semi isolated mobile communication machine. This assumes there are advantages to plastic and metal contrasted with flesh and bone. Or, conceivably, there could be some combination of all of them.
In short, the pattern of the human may more easily be taped into the communication machine with its numerous structural advantages. The idea again is that the individuality of the body is like that of a flame rather than that of a stone; of form rather than a bit of substance.
The several apparent advantages are that putting the pattern into the machine is easier than re creating another flesh and bone individual and the new metallic and plastic individual is then immortal, given minimal upkeep. Beyond this the machines have innumerable advantages over the human constitution. These advantages (and some disadvantages at present) not only tell us more about the possibilities of machines but point to an earlier solution to transmission problems.
Intelligence is likely to become the supreme forte of the newer communication machines. This is believed extremely probable because of the startling growth in the last decade of the thinking machines and their vital function now in business, the military, in universities and governments in many countries over the surface of the planet. They are orbiting in space right now doing mental jobs no human alone could dream of doing. The range of data they are able to encompass, receive and transmit is limited only by the laws of nature. They receive and transmit radio waves, ultraviolet rays, light rays, sound waves, infrared rays, X rays, heat rays, gamma rays, and any conceivable type of wave form at almost any magnitude. As the functioning of this spectral capacity becomes better integrated it forms the basis of a higher intelligence. The range that a human can receive and transmit is infinitesimally small by comparison. This same limitation eventually puts a limitation on human intelligence. Most of the waves would be almost totally beyond man’s comprehension if he did not have the machines to inform him of them.
It is often suggested that it doesn’t make any difference as long as man has control of the machines. But somehow it does make a difference. When there is a difficult job to do men are matched with the machines and the winner gets the job. It should be painfully evident, for those who want jobs, who is getting the jobs lately. And from ousting men from one job the machines march on to another still more difficult and demanding. They begin by performing rather simple physical and mental operations but have now moved up to designing the next generation of still more capable machines and to designing the actual factories themselves. And the more capable machines displace the less capable machines, as well as men. As one analyst observed: when the machines start causing unemployment among themselves then it’s time to start worrying.
But to return again to the question of whether it makes any difference as long as men always control the machines, the short answer is that we may lose control in a variety of ways. When men lose control over individual jobs it forces the society to socialize, to cooperate more closely in controlling the machines and in distributing the output. Man won’t regain in this type of control until he fully understands that work is for the machines. Man was never meant to work. It isn’t in his nature whereas it is within the nature of some machines. When man realizes that full unemployment is his goal and has devised an equitable distribution system then he will have achieved a measure of control over himself and some machines. But this isn’t the ultimate control that the more imaginative people are thinking about. Evolution may be instructive here.
In evolutionary studies, indications are that species adapt to fit the environment. On the Galapagos Islands, Darwin found fourteen species of finches originating from a single mainland species. Each species adapted to an available food supply, gradually separating further from the original species. It is possible to imagine this in space exploration. The species of highly specialized machines best adapted to the environment are now in those particular niches. Their numbers are on the increase. Only those machines which are adaptable to the environment of Jupiter will continue to occupy that planet. Probably differing types of machines will more efficiently fit the differing types of environments. If one were to take a survey presently or some time in the future one would find the machines everywhere would roughly fit the environment (space especially) just as Darwin’s finches fit the Galapagos environment.
The splitting off and radiating of Darwin’s fourteen species of finches is perhaps the common process. It may be the way machines, that is some of them, may eventually split off from men, separate, radiate and become as individualistic and independent as men are from apes. However, evolution has manifold processes which eventually allow the new to separate or to gain new territory. Many of them involve parasitic and symbiotic relationships which it suspiciously appears now exist between men and machines. How the splitting off may occur is difficult to hazard a guess at, but it shouldn’t blind one to the possibility that it may occur. Ants are instructive of one of these displacing processes. A certain fuliginous ant queen will venture into the nest of a mixtus ant queen, mount the back of the enemy queen and saw off her head. The invading queen takes the place of the deceased queen producing young which mix with the host ants though one be black and one be yellow, making a pretty sight on the forest trails for perhaps five or ten years until all of the mixtus workers disappear and the colony becomes purely fuliginous.
Or viewing all of ant evolution, just like evolution in general, it is observable that some 18,000 species evolved from one single pre ant strain over a period of perhaps 200 million years. Not only did they radiate away from each other in general but they often intermixed again in a very wide variety of relationships: parasitism, competition, parabiosis, plesiobiosis, xenobiosis, dulosis, lestobiosis, etc. If one were exposed to pre ants alone it would be very hard to imagine the eventual radiation into 18,000 species. In the long run independence and the development of new varieties and species is the rule.
Another common question is: If the machine is so smart why does he need man to originate him? The partial answer is that no species is smart enough to evolve themselves. Each species builds or evolves out of the previous species. The plants differentiated themselves from the animal cells by developing chlorophyll but both had a common cellular base. Then the animals built upon plant life in a predatory sense which allowed the animals to evolve much more complexly and rapidly. Something of the same happened with man growing out of what we call the lower (or higher) orders of animals. It is neither to his credit nor to his detriment. Likewise with the newer machines. They could not exist (the necessary levels of organization did not exist) before men created them and guaranteed their survival for a time. Merely because men created them by no means indicates that beings of mechanical, electrical and plastic construction cannot be superior to investigating the universe and to surviving in it. If one denied the possibility of the machine’s superiority one would have to logically deny that any child could be superior to his or her parent. If the child were always less intelligent than the parent we would have devolution not evolution. As a rule evolution works otherwise. The children are, on the average becoming smarter than the parents, and probably the machines are becoming smarter than humans. It may be a greater blow to man’s ego than finding out that the earth was not the center of the universe, but if it is accepted graciously it is a sign of maturity which wears well with the pride of parentage.
It must be noted that the infant communication machines are granted by all scientists to be superior in investigating outer space. They are there now doing the job. Man can eventually find a use in space such as insuring the preservation of his own species in case of annihilatory hydrogen wars but thus far publicity and power are the main reasons for his brief spatial excursions.
Structure and efficiency are two interrelated aspects in which the newer communication machines command significant advantages over the human frame. Humans spend about 80% of their time and energy on maintenance and repair, whereas the machine spends about 10% of its time on similar functions. This is because of the machine’s construction which is usually almost indestructible: the essence of durability compared to the relatively unstable perishable flesh and bone. Flesh and bone can exist by itself without protection only under an extremely narrow range of temperature and other wave form while the machine has many times the capacity for survival under what would be adverse conditions for the human. One could put almost any machine on the moon’s surface, which might vary in temperature from 250 degrees above to that much below, with no oxygen and no water and the machine wouldn’t give it a second thought. These structural advantages which allow the machine to better comprehend and withstand the rigors of almost any environment cannot be dismissed and when combined with meaningful levels of organization eventually have an impact for improving its intelligence and its ability to solve problems and to survive. Relatively speaking, given two equal systems in other respects, the system with more time and energy for mental activity coupled with greater durability will provide a superior output.
This mental capability has been known for a decade or perhaps two. The ability to intensify a physical force many times to get physical work done has been known for ages. The second potentiality to multiply a different physical force known as mental power many times in order to get mental work done is the quite recent realization. Similarly as a physical force may be intensified even a million times, for example, any approximation of this in the mental sphere is more than likely (to put it mildly) to produce revolutionary changes. This mental capacity of the newer communication machines is relatively to be considered the fulcrum of the second industrial revolution. These new found mental abilities coupled with the older physical abilities allow the machines to continue the entire operations of a factory, office, or business relatively unaided by human intervention. And humans are still somewhat amazed or baffled or surprised at the ease with which the well known superiority of the machines to do physical work was quickly coupled with the newer machine’s superior ability to calculate, order, and direct operations.
If Ashby is correct in his writings, there is no theoretical reason why men should not be able to build a machine with an IQ up to a million or beyond.14 Otherwise there would be no known upper limit. Then the meanest intelligence (as the machines say) should be able to see what this means for solving the problems of the transmission of human patterns into automatons, or for the solution of any other problem. Admittedly the problem may be as large or larger than that of effecting the first atom bomb or the missile that took pictures of the hinder side of the moon. Though it cannot be dogmatically asserted, it would appear that those may have been easier problems, being rather technological in nature. The problems of reanimation, transmission, etc., which lead to physical immortality are not only technological but involve a vast amount of time-consuming research and fundamental theoretical work such as with cancer which has only partially been solved to date. Again it doesn’t mean that it cannot be done. It means that it might take billions of dollars toward fundamental research over a period of fifty years or so.
If you plan on living that long, fine. If not, you might arrange for the long cool dreamless sleep in case you die naturally or accidentally before the research has been completed. The alternatives will be the same as delineated by the greatest of the ancients nearly 2400 years ago: “Either it is like a dreamless and undisturbed sleep or it opens a new world to which the good man can look forward with hope.”
Research in the Future
Research today evolves some tentative outlines of future research. This is part of present research. Let us see if we can ascertain the most reasonable directions and allocations.
First an evaluation and criticism of this present work seems in order. Objections, criticisms and new findings need to be communicated both amongst those concerned with immortality and longevity, and to the author of this work. If some absolutely invalidating illogicalities are found, or if experiments were to prove that physical immortality (meaning the opportunity of indefinitely postponing death) is a scientific impossibility then of course it would appear that this project should be dropped.
However, if the arguments and the evidence presented or available are carefully weighed and they indicate some possible or reasonable assurance that physical immortality is not impossible then this would logically indicate that our minds should consider which research offers the most promise. And this includes the awareness that great discoveries often occur in unexpected places. It also includes the knowledge that most research can be planned for despite the reminding ironies of fate.
Depending on what you include in research, and taking the globe as a single unit, the amounts spent in the 20th century have skyrocketed to five or ten billions of dollars a year. Nearly all of it is for reasons of power, prestige and publicity. The form it takes is supposedly the exploration of space. Already there is growing resistance to such expenditures when it is seen what that same amount of money could do for education, for the poor, and for the underdeveloped nations. If, however, it drains off the contact points of war or helps provide an exit for some members of the species into the safety of space it will have been well worthwhile. There is much about it that is moot. Perhaps only the passage of time will inform us of the net effects. Considering immediate effects it would appear that space research is for the best. No hot wars are going on at this immediate date. The draining off effect appears to be in operation with the substitution of newer forms of competition and accomplishment. It is hoped the information will benefit everyone eventually and certainly mankind would never get such space research if it weren’t for this weird three sisters’ mix of benefits, ironies, and insanities of national rivalry. But this hardly proves that the more biologically oriented research is secondary. For if we remember our groundstone, the primary value of the individual, it means that we are obligated, in order to be humane as well as consistent to expand our research in biology, physiology and cybernetics.
As an aside, if we wished to stoop to crass power considerations, and in thinking of the power of the state which controls research decisions now, it may be pointed out that the nations which repeat their allegiance to the individual would reap great publicity benefits by working toward and eventually achieving physical immortality for their citizens. These same nations often need more people to offset the state oriented nations with their superabundance of beings. If the open societies do not keep even in this type of research the state-centered nations will achieve it as irony would have it. Even if both extraterrestrial exploration and immortality research were to be financed out of power motives public vice would lead to private virtue: i.e., benefit.
No matter how or who is providing the resources for research the most effective way of obtaining long run benefits to individuals and society is to let individual scientists decide their path of research. Professor A. C. B. Lovell has brought this home rather convincingly in his book The Individual and the Universe where he shows that societies are now past the stage where the individual suffers actual bodily harm or death because of his astronomical theories. It is quite conceivable that pique and momentary hysteria may lead to economic persecution but this is unlikely over astronomical theory per se. If the astronomer engages in political controversy then of course he is vulnerable for that is what persecution is concerned with in the 20th century. Also we are moving past a 300 year era between Galileo and the 200 inch Hale telescope in which astronomy was privately financed. For the nation states now recognize that astronomy is a necessary and useful tool of national power. Thus, we are now in an era where the state provides the funds and often controls the direction of research. Just how free the scientist will be in the future is unknown. But to date Lovell thinks that scientists in the U.S.S.R. with the authority to decide on which projects to pursue and the resources to carry them out has made the Russians first in space. On the other side of the planet a General Bullmoose could not understand why it is important to explore the moon. And a group of conservative orthodox publics, less knowledgeable and relatively in