Living Forever

It's an audacious notion, no more plausible than flying through the air or walking on the moon. Yet the quest for eternal life has taken its place alongside fusion power and string theory as a just-maybe in-our-lifetime possibility — or, if not eternal, at least a whole lot more than we get now. After all, there are animals known to live practically forever unless killed through misadventure — turtles and sea urchins, to name two. That these slimy creatures enjoy the greatest gift, and not us, flies in the face of all that it means to be human.

If there's one thing baby boomers hate, it's to be denied. As their ranks enter the September of their lives, their rage against the dying of the light will drive advances in every area of health and wellness. Cures for chronic diseases, replacement parts from top to bottom and inside out, plastic surgery, boner pills — one by one, medical science will counter nature's arguments and prevail over time.

It won't always be easy. The boomers will fight the war on aging with crude weapons, making do with clumsy microprosthetics and unrefined medicines that pay for quantity of life with its quality. But new ground will be won with each succeeding development cycle, and we of younger generations will be sitting pretty when our golden years arrive.

A hundred and fifty years? Two hundred? Imagine the future we'll live to see. Compare the present with early America — from breech-loading muskets to dirty bombs in suitcases, from wooden teeth to silicone lips, from "The Scarlet Letter" to the Paris Hilton video — factor in the accelerating pace of history, and you start to get an idea of the changes we will live through. The early days of the Internet seem quaint already — remember typewriters, letters and rotary phones? By the time we're pushing the century mark, the first decades of our lives will seem absurd and inaccessible, a cognitive dissonance with the late twenty-first century, which will itself be ancient history before we're done. New forms of entertainment, transportation, financial derivatives — the mind reels at what's to come.

Even on the frontier of forever, however, the law of unintended consequences prevails. Like an arsonist trapped in his own inferno, we'll face problems we hadn't intended to be around for, things we'd meant to leave to our children — global warming, for example. By the time we muster the political will to do something about it, melting ice caps will have robbed us of coastal cities and plains, and changed growing conditions will have wreaked havoc on our food supply. But don't despair! Says Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which is pretty much what it sounds like), in response to the recent demise of the Kyoto Protocol, "Global warming ... will be solved through building resiliency and capacity into society and through long-term technological innovation and transformation."

Resiliency! Capacity! Innovation! Transformation! Now that we've changed the climate, we'll just change society to fit it. Vast civil engineering projects will protect the rich and necessary from the rising seas, with relocation stipends and road maps for the others. We'll use genetic engineering to fortify our food chain while less important ecosystems collapse left and right.

Similar strategies can be applied across the spectrum of ecological disaster. New and improved sunscreen will be tattooed right into our skin, enabling us to brave the outdoors for hours at a time even without an ozone layer. As old-fashioned animals like tigers, rhinos and whales depart the wild like elves leaving Middle Earth, we can maintain cloned copies in scientifically managed, customer-friendly facilities for future Earthlings to enjoy. New generations of virtual reality and gaming systems will make us forget all about redwood forests, reefs and any other lost natural wonders. We'll experience the full richness of the world and its history right from our armchairs, comfy and cool in our air conditioned, UV-screened, air- and water-filtered McMansions.

It might get a little crowded as each person sticks around longer, but fertility technology will allow career-oriented parents to delay childbirth until what we now think of as retirement age. (Retirement itself will be a thing of the past, of course; even without a bankrupt Social Security system, we'll have to work overtime to pay for all these blessings.) Meanwhile, beyond the vale of immortality, the huddled masses of the Third World will wax and wane between population explosion and multi-resistant plague, taxing our charitable natures until we have no choice but to wall them out and protect our own. Should bitterness incite them to nuclear methods, we can always seal ourselves deep in caves and plug ourselves into virtual worlds in which we can while away the centuries blissfully oblivious to our forsaken physicality.

What a time to be alive.

— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)

— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)