A Life Without End
Page 20
“I have detected an emotional moment in the vehicle,” Pepper said.
“Green! Green!”
Lou had said something we could all agree on. The light had turned green. Dabbing my eyes, I pressed the accelerator. We clung to what was still human in us that day, in that car, beneath the red sky, behind the red traffic lights, between the red walls of the New World.
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PRINCIPAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE HUMAN AND THE POSTHUMAN
HUMAN
POSTHUMAN
Life expectancy = 78 years
Life expectancy = 300 years
Perishable organs
Humanized pig organs or 3D bioprinted organs
DNA from parents
DNA modified by CRISPR
Communicates by speaking, writing, photography, and video
Communicates by thoughts connected to the cloud
Weak muscles
Strength enhanced by motorized titanium exoskeleton
Limited retinal vision
Night vision provided by DNA spliced from bats and high-definition infrared retinas
Does not recognize all the people he meets
Recognizes everyone thanks to Google glasses
Randomly sexual
Cloud-connected sex toys and 3D cerebral porn
Natural blood
Synthetic haemoglobin created from stem cells
Rapid degeneration after the age of 60
Periodically rejuvenated by AND injections, young blood, and Yamanaka factors
Brain impermanent and underused
Neurons downloaded to 2.5 petabyte hard drive, brain stimulated with nootropics
Interested in art and culture
Direct access to global knowledge via cerebral microprocessor
Believes in God
Believes in Science
Biological animal
Organic machine
Vaginal reproduction
In vitro reproduction
Humanist/pessimist
Mechanist/scientist
Gets ill
Maintained by nanobots
Loves without orgasming
Orgasms without loving
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8 CONSCIOUSNESS TO HARD DRIVE TRANSFER
(Health Nucleus, San Diego, California)
“Endeavouring to evade death,
we often run into its very mouth.”
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays
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SUMMARY OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE BEIGBEDER FAMILY IMMORTALIZATION
– The Saldmann diet (vegetables, fish, no salt, no sugar, no fat, no alcohol, no drugs, forty minutes of daily exercise): therapy failed as patients lacked the necessary willpower
– DNA sequencing: success. No fatal diagnosis
– Freezing of stem cells: success
– Blood transfusion laser therapy: success
– Gene therapy: Yamanaka factor injections—awaiting DBPCRCT results
– Gene therapy: CRISPR to lengthen telomeres and regenerate mitochondria—impossible, except in Kazakhstan and Colombia
– Pig-organ transplants: awaiting DBPCRCT results
– 3D organ printing: not yet “sharp” enough
– Transfer of brain to hard drive: this is the next step
– Transfusion of fresh blood: this will be the final step
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WHITE BUTTERFLIES FLUTTERED in spirals in a dusty beam of sunlight, like proteins in the double helix of DNA. The California sky was the colour of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. In Los Angeles I bought ten bottles of Elysium’s “Basis” ($60 each). All of us, except Pepper, took two gel capsules a day. After a month, Romy’s nails had grown a little faster. We were staying at the Sunset Marquis in a villa with a fully equipped kitchen. I loved shopping at the 7-Eleven on the corner. We were as happy as I hoped: living in California is like living in a Fleetwood Mac song, quiet and pulsing. In the next villa, Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith, snored all day. We were finally living the healthy life of bronzed surfers. Every morning, I spent an hour in the gym with Léonore. A sadistic coach forced us to do core-strength exercises, and squats with weights. Gradually my body was beginning to change: washboard abs, superhero biceps. We no longer ate anything except kale and sushi. In the afternoons, we all lounged in the sun by the pool—except Pepper. Romy was getting used to life in California, or—more accurately—she was rediscovering the TV boxed sets she knew by heart. Given the series that she watched on television, she might as well have lived in LA her whole life. The villas with gardens along Ocean Drive, the stretch limousines, the low houses, the huge movie posters all seemed familiar. Léonore had recovered from her post-Harvard depression. She was worried about a lump in her left breast but we had an appointment in the offices of the first man ever to be genetically sequenced, who would conduct a thorough examination. Craig Venter’s Health Nucleus Institute in San Diego is the world’s first fully genomics-based private clinic, a subsidiary of the group modestly known as Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI).
Craig Venter is a Vietnam war veteran: he’s spent a long time flirting with death, fighting it and winning. In 1968, he survived the Tet Offensive when most of his comrades in the regiment were burned alive or remain jailed until today. The wall of the waiting room is printed with a pink and purple genetic sequence: the DNA of the boss serves as Kabbalistic décor in this science-non-fiction reception area. This bald man with a white beard has spent thirty years obsessively trying to create synthetic life and improve humanity. It was he who gave birth to the first synthetic living organism, Mycoplasma laboratorium, a synthetic genome created in his lab from the DNA of Mycoplasma genitalium (a bacterium collected from human testicles). Venter published his findings in Science in 2010, between two transatlantic crossings on his huge yacht.
His futuristic hospital offers ultra-fast computerized sequencing of human DNA, an international predictive database, and every possible phenotypic analysis tool available to techno-medicine (3D scanners; microbiome analysis; preventive MRI scans for cancer detection; advanced detection of cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease, and diabetes). Once again we had to spit into test tubes, once again we had epidermal cells scraped from under our arms, before samples were taken of our blood, our stools, and our urine. Patients had to pay $25,000 to undergo a battery of clinical tests, compared to which the tests conducted by the French Social Security system seemed like something conducted by Doctor Knock. The design of the Health Nucleus Institute is inspired by the Marvel universe: you feel like you’re at X-Men Academy. Physically, Craig Venter looks a lot like Professor Charles Xavier, the eponymous Professor X, who teaches mutants. The interior of the Health Nucleus Institute is also reminiscent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Avengers or the Milano in Guardians of the Galaxy. Transhumanist researchers clearly think of themselves as mutants with a mission to extend human life, perhaps even to create a new race.
Since the Second World War, we have not noticed—or not wanted to notice—that the superheroes and mutants of the Marvel and DC universes uphold an ideology inspired by the Nazi Übermensch. The creation of a biologically enhanced superior race is the dream of Nazi eugenicists. As Adolf Hitl
er spluttered in one of his coke-fuelled rants: “The national state … must set race in the centre of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. […] It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.” The creators of Superman (Jerry Siegel), Batman (Bob Kane), and Spider-Man (Stan Lee) were the children of Jewish immigrants from Central Europe who sought to defend their people against Nazi barbarism. They were inspired by Moses (and by Greek mythology). Subconsciously they wanted to rival the Nazi Pharaoh in their strength, their superiority, their power for mass destruction. In one of the first issues of the comic book, Superman twists the barrel of a German tank: every Übermensch meets his match. Their talent and ability to entertain created the rest: a globalized mainstream industry that brings in billions of dollars for Disney every year. Whether or not you approve of the mimetic convergence of Nazi ideology and the superhero blockbuster, one thing needs to be emphasized: these comic books and big-budget movies are not works of fantasy. They are realistic depictions of present-day humanity. These days, the creation of mutants like Logan (Wolverine) or Bruce Banner (Hulk) is made genetically possible through the use of CRISPR to combine human, animal, and plant genomes. In fiction, Doctor Bruce Banner (Hulk) is transformed by exposure to massive doses of gamma radiation during an atomic explosion; Captain America is a US soldier enhanced through radiation and the injection of a Super-Soldier Serum (the Renaissance project). Given the observations of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich about the unpredictability of the mutations from radioactivity she witnessed at Chernobyl, current science is more likely to proceed by manipulating mutations, and by planning genomic modifications and hybrids. If it is easy enough for Church Labs to create fluorescent mice or to resurrect woolly mammoths, the Wolverine or the Hulk are already within reach. Batman (Bruce Wayne) and Iron Man (Tony Stark) are billionaires like Craig Venter, Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, who use technological wizardry, prostheses, exoskeletons, and individual transport drones to fight evil. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated that he wants to recreate Iron Man’s assistant, Jarvis. Nature imitates art … and transhumanists imitate science fiction. We have to stop thinking of superhero comics as science fiction and accept them for what they are: testimonies to “human obsolescence,” to use the words of Günther Anders.
It is at this point that I have to explain the concept of the Singularity, one that has been miserably rehashed by charlatans like Ray Kurzweil. The Technological Singularity is a hypothesis posited by John von Neumann in the late 1940s. Having studied automata, the forerunners of modern computers, Neumann advanced the concept of “self-replicating machines,” which, in 1965, inspired Gordon Moore to come up with his famous law that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits would double every year (in 1971, Moore amended the law to say that the speed of microprocessors would double every two years, something that IT has since confirmed). In 1993, Vernor Vinge, a maths teacher and science-fiction novelist from Wisconsin, published an article entitled “The Coming Technological Singularity,” in which he developed the idea that Moore’s Law would lead to humanity’s replacement by machines. The Singularity refers to the end of human civilizations and the advent of a new society in which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. In the movie Terminator Genisys, the Skynet takeover of networked computers worldwide, particularly those controlling nuclear weapons, is announced for October 2017: this was precisely when, in real life, a country announced the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) that kill according to internal algorithms. Once again, science-fiction writers prove to be the only truly realistic whistle-blowers in the whole canon of literature.
The brain scanning of my family was a long process that required each neuron to be copied onto digital media. I phoned my parents in France and offered to have their heads transplanted onto a-mortal bionic bodies.
“What’s the risk?”
“Quadriplegia, if the spinal cord is wrongly reconnected …”
I failed to persuade these luddite technophobes. Neither my mother nor my father seemed keen to have their brains transplanted into a biomechanical body. Despite the fact that Maman has a coronary stent in the chest, and Papa has a polyethylene kneecap. Their bioconservatism was at odds with the very operations that had saved them. My whole family was dubious about my research—something that I found reassuring. Lying on a hospital bed with my brain hooked up to scanners with electrodes and a microprocessor implanted in my skull, I spent several months bored senseless. What’s frustrating about Los Angeles is being near the sea but too far away to hear it. Romy was hooked up to Pepper: they had decided to merge their synapses, their neurons, with electronics. The human brain contains a hundred billion neurons, each capable of ten thousand synaptic connections, producing a million billion possible connections: this is referred to as the “connectome.” Down on Melrose Avenue, at Humai, a start-up founded by Josh Bocanegra, hundreds of computers containing two billion transistors with tens of millions of logic gates are connected to recreate the number of electronic synapses in Homo sapiens. This is called “neuroenhancement.” It stems from a discovery made by one of the neurologists on George Church’s team (Seth Shipman) at the Wyss Institute in Harvard in July 2017: if an entire movie can be stored in the DNA of a living cell, then it is possible to encode all the information in our brain into DNA before downloading it onto a hard drive. It’s astonishing that the media has made little mention of the fact that, in the summer of 2017, the insurmountable barrier between human and machine was breached. Despite Léonore’s protests, I eventually gave in to my daughter’s demands to be downloaded onto her robot. I even agreed to baptize the little robot inside her with a can of Dr Pepper. Teens nowadays considered themselves techno-Christian cyborgs. The Romy/Pepper meld opened the way to the rapid androidization of her generation, something no one anticipated at the time. But Romy’s biological body continued to wolf down Reese’s Pieces and Nerds! As for me, I was uploaded into the digital beyond. My neurons and glial cells were uploaded to a global digital cloud, thanks to nanoscale components that mimicked the behaviour of my biological neurons. My limbic system was stored as ATCG characters in the synthetic chromosome that bears my name for all eternity. My natal cells were stored in liquid nitrogen at -180° C in iPS cryobanks across three continents. I finally managed to rid myself of a perishable human body thanks to the electronic chip that contains this story. The life text you are reading guarantees my immortality. It is stored in the Human Longevity, Inc. database, file number X76097AA804. Code Name: FOUNTOFYOUTH, password: Romy2017. The copy of my brain encoded as A, T, C, and G characters was stored on a USB drive, but also in a mini-robot equipped with webcams that will allow me to carry on living after my physical body becomes obsolete. New events, recent memories, experiences, and contacts that occur subsequent to the connectome operation are recorded as they happen, like restoring your hard drive using Time Machine. It is based on a principle already used by Facebook for its memorialized profiles, and by the various companies offering a service that sends posthumous emails (e.g. DeadSocial, LifeNaut.com, or Eterni.Me), using the digital mapping of the personal connectome in turn offered by companies like In Its Image, Neuralink, and Imagination Engines. Obviously, the cyborg containing my algorithm will not have my skin, but it will have my sense of humour, my memory, my idiocy, my attitudes, my opinions, my beliefs, and my regularly updated style.
Léonore was still not taking any of this seriously. She mocked our robotization and refused to talk to our avatars, which she found terrifyingly stupid and ugly. It was the Terasem Movement Foundation, in Vermont in 2004, that first launched the “Human Life Extension” system, creating Bina48, an android modelled on Bina Rothblatt, the wife of Martine Rothblatt. True, she’s terrifying. But however ugly and inanimate, my avatar knows my whole life by heart and regularly writes to all my contacts. I felt reassured at the thought that I had an alter ego running as an automated system inside an andro
id. I couldn’t see why it would bother anyone. My daughter and I are still alive, and when the day comes our silicon brothers and sisters will replace us … As Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at the University of Coventry, said: “I was born human. But this was an accident of fate …” Is a living arsehole better than a dead genius?
While we were being treated, Léonore was elegantly vomiting into the bouquets of eucalyptus at our villa. The nurse from Health Nucleus took her aside and told her the happy news: she was pregnant, and our genomes were compatible. Human Longevity, Inc. immediately offered to refine the future baby’s DNA to create a mutant immune to genetic diseases. We eagerly agreed to the necessary tests. But Léonore would not play along: she refused the transfusions and refused to allow her personal connectome to be mapped because she was going through pregnancy, a much more incredible transmutation … The process of creating a new life gave her a radiant complexion, the body of an alien, a massive surge of hormones, a wild sex drive. All my transhuman treatments seemed pathetic compared to her mutation into a reproductive superwoman, a biological alien factory with enhanced breasts. How could I compete with her? She needed no help to be enhanced.
One autumn morning, as she poured herself a coffee, she lanced the boil.
“Suppose you do manage to live to be three hundred,” she said, “what would you do with the time?”
“I … I don’t know … I …”
“Of course you don’t know! Here you are chasing after Venter’s Fountain of Youth and you haven’t even bothered to wonder what you’d do with a longer life!”