Die Trying

What happens if we achieve eternal life?


If what transhumanism proposes were somehow possible, if the Singularity was proven and real and not just a theory that can’t be verified, if we could cure aging and death and copy our minds to computers and make machine bodies and live forever — would doing so be ethically right? Who would those enhancements really benefit?

“I wouldn’t say it was wrong, but it’s certainly not fair because only a few could do it,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and current head of NYU’s Division of Medical Ethics. “So it’s not just.” Caplan is also on the board of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He has written extensively in favor of classifying aging as a disease and says there is no intrinsic ethical objection in attempting to cure it.

Caplan sees transhumanism as more closely tied to fantasy than reality; spending money on developing its technologies would only ever benefit the ultra wealthy who already have so little material concern that they can dedicate endless money and time to conquering death itself. Transhumanism in this way ignores the day-to-day challenges that currently affect huge swathes of the global population.


“Almost every human being who has ever lived is dead. Solving this problem is the most natural, humane, and important thing we could possibly do.” Peter Thiel

“We have a society with a gigantic income disparity and huge lifestyle disparities. So, saying you’re going to ignore the middle class or the poor is what the rich, many of whom are interested in transhumanism, already do every day,” Caplan says. “Focusing on these transhumanist goals at a time when 60 percent of the world’s population can’t live an expected lifespan right now is a problem.”

Bobby Kasthuri had said something similar: “Mind uploading, cryonics, they wouldn’t save the human race. They would save a bunch of rich people who want to live until the future. And every dollar they sink into this idea now is a dollar they don’t spend on a truly useful, practical, helpful idea for the present.”

Caplan is far more concerned with the social and economic impacts of a looming aging population, with health care and welfare systems having never been intended to support so many retirees. The Baby Boomers will potentially be working much longer than their parents, shutting younger people out of opportunity while simultaneously burdening them with their care. In that light, Caplan says, transhumanism’s dreams of immortality pale against a bevy of urgent, critical needs.

“I’m not sure morally that right now is the time to be dedicating resources to things like trying to cure aging,” Caplan says. Simply extending life is not enhancing it.

“If you live long enough, you will suffer mental incapacity, and that’s a huge burden on society. “Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, strokes, these catch up to everybody — everybody. It’s not an option.”

Transhumanism moon

Everyone you love and everyone you know and everything you touch will someday be gone. We will lose our lovers, our friends, our parents, our children, our animals, ourselves. The pain will be almost intolerable. The jobs we define ourselves by will end. Anything you make with your own two hands will eventually be dust. It will take only a few generations for you to be completely forgotten within your own family.

When I was 22 years old, my father unexpectedly died. He was 64, and one Sunday afternoon he sat down to a meal at a local pub and on finishing his beer, fell over dead of a heart attack. He had been waiting there for me to meet him. That this was the last thing he ever did has always given me the only comfort there was to find in his death. He would never have tolerated becoming infirm and old. He took a drink and then took his leave, and it was so traumatizing for the bartender who’d poured it for him that he later turned up, welcome, at the funeral.

My father’s death was the fissure that ruptured the foundations of my life

This was and remains the single most catalyzing event of my life. My father’s death was the fissure that ruptured the foundations of my life after which everything was forcibly rearranged and wholly reconfigured. Even now it is there. Our griefs never really go away, they live inside of us always, waiting to be stirred, unbidden.

What transhumanism seeks to offer isn’t new, but ancient: a way out of suffering. The only pain worse than our own is having to witness the pain of the people we care about. Perhaps life would be wonderful in ways we can’t envisage if no one we loved ever had to die, or become ill, or endure mental decline, or in any way leave us. If we ourselves never had to die, if we never had to let go of our lives. Maybe then we would ascend to a new plane of human existence exceeding all current imagining. Maybe it would be a paradise on Earth and beyond and we should do everything we can now to make it a reality, whatever the cost.

But transhumanism is at base about denial: the denial of the reality of our mortal life, and that it, along with the life of every other thing in the universe, will end; the denial of the realities of the planet we live on now, and the responsibility we shoulder in meaningfully changing how we manage the Earth’s resources. Transhumanism in effect passes the buck; it rests on a naïve hope that an all-powerful intelligence will come along and solve all of our problems in the future (if it doesn’t kill everyone), without us having to actively change anything about the way we live now.

Maybe you believe that a life lived free of loss and pain and grief would be a life lived in bad faith. That, to me, is where the trans of transhumanism would truly take us “across” to something other: we would become something other once we’d mastered an ability to never be in pain, to never have to sacrifice anything of ourselves, not once we had become immortal or machine. Once we never had to endure the difficult — sometimes brutally, almost unbearably so — parts of being alive, we would no longer be human.

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By Saturday Zoltan is exhausted and ready to get back home to his family, though he is also sad to be getting off the road and admits that a large factor driving his campaign is the excuse it provides him to run away a little from his life. “Not that I don’t love my family, I do. Very much,” he says leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms. “It’s just fun to do this stuff, you know?” The road reminds Zoltan of who he was when he was younger, called by the whims of adventure.

“You want to be provocative, to make people think and make them a little upset.”

Roen heads back home, but in a few weeks time he’ll meet back up with Zoltan when they collect the Immortality Bus from People Unlimited’s parking lot and continue on across the country. Alexey is off to San Fransisco for a spell before coming back to Scottsdale to attend Alcor’s annual cryonics conference. After that, it’s back to Moscow to ruminate yet more on existential risks.

Looking back over the week while draining a scotch in the hotel lobby, Zoltan deems the campaign leg an overall huge success, though, not everything is going so smoothly. One of his advisors, Natasha Vita-More, has quit over some of Zoltan’s ways of doing things: he’d written an inflammatory piece about how transhumanism renders the pope irrelevant, which upset a great number of people.

“You want to be provocative, to make people think and make them a little upset. That’s how you build a brand, it’s how you get attention,” Zoltan says, convinced that all attention is good. “It works!”

Zoltan knows that he has no chance whatsoever of becoming president in 2016. His campaign is really about trying to get people to accept some incredibly strange ideas, to be a roving provocateur. When I ask if it’s more important to be president or to live forever, he says, “Becoming immortal is way, way more important. No question.”

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Which is just as well, because things get worse once Zoltan gets back home. The ever-roiling tensions and disagreements within transhumanism come to a head when a petition is launched, signed by several prominent figureheads including Max More, Natasha Vita-More, and Hank Pellissier (previously Zoltan’s party secretary), calling for Zoltan to be disendorsed as the Transhumanist Party presidential candidate. They are concerned about Zoltan’s management style, worrying that he has designs on becoming a dictator and is otherwise damaging transhumanism’s image with his freewheeling coffin bus.

He puts the revolt down to being the new kid on the block

Zoltan is trying to be sanguine about this when we speak a couple of weeks later, but he’s clearly bummed out. He puts the revolt down to what always happens to all new kids on the block: the olds yell at them to get off their lawn. “They’re mad because I’m new, and maybe they aren’t going to have all the power anymore.”

I ask Zoltan about his wife Lisa and how she feels about all these strange ideas and his big ambitions. He says that she is most concerned with their everyday, with getting their very young daughters to school on time, on not letting them be even two minutes late. Zoltan sometimes feels this is missing the much larger point. “If my campaign works out, then we could become an important political family. And if this goes right then we could change eternity,” Zoltan says, his sights already set on the 2024 election and beyond.

Zoltan connects me with Lisa, who works as an OBGYN and seems extremely level-headed. Because I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with Zoltan’s hyperkinetic energy every single day, I have to ask. Lisa says that she is supportive of his career even if she isn’t entirely on board with some of Zoltan’s more out-there ideas. But that never stopped her from falling in love with him.

This happened in a way that will strike you as either entirely pragmatic or deeply calculating: Zoltan always wanted to get married and have children and when he began to feel the window was closing, he jumped on Match.com with a set of specific traits he was looking for: a woman who was also an MD. He wanted to find someone smart and committed and extremely together who would offset his more immature tendencies. Someone who wanted to work as part of a team. Lisa fit the bill.

“Zoltan is an all or nothing person.”

Zoltan prizes working well together above love as the most important factor in two people making it for the long haul; love, he says, had broken his heart too many times before. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t love Lisa, he does, deeply, which worked out well. Just that to him, letting something as potent and irrational as love alone dictate the entire direction of your life made no practicable sense.

“Zoltan is an all or nothing person,” Lisa says. “He only ever does something if he really believes in it.” Did he wait a certain length of time to divulge his wishes to be a machine or any of the other parts of his very odd philosophy?

“I knew from the very beginning. I think he probably gave a monologue about transhumanism and told me all of the things about it right away,” she laughs. “For most people who haven’t heard much about it, it can be a bit much to take it all in all at once.”

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Lisa thinks of Zoltan as a deeply rational person, that if he’s spent so many years thinking about transhumanism, then its ideas must have a foundation of sense. She herself doesn’t want to live forever, but would like to extend the number of productive and healthy years of her life. And as a doctor, Lisa is very interested in whatever breakthroughs might come from transhumanism’s push for biomedical research.

“I think if you asked most people if they want to live forever their answer would be no,” she says. “But if you asked them if they wanted to live a longer, healthier, better life, their answer would probably be yes.”

Then I ask Zoltan Istvan — a man who has had several brushes with death, is attracted to dangerous places and weird ideas and wild pursuits; is a husband, father to two very young children, a self-made millionaire, a lapsed Catholic son; a man who would be president, a cyborg, an artificial intelligence, a machine — what he fears most in the world.

“In my reporting,” he says after an uncharacteristically long pause, “I’ve seen dead people. And when that happens it changes something in your brain, you know they are really gone. You see it. You understand it. If you believe in an afterlife, then that’s fine. But if you don’t, like me, then the emptiness and the void is so apparent there is no backing away from it. Unless you concoct some kind of fairytale…” Zoltan Istvan says. “I’m afraid of losing my meaning.”