A Few Ways to Live Forever

Headlines announcing that humans have maybe kinda sorta solved the "problem" of aging may be hyperbole, but I've got good news for you.

Painting by me. (Buying art supplies is cheaper than subscribing to Getty Images.)

Author’s note: If you want to get to the point of any Screensick article faster, skip to the end. Each of these little missives is structured like a river winding toward the sea, so if you want to skip the journey and jump straight in for a swim, scroll to the bottom.

Let’s do a little math proof. If life is A, and death is B, and wherever there’s an A there has to be a B, but when A thinks about B it wants to B itself so it pretends B doesn’t exist, leaving B to shuffle along behind A unspeaking, until one day A is going about its signifying, minding its own business, when bam! the long-tethered-but-silent B snaps, and is like “A YOU LITTLE BASTARD, ACKNOWLEDGE ME!!!! YOU CAN’T EXIST WITHOUT ME!!!! I AM REAL” And then A is like “La La La I can’t hear you, B, you’re a figment of my imagination,” when suddenly an equals symbol shows up and starts running toward them and B is like “YES WE WILL FINALLY BE ONE” and A is like “NOOOOOOO!!!! I’M AN EQUATION THAT DOESNT WANT TO BE SOLVED,” but it’s too late, the equals symbol tackles them both, then A + B = the human condition.

Look,I never got very far in math. There’s probably a name for when a positive and a negative are forever stuck together, negating but also enabling the other, but I have no idea what it is, so let’s just call it MORTALITY.

This month, a bunch of headlines have claimed that a cure for aging (mortality’s frequent collaborator) is right around the corner. It isn’t. But, there are some amazing discoveries being made about how and why our cells degrade over time and what can be done to delay or even reverse that process, and these discoveries could lead to medications in the future. For an overview, check out this fabulous piece in National Geographic, which surveys a lot of the promising research, and correctly makes clear in the first paragraphs that it is currently being done in mice, which is super cool and important but the history of drug discovery is one of learning the lesson repeatedly that what works on a mouse doesnt necessarilly work for the tax-paying great ape.

If we think of aging like a steam roller moving over a line of jelly beans (the jelly beans are your cells and the steam roller is time) then you can think of the latest discoveries like an armor thrown over some of the jelly beans, protecting them from getting squished. Does this stop the steam roller? Does this give you more jelly beans? No. But hey, this is legitimately cool and maybe those few jelly beans staying plump means your neck wont sag and your brain wont atrophy quite so fast and that, well, that’s cool. But the jelly beans are still laid on a track named MORTALITY, over which all the little As run with their Bs shadowing behind.

Mortality has been on my mind ever since I realized there was a B shadowing me and every other A I knew, but for most of my experience being an A I’ve been able to ignore it. Becoming a mother changed that.

As any mother will tell you, holding a part of your body outside of yourself and watching it slowly unfurl and smooth out and expand and think up ideas is an exercise in confronting the B of death every day. Time, as they say, is a bitch,

Your own death becomes something you must acknowledge as you stay awake to keep from rolling over and suffocating your baby, as you drive carefully through the rain knowing if you crash the little A you made and will either be quickly devoured by its own B or at the very least will be so corrupted and corroded by your absence that it will beg its B to come and take it.

Sorry for the AB thing. I’ll stop.

Once Huxley was born I began having an intrusive thought which was an image of me slumped dead against a concrete wall, my rigid limbs stiff with death still holding him against my breast, and him, unaware that I am gone, still suckling the milk that will soon spoil in my flesh.

You know, light-hearted mom shit like that.

Good news: we made it through the scary nursing stage — me and Hux and me and Asa — and that vision stopped and I went back to ignoring the B of death for the most part.

Bad news: Your children will figure out mortality exists and then they’ll ask you all sorts of nonstop questions about it. At this point you’ll be asked to explain the unexplainable, to make palatable the terrible, to justify something humans have found unjustifiable since we first turned around and saw that hulking B looming over us. (I said I would stop but I lied, sorry.)

I have, as you might imagine, about a bazillion thoughts on this, and some of them I have been organizing into an outline for a book, and others I’ve been scrawling in random notebooks that I leave in the bottom of random bags and will never see again. But today I wanted to share some basic observations about this whole ~situation~:

1. Death is a fact.

2. Humans know this fact, but do not want it to be true.

3. The gap between hoping for eternity and knowing about mortality has birthed religion, philosophy, and an undimmable hope that perhaps magic is real.

4. The hope for magic has led humans to seek holy grails and wishing wells and eternal springs and snake oils and conspiracy theories.

   

   How could you not buy the snake oil this handsome man is selling?!?!?!?!!?!

5. It has also driven science, for even though there is no evidence of there ever being an A that didn’t need a B, human ingenuity has, over the course of our existence, done the impossible many times before: We harnessed fire. We figured out how to safely remove babies from mother’s wombs using a scalpel and mostly not killing the mother in the process. We cured polio. We made metal whales fly. We sent our voices across space and time. And so even rationalists who know every A has a B seek to find a REAL WAY to cut the tether. That’s what the new space race to cure death is trying to do.

6. The current quest to detach death from life takes the form of massive institutes paid for by billionaires developing medicines those billionaires hope will allow them to do the one thing they haven’t be able to yet: slay death. It involves animal testing and frozen chambers into which brains will be placed until a future when the currently impossible becomes possible.

7. All of this is fascinating, and I hope you are interested in it enough to read a whole book about it one day soon, but the fact remains that RIGHT NOW IN THIS SPECIOUS PRESENT, death has not been cured. And even if we cure aging, which I seriously hope we do, that won’t prevent your unnaturally young cells from getting run over by a bus.

But I have some good news! There are already ways to live forever. SURPRISE!!!!!

Some Real Ways to Live Forever

1. Procreate (and cross your fingers that your progeny keep going)

2. Scrape an image into a cave wall. You’ll want to do some basic research about the tectonic plate situation below the cavern.

3. Compose a song so good that people sing it for millennia

4. Live in infamy.

5. Deposit your DNA into a bacterium that you bury in a hot part of the ocean where it will be fed by undersea volcanoes and grow and grow, replicating inside every generation of that bacteria for eternity, a copy of a copy of a copy of you, ad infinitum.

6. Embed your DNA into the seed of a redwood tree and plant yourself inside Muir woods and hope the tree-huggers persist.

7. Find a tardigrade, feed it your blood, then shoot it to space.

8. Embed your DNA into the CRISPR system of a phage and then bury it deep in the permafrost in Siberia and invest in fighting climate change.

9. Do something so toxic to the planet that every subsequent generation of life on Earth has to adjust its genetic code to deal with you, thus indelibly imprinting yourself in the negative space of all living things and being eternally annoying

Ugh, I can’t think of a 10th. You got any???

Happy weekend, loves. Thank you for reading.