The Selfish Ape by Nicholas P. Money

Author:Nicholas P. Money [Money, Nicholas P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789141832
Google: pU6gDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2019-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

ΔS = δQ/T

where ΔS = change in entropy, δQ = heat transfer and T = temperature. This dictates that, sooner rather than later, our warmth will be transferred (δQ) into the environment and we will not be detectable from the background temperature (T). Hold an old-style thermometer and watch the mercury rise; put the thermometer on a table and watch the mercury fall. ‘I am alive—I guess’, wrote Emily Dickinson.10 In his last months, the writer Christopher Hitchens described his entropic sensation of ‘dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water’.11

Above the grave, our bodies are islands of orderly molecules cast within a cooling universe. Entropy is evident from the accumulation of errors in gene expression, as well as in the incessant damage caused by viruses and a plethora of environmental poisons.12 This is why the maximum lifespan is never likely to creep more than months beyond the purported record of 122 years and that few of us will enjoy more than 33,000 days. We live longer than most animals with backbones, including an Australian fish that wraps up the whole business in two months, but we fall short of the Greenland shark that may live beyond its 300th birthday.13 If we bring invertebrates into the comparison, we may feel further elevated by the demise of a nematode worm after only three days of wriggling, and disheartened by an Icelandic clam that persists in its clamminess for more than 500 years.14

Encouraged by sharks and clams, devotees of life extension embrace hormone replacement therapies, vitamins, enzymes, antiviral drugs, fish oils, plant extracts and dried mushrooms. Traditional Chinese medicine is replete with miracle cures for mortality that come at the expense of endangered species, yet no amount of powdered rhinoceros horn or pangolin scales keeps anyone from the grave. With similar vanity, the Californian fetish of deep-freezing heads seems as likely to work as removing organs from a corpse, wrapping it in linen strips and stowing it in a pyramid. Even the most enthusiastic backers of this gelid pursuit seem sceptical about the outcome, because none of them elect to have their head submerged in liquid nitrogen before they are dead.

The fear of the process of dying is more reasonable, perhaps, than the fear of its aftermath. Everyone would prefer to sidestep a painful death, and even when expiration is embraced as a relief from pain most feel sad when they think about missing the amusements of the future. The Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher Lucretius offered some hope with his cheerful insistence on the symmetry between being unborn and being dead, reminding us that we have spent a great stretch of time in the former state already.15 This is all very well, but modern pharaohs pursue reincarnation with all of the vigour of ancient royalty and place their faith in an in silico persistence after their brains are uploaded to computers. Feasibility studies on the pseudoscience of Whole Brain Emulation suggest that each brain requires a computer with one petabyte of memory (1015 or one quadrillion bytes).

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