Free Immortality by Stephen Cave Page B

long-gone golden age, but in the future. The scientific version of the Staying Alive Narrative therefore looks forward for inspiration, believing it is there that the Mount of the Immortals is to be found—and that the route to it is called “progress.”
    The success of civilization comes from breaking down the problems that humans face and solving them one by one, using specialized tools and learned skills—so, for example, agriculture solves the problem of hunger, medicine of disease. We can see
progress
in these terms: as the breaking down of civilization’s problems into ever-smaller parts so as to provide ever-better and more specialized solutions. Once we lived in huts, but now we (in the developed world) have houses with air-conditioning and central heating; separate rooms for washing and cooking; and correspondingly complex property laws, building regulations and the like. Whereas in simpler societies, the problem of shelter was solved with a basic roof over one’s head, in developed countries houses address countless specific needs and eventualities.
    In the past few centuries this form of progress has reached new heights through the effects of science and engineering. Science advances by systematically dividing and subdividing the world in the hope of achieving the fullest possible account of nature’s laws; engineering, broadly conceived, puts this newly won knowledge to work in solving our problems. The result is new forms of travel and communication, new drugs and prostheses—all the luxuries and benefits of the modern world. Material progress consists of exactly these engineering solutions, ever more specialized, solving ever-more-specific problems.
    But one way or another, lurking behind all the problems we attempt to solve—disease, hunger, cold—is death. The possibility that they may kill us is what makes all these problems so problematic. Progress, therefore, means that we are better at diagnosing death’s many modes of attack and developing sophisticated defenses to fend them off. The most comprehensive of the surviving ancient Egyptian medical papyruses, for example, contains an impressive seven hundred afflictions and remedies, but the World Health Organization today recognizes over twelve thousand diseases—and counting. Ever-finer distinctions help us to make ever-finer treatments.
    The scientific approach to the problem of death is therefore to break it down into increasingly specific elements and tackle them one by one. This piecemeal problem-solving strategy defines the modern narrative of how we might succeed in staying alive. I will call it the
Engineering Approach
to immortality. It provides both a story we can tell ourselves to assuage the fear of dying and also a genuine source of innovation that really is increasing life expectancy.
    T HE Engineering Approach begins with an insight neatly summarized by Linus Pauling—that “life is a relationship between molecules.” Pauling firmly believed that humans and other living things are made of the very same stuff as stones, sea and sand, and obey the same laws. This is now the accepted view in the scientific community,but it was only a few centuries old—and still controversial—when Pauling expressed it in 1962.
    The great majority of traditional belief systems and religions have assumed that life requires some kind of vital spark to ignite it. Usually this magic stuff is a gift from God or gods; it might be equated with the soul or spirit, like the Egyptian
ka
; and it separates absolutely the living from the nonliving—men from mud, birds from rocks. But the pioneering philosophers and early scientists of the Enlightenment challenged this view, arguing that living things were natural phenomena, obeying the same rules that governed all matter. By careful study, they argued, we could understand those rules.
    To the founders of the scientific method, from René Descartes to Nicolas de Condorcet, man was a machine. Therefore just as