‘I have never stopped dancing, it simply has taken on different rhythms and steps. And we need to dance with our ideas, words and pen — which transhumanists do take seriously,’ she says. And why not? This is the sort of talk that transhumanists talk.
Aubrey de Grey sounds like an Oscar Wilde character and is, by coincidence, also obsessed with not ageing. This 49-year-old London-born/California-based ‘biogerontologist’ has the massive beard of the self-conscious eccentric – a massive beard that ironically makes him appear far older than he is, which seems a bit counterproductive to say the least. His foundation is called Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) and suggests that if we get rid of the things that people generally die of in old age, then we will not die.
‘There is a tendency to think there is some sort of inevitability about ageing,’ he says, correctly.
But humans could become one of those creatures who hardly age at all, like lobsters – only better. De Grey envisages a world of humans living for thousands of years, whose only cause of death is suicide or murder. And no-one shaves (not sure if that’s integral).
De Grey’s efforts have been partly funded by PayPal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel, a strongly right-wing libertarian and leading light among the so-called Paypal Mafia, a Silicon Valley clique of billionaires who got in early on creaming off a small amount of money from a great many Internet purchases and now love themselves and future-science possibly overmuch.
But why does de Grey want to live so long? Isn’t a standard life long enough anyway? In an interview with the Washington Post, de Grey proffered his reasons. ‘So many women. So much time.’
Hey ladies. Come and get it. Come and get some of beardy Aubrey! Don’t rush. He has all the time you need. Oh yeah. I’m a love train, baby. A beardy love train.
Let’s assume, though, that the transhumanists are right to some degree and technologies arrive that actually work in boosting human capacities. If some get boosted and not others, is that fair? Not really.
Many transhumanists might say they are not bothered about being fair. Life’s not fair, so what’s the point in even starting with that shit? But others are properly fearful of a divided future of the enhanced versus the non-enhanced leading to a rather regrettable enslavement/genocide scenario (or competing tribal subspecies perpetually battling for supremacy).
It goes without saying that the already moneyed will be first in the queue for any enhancements. So perhaps we should picture this future world as an insanely exclusive, insanely tribal club scene, with door staff checking out the size of your genetic wad: ‘Your legs are crap and your IQ’s piss and you’re not going to live for 120 years. You’re not coming in.’ And then they kill you.
Should we really be worried about this? Well, when asked what his greatest fear was for the future of humanity, Stephen Hawking replied: ‘It is over genetic engineering. It should soon be possible dramatically to increase the intelligence and life span of a few individuals. They and their offspring could become a master race. Evolution pays no regard to social justice. It was not fair on the Neanderthals they were replaced by modern humans.’
Remember, this guy was right about time.
Attack of the cloned neanderthals
Cloning humans might be the sexy side of genetics that gets in lots of Hollywood films, but it raises a whole host of thorny issues. What if your clone is more interesting than you? Is it okay to clone someone without their permission? And what if two clones took a shine to each other: should there be a lawful impediment to the two of them having a civil partnership?
There are also the moral issues. And the fact it’s fiendishly difficult. And illegal.
Animal cloning has been with us for years, of course. The breakthrough clone was Polly the Sheep. Yes: Polly the Sheep. Everyone knows about Dolly, but Polly, who followed soon after, was actually more significant, but was eclipsed by Dolly’s absurd fame.
Polly had human therapeutic protein genes inserted. So did Molly (yeah, there was a Molly; don’t mention Golli, everyone’s trying to move on from that whole debacle). So Polly had human genes, whereas headline-hogger Dolly the Sheep (named after Dolly Parton: FACT) was just a sheep. And a sickly one at that.
Dolly was born in July 1996 – and put down in 2003, at the age of six (half the normal lifespan of a sheep). She was suffering from a lung disease generally only common in much older sheep, and was obese, and had arthritis.
Some said this was because she was a clone (no shit); others said it was the strange circumstances of her upbringing, blaming the parents, in this case Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell of the Roslin Institute, the chaps who popped the DNA nucleus from the cell of an adult sheep into an egg cell. Yet others still said that she was a victim of her ‘celebrity lifestyle’, stressed out from all the photo opps and prodding.
I have to admit that I go quite strongly with the celebrity lifestyle theory. I knew Dolly a bit when she was on the scene and I can still recall her now, mired in her own sleaze and degradation, compromising hint-of-teat photos splashed all over Farming News, her phone hacked by the Independent …
… falling out of the back of taxis, laughing with the paparazzi even as they hungrily consumed her decline . . .
… those sex tapes …
… at the end, a Norma Desmond figure, hanging round the lab with the blinds drawn: ‘It’s just the test tubes that got small …’
So: they can clone sheep. Human cloning is still off the cards – illegal in all countries of the world. This, at least, is a line that shall not be crossed. Or is it? Geneva-based alien-loving sex cult The Raëlians claimed in 2002 that a cloned baby had been born to a Dutch lesbian couple the previous day, which led to headlines like CNN’s ‘Dutch lesbian gives birth to cloned baby’. But we should probably take the idea that Dutch lesbians have given birth to a cloned baby with a pinch of salt. (No, really.) 2
But cloning animals is cool, and seemingly involves a race to clone the animal with the weirdest name: the gaur (a type of ox), the mouflon (a rare sheep), and the banteng (a type of Japanese cattle) have all allegedly been cloned. It’s not impossible that they made those names up. That’s the sort of shit that scientists could easily get away with. ‘The, er, banteng? [snigger] It’s, uh … Japanese cattle from, uh, Japan … Honestly – I’ve got receipts.’
Meanwhile, scientists in Australia have been trying to clone a woolly mammoth from frozen DNA. Scientists have also seriously debated the ethics of cloning Neanderthals (who are not covered by the current laws banning human cloning).
Cloned Neanderthals hunting cloned woolly mammoths: this would definitely be an achievement of sorts. Wrong, clearly. But the sort of wrong you might pay good money to see.
It has also been mooted – technological leaps willing – that by approximating it from human and Neanderthal DNA, we might be able to recreate the DNA of the missing link betwixt ape and man and bring it to life. Then there’s the dodo – which, if they do bring it back, will mean binning the saying ‘dead as’, perhaps replacing it with ‘as fucked up as a brought back to life dodo’. And, of course, using what we know about particular dinosaur DNA to conjure up a ‘generalised dinosaur’. Bring that lot forth and we’ve got one hell of a swinging party. Jurassic Reindeer-Shark? Jurassic Park, more like.
So genetics could make the future one big mad menagerie of fucked-up shit. It’s also even suggested we could bring back dead poets, scientists and Elvis (it would certainly be a Comeback Special worthy of the name).
Then truly shall we be gods. Quite weird gods, pissing about doing pretty odd stuff to mice and mammoths. But gods nonetheless.