Death Is Overrated Apparently

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Good evening, and welcome. Today we're discussing longevity escape velocity, the idea that medicine might one day add more than a year of life expectancy for every year that passes, so that dying becomes, in principle, optional.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: With me are Pastor Cole, Boomer Bill, and Prepper Paul. Pastor, is living forever a gift or a temptation?

Pastor Cole: Well, Doctor, I'd say any gift can turn into a temptation if we grab it without humility. I'm all for healing folks and giving grandma more good years. It's the notion that we can outrun the Good Lord's calendar that gives me pause.

Boomer Bill: Nobody's outrunning anything. I'm seventy-four and my knee can't outrun a mailman.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Bill, would you take the treatment if it were offered?

Boomer Bill: Does it come with a pension?

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I'm not certain it does.

Boomer Bill: Then no. You live to three hundred, who's paying for it? Not Social Security, I'll tell you that.

Prepper Paul: Okay, but think about the supply chain. Immortals need food, and the food comes by truck, and the trucks come by grid, and the grid goes down in one solar flare. I've got four hundred pounds of rice buried. I'm just saying, if people live forever, so does the grid problem.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Paul, I think that's a slightly different question from the one I asked.

Prepper Paul: Is it, though? Is it really?

Pastor Cole: Now, Paul, I appreciate the rice. But Doctor, let me say what troubles me most. If this is only for the wealthy, we've built a heaven you buy a ticket to.

Boomer Bill: There it is. Rich guys get forever, the rest of us get a casserole at the funeral.

Pastor Cole: Bill, I believe that's the first time we've agreed on something in nine years.

Boomer Bill: Don't get used to it.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Let's stay on that. Paul, is there a fairness problem here, or will the technology become cheap like most technology does?

Prepper Paul: Cheap? Sure, until the day it isn't. Then the guys with the clinics have the bunkers, and the guys with the bunkers have the clinics. I've seen the blueprints. Well, I've seen a blueprint. Of a different thing.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I see. Pastor, history does suggest that expensive medicine tends to get cheaper. Does that ease your worry?

Pastor Cole: Some. Penicillin was a rich man's miracle once. But there's a stretch in between where folks suffer while the world catches up, and the Scriptures have plenty to say about that stretch.

Boomer Bill: Stretch in between. That's what they said about cell phones. Now my grandson can't look up at a sunset.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Bill, I'm not sure the sunset is relevant to the cost curve.

Boomer Bill: Everything's relevant to the sunset.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Moving on. Another objection is turnover. If nobody retires and nobody dies, who makes room for the young?

Boomer Bill: I'll tell you who. Nobody. Same guy runs the union hall for two hundred years. I know that guy. I voted against that guy.

Pastor Cole: There's a real wisdom in generations, Doctor. A child watches an old man pass his tools to a younger one, and that's how love gets handed along. If no one ever hands anything off, I fear we'd all just be holding on.

Prepper Paul: Handing off is key. That's why I've got a will, a backup will, and a will in a coffee can in a place I won't say on the air.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Thank you, Paul. Though a moment ago you were concerned about immortality.

Prepper Paul: I'm concerned about everything. It's efficient.

Pastor Cole: Doctor, may I push back on myself a little? I've sat at a lot of bedsides. When a young mother is dying, I can't stand here and tell her death is a blessing. If science can give her forty more years, I'd call that grace with a lab coat on.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: That's a notable distinction, Pastor. So you accept curing disease but hesitate at removing death entirely?

Pastor Cole: I do, and I'll admit the line is blurry. I can't tell you the day that stops being medicine and starts being Babel.

Boomer Bill: Line's at a hundred and ten. Anything after that, you're showing off.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: That is a surprisingly specific figure, Bill.

Boomer Bill: I read it somewhere. Probably.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: What about meaning? Many philosophers argue that a finite life gives choices their weight. Does forever make everything cheap?

Pastor Cole: I think there's truth there. A sermon matters because Sunday ends. A Thanksgiving dinner matters because someone at the table won't be there next year.

Boomer Bill: Thanksgiving's already too long.

Pastor Cole: Bill.

Boomer Bill: Fine, it's a good point. My brother Walt's chair is empty and that's why I call him on his birthday. Dead birthday. Still call.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: That's rather touching, Bill.

Boomer Bill: Don't make it a thing.

Prepper Paul: See, I look at it differently. If you live forever, the odds of hitting a disaster go to a hundred percent. Meteor, pandemic, zombie, whatever. Eventually it gets you. So you'd need to be ready for all of them. Forever. That's a lot of rice.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: That is, oddly, a fair statistical point, Paul. Even an ageless person is only as durable as the next accident.

Prepper Paul: Thank you! Finally somebody gets it.

Pastor Cole: And that, Doctor, is its own sort of mercy. Even the immortal would learn to hold tomorrow loosely.

Boomer Bill: Or just never leave the house. I'd never leave the house. I mean, more than now.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Let's turn to resources. If people stop dying, does the planet fill up? Bill?

Boomer Bill: Of course it fills up. Where are they parking? You think the guy at the DMV has gotten faster in forty years? Imagine him at four hundred.

Prepper Paul: There's a plan for that, by the way. Underground cities. I'm not allowed to say where.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Pastor, is population a moral problem or a logistical one?

Pastor Cole: Both, I'd say. Folks who live longer might have fewer children, as we see already. But I'd be wary of anyone who says some lives are worth less so the numbers come out right. That road has never ended at a good place.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: A fair caution. Bill, you looked as if you wished to respond.

Boomer Bill: Just that in my day, you got old, you moved to Florida, and you left the good parking spots. That was the deal.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: A social contract of sorts.

Boomer Bill: The only one that worked.

Prepper Paul: In Florida they have hurricanes. Which, hey, I have thoughts about.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I'm sure you do, Paul. Briefly.

Prepper Paul: Generators. Two kinds. Always two kinds.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Thank you. Now, a harder question. Suppose the treatment existed and was free and safe. Would it be wrong to refuse it, or wrong to take it? Pastor?

Pastor Cole: Wrong to take it? No, I don't believe so. I'd say it's wrong to take it as an escape from love, or from the poor, or from the thought that we'll answer for how we lived. If it makes you more generous with all that time, hallelujah. If it makes you a hoarder of years, well, that's an old sin in a new coat.

Boomer Bill: Hoarder of years. I like that. Put it on a mug.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Paul, would you take it?

Prepper Paul: Depends who's holding the syringe. And where it was manufactured. And what else is in it. And whether they've got my address.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: So, a qualified yes.

Prepper Paul: A qualified I'll-get-back-to-you-from-a-secure-location.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: Bill, your final answer?

Boomer Bill: I'd take it if my wife took it. Fifty-one years. I'm not breaking in somebody new.

Pastor Cole: Well, now, that's about the best argument for long life I've heard all evening.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: I rather agree, Pastor. It seems the question isn't only whether we can live forever, but whom we would want to live it with, and who gets left at the door.

Boomer Bill: And who's parking where.

Dr. Penelope Hartwell: And who's parking where. Thank you all. This has been a conversation about time, and I'm told we've run out of it, which feels appropriate. Goodnight.