Praise for Adam Leith Gollner

An epic quest to understand the nature of immortality . . . [Gollner] leaves no fountain of youth untested, no faith unexamined, and no pseudoscience unquestioned. . . . An engrossing, immensely fascinating tour of beliefs.Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Adam Leith Gollner possesses a talent as rare and exotic as a coconut pearl. Lustrous and exhilarating The talents of a food writer, investigative journalist, poet, travel writer and humorist grafted onto one unusual specimen. Long may he thrive.Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review One of the most surprising, and satisfying, reads of the year.Washington Times Enough historical facts, horticultural wonders and real-life adventures to fill a thousand and one summer nights with delightful reading.Miami Herald A series of surprises, made delicious by a writers skill.Dallas Morning News

Introduction

The Nature of Immortality

It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify?

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Spring

Because they believed in nothing, they were ready to believe anything.

Lucian Boia, Forever Young

Its not something tangible we can point to, see, or demonstrate. It resides in thought but not in reality. Immortality is an abstract concept that helps us make sense of death. The idea emerged from our fear of dying, from the sense that life must go on in some way. Immortality means nonmortality, undeath, never-ending existence in this world or some other. It is the permanent absence of death. It entails evading or outliving the end. But that cant be done, or at least we cant prove that it can be done. No examples of anything immortal have ever been found by science. There are just visions, tales, hopes, fears, and maybe some inferential cognizers. In most definitions, immortality occurs after death. The unending perseverance of a mind or a soul following the decay of the physical body is spiritual immortality. The basic premise of this cosmology is simple: we die but our soul (or some other part) doesnt. Just as our flesh must necessarily decay, our spirit or intellect or entelechy returns to the primordial source. An energy or force within us outlives its mortal container, ending up in the afterlife or hurled back into rebirth. 5

mmorta lit y doesn t actua lly e x ist.

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Spiritual immortality is a narrative of numberless incarnations, from eternal sanctification to damnation to reincarnation. The very word immortality conceals infinite possibilities. Its a one-word poem. It can mean whatever we want it to mean, whatever we believe it to mean. In recent years, the idea of the indefinite persistence of an undying material body has captivated us. But physical immortality is also a mythology. It, too, helps followers cope with an uncertain world, just as a Christian uses the idea of redemption. We tend to imagine that these are secular times. The facts suggest otherwise. Belief in posthumous immortality is very much alive today. Data collected by the General Social Surveys show that 80 percent of Americans believe in life after death. The figures are around 70 percent in Canada, 65 percent in Australia, 60 percent in the UK, and above 50 percent throughout much of Europe. According to the World Values Survey, close to 100 percent of those surveyed in parts of the Middle East believe in the afterlife. Not exactly a faithless world. For those of us who dont believe in immortality, we can either dismiss it or contemplate it. Either way, its not something we can resolve. Immortality is a matter of belief, not fact. Like death, immortality is something we dance with. But theres no denying the existence of death. We can believe we wont die, but dying is ineluctable, devastating, real. Every single day around two hundred thousand people die worldwide. There are two deaths every second. Six people just died. Make that eight. Ten. It can happen to anybody at any time, and yet exposure to death profoundly bothers our mind precisely because we cant understand it. Death is whats called a meaning threat. When confronted with the incomprehensiblesuch as losing a loved oneour mind scrambles to find another pattern that alleviates the confusion. For some, its enough to say, Theyre gone. Others have such an urgent need to escape feelings of meaninglessness that they create alternate, more coherent plausibilities, such as myths about immortality. Grief forces us to have an opinion about the end. Imagining that everlasting life exists is a common reaction. We tell ourselves the loved one is somewhere else now, somewhere better. To make sense of insensateness, we wrap ourselves in beliefs. Were all apprentice magicians trying to master the trick that transforms loss into understanding.

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Thoughts of eternal life shuttle between the terminals of knowledge and belief. There are things we can know and things we cant know. The knowables are gathered into knowledge. We deal with everything else through belief. Science is our means of exploring all that can be known; belief is how we approach that which cannot be known. Beliefs allow the brain to assert truths when lacking material evidence. Death tells us nothing knowable, only that we are currently alive and that our bodies wont last forever. As a result, psychologists claim were all frightened of dying, but it isnt simply anticipatory worry; its the not knowing that bothers us, the lack of control. What we want is something that doesnt exist: resolution. Because patternlessness cannot be borne, the brain represses thoughts of its eventual extinction. Its impossible to understand what it would be like to have no more thoughts. We have a central incapacity, a bug built into the operating system: our consciousness cannot imagine a lack of consciousness. Trying to imagine our own death is like trying to think thought. We cannot do it. Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness, and you will see the impossibility of it, wrote Unamuno. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive ourselves as not existing. Nonexistence is nonconceivable. The brain conceptualizes things as being somehow similar to other conceivable things, so we compare death to life, minus the bodywhich is why we imagine that our consciousness (whatever that is) will outlive us. All our fantasies of stymieing the inevitable stem from an inability to grasp the fact of finality.

Consider what would happen if certain species did not die. They would simply keep on breeding and accumulating. In the time it takes to read this sentence, several hundred million ants will have been born across the planet. It would take a single tiny bacterium mere hours to generate a mass equivalent to that of a human childand there are countless billions of bacteria within a hundred-foot radius of everyone. Imagine if they could live forever? In less than two days, the entire surface of the earth would be covered in great smelly dunes of prettily colored bacteria, explains zoologist Lyall Watson. Left similarly unhindered, a protozoan could achieve the same end in forty days; a house fly would need four years; a rat eight years; a clover plant eleven years; and it would take almost a century for us to be overwhelmed by elephants. We can thank death for the fact

Introduction

that our atmosphere isnt clogged with hedgehogs all the way to the ozone layer. Like everything else in nature, were all terminal cases. The oldest person who ever lived whose true age could officially be verified died at 122 in 1997. (She only gave up smoking at 119.) From the dawn of the Homo genus up to the 1800s, the majority could expect to live for approximately twenty-five to forty years. Largely due to basic realizations about hygiene, life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century and a half. Some demographers argue that life spans have attained their utmost and are starting to decrease slightly. Others disagree, suggesting that 125 is a reasonable target for baby boomers. Most scientists maintain that human life has a maximum expiry date, but immortalists speak of Plastic Omega (omega being the end of life, and plastic being malleable). As of 2013, all parties can anticipate living somewhere between seventy to ninety years unless an accident, disease, or disaster strikesor immortality becomes reality. Intriguing, genuine discoveries are being made in the field of gerontological studies. Scientists have dramatically increased the life spans of simple organisms such as yeast, roundworms, fruit flies, even mice. So far, those breakthroughs havent yielded human applications. But even if we learned to cure every major disease, to resolve every cause listed on death certificates, some biologists argue, wed still only add ten or fifteen years to human life expectancy. Research being made on a genetic level could eventually prove beneficial to our health span. Even so, death will become us. Theres an important distinction between medicine and miracle work: miracles prevent death; medicine counteracts illness. The main aim of mainstream medicine is prolonging health, and contemporary doctors know more about keeping people alive than ever before. That doesnt mean we can make people stop dying. The average Westerner only gets eighty years, not eighty trillion. And theres a price to pay for extended life: the degenerative diseases of senescence. Our bodies arent supposed to live forever, which is why they have built-in obsolescence mechanisms. Longevity is starkly different from immortality, yet somehow the two have fused in public consciousness. Most of us will live longer than our ancestors did, but all of us can still die at any moment. Spurred on by our gains in life expectancy, a pandemic of magical thinking about sciences unlimited capabilities has led to a wider discussion about the possibility of eternal life. Prime-time TV specials with titles like Can We Live Forever?

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fuel the mass delusion. Every year more conferences pop up purporting to reveal the latest means of attaining eternity through technology. Immortality Only 20 Years Away, blare newspaper headlines. Philanthropic organizations (the Immortality Institute, the Methuselah Foundation, the Fuck Death Foundation) are joining together to eliminate death. There are people living today who may extend their life spans indefinitely, declare salesmen, triangulating faith, biology, and magic into a unified worldview. This confusion has led to an alarming increase in the availability of untested antiaging remedies over the past two decades. Countless products are presently being sold as having life-extending qualities, even though there arent any demonstrable means of increasing human life. No treatments have been proven to slow or reverse the aging process, announced the National Institute on Aging in 2009, trying to staunch the hype. Contrasting the claims made by life-extension companies with the genuine science of aging, fifty-two scientists signed a Position Statement on longevity that clarified the situation explicitly: no currently marketed interventionnonehas yet been able to stop or even affect human aging. The prospect of humans living forever is as unlikely today as it has always been, they wrote, and discussions of such an impossible scenario have no place in a scientific discourse.

The dominant mythology of triumphalist scientism is the idea of progress. For the most part, we dont question the idea that everything is constantly getting better and better and better. Its just the way things are, we tell ourselves. Were so close to perfection. And progress necessarily leads somewhere: to a world in which were all immortal. A solid belief system is one we dont realize is a belief system. Because sciences veritable achievements are so impressive, almost everybody today believes in the unidirectional march of progress. Technology is unceasingly propelling us forward, and science has become synonymous with progress, so it becomes easy to imagine that life everlasting is around the corner. We take it for granted that suffering can be eliminated, that poverty will ultimately be eradicated, that we should never be sick again, that science will soon make everybody never die. The illusion of continual betterment is a pervasive enough mythology that it can overlook the environmental crises, the scale of warfare, and the fact that over a billion people live on less than $1 per day.

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Is progress even real? Microchips certainly get smaller and processing speeds faster, but not everything has progressed over the past centuries. Have our emotions changed since Shakespeares time? Since Sophocless time? Are we moving toward a time of universal happiness? Genocide is not an anachronism. Neither is inequality. Is progress a law of history, or is it a story we tell ourselves? In 1869, the avant-garde writer Comte de Lautramont published Les Chants de Maldoror, a book exploring the spiritual crisis brought on by scientific progress. In it, he characterized immortality as the terrifying problem that humanity has not yet solved. A century and a half later, were still nowhere close to solving it. Although our congenital belief in progress means were more ready than ever before to believe in physical immortality, misinformed lifeextension stories have been around for millennia. Theres nothing new about bearded hustlers such as Aubrey de Grey vowing to help us live forever and cryonicists who claim to have cured death itself. Theyre all tapping into a longing that has always been with us. Yellowing medical journals are filled with stories about how the great alchemical dream, the Elixir of Life, seems almost ready to be bottled. Following World War II, the personal goal of attaining immortality moved from religious aspiration to actual possibility. In 1966, biophysicists at the California Institute of Technology wrote, We know of no intrinsic limits to the life span. In the 1970s, a group of molecular biologists and gerontologists mobilized as the Immortalist Underground. In 2010, a special issue of Time magazine about longevity announced that elixirs of youth sound fanciful, but the first crude anti-aging drugs may not be so far away. Were drowning in misinformation. How-to books such as Why Die? A Beginners Guide to Living Forever and Young Again! How to Reverse the Aging Process and Physical Immortality: The Science of Everlasting Life each outline various ways to defeat reality by harnessing miracles of technology. Finding such miracles is abundantly easy, especially online. Searching immortality device wanted leads to a site called www.achieveimmortality.com that claims to own US patent number 5,989,178 for the most imporatnt [sic] invention in human history, a gear-based magnetic pinkie ring that ALLOWS HUMANS TO STAY PHYSICALLY YOUNG FOREVER. Entire subcultures of enthusiasts are dedicated to deathlessness. There are bloggers with a passion to create an environment where all sickness,

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aging and death are eliminated. There are amateur philosophers who argue that everyone is bodily immortal until proven otherwise. Facebook Transhumanists list their religious views as the abolition of suffering. They end posts with the movements abbreviation: H+, as in human plus. Superlongevist manifestos confidently assert that we can all live for hundreds of years, that the eventuality of a modern Fountain of Youth is nigh.

It is utterly ordinary to not want to die. But, as Dame Edith Sitwell once wrote, ordinariness carried to a high degree of perfection is precisely the definition of eccentricity. In her view, eccentricity entails some rigid, and even splendid, attitude of Death, some exaggeration of the attitudes common to Life. As she concluded, theres something askew about people who dont understand they will dieor that they are actually dead, in the case of cryonicists buried upside down in frozen thermoses, five per container, wrapped in sleeping bags, awaiting reanimation. Eccentrics really, really dont want to die. Caloric restrictors, sun gazers, nightwalkers, potion peddlers, cybernetic Nostradamus-types, and outright charlatans: the immortality community boasts a plethora of unorthodox individuals. Most noneccentrics consider physical immortality a nonsensical fantasy, but physical immortalists dont care. Theyre convinced that science will soon unlock the codes that regulate aging. In their hunger to live forever, or at least to confirm their bias that science can solve all problems, theyre so willing to put their critical faculties on hold. I am not personally interested in living forever, but I am interested in writing about people obsessed with the impossible. Nonfiction writers are characteristswe look for characters living real stories. Perhaps not unexpectedly, people who want to never die may appear unsavory: a hint of the corpse hangs about them, a whiff of swamp yawn. Those seeking endless physical existence are undoubtedly peculiar, but theres also something profoundly human about them. More than human, they would say. Human after all might be more accurate. We all believe. A belief is a relationship, something we fall into or grow up with; we can cherish it, desert it, stay loyal or cheat. A peculiarity of all belief systems is that those in the throes of belief do not see themselves as believers, but rather as those who know the Trutheven though the Truth cannot be known. We can view ourselves as believers

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or as nonbelievers. Its a personal choice. Either way, we all dont understand death. So whatever anyone sees death as is what it is. Building palisades of belief is what we do when we cant understand something that has no provable explanation. When it is impossible to know something with any certitude, we turn to belief to feel like we know. Beliefs are mirages that provide the illusion of certainty. Unlike a fact, a belief can persist even when disproved. To this day, belief precedes knowledge. Before we can know whether something is true or not, first we have to perceive or experience it, and then believe or disbelieve it. All scientific tests begin as beliefs before becoming testable hypothesesbut once we come up against the limits of the knowable, we either turn back to rational ground or take a leap into faith. Examining our own base assumptions invariably means realizing that some things we take as knowable facts are simply beliefs. We may find it hard to distinguish between what we believe and what we know. Weve classified ourselves as the species that knows: sapiens. But there is so much we dont know, that we cant know. We believe that we know; thats all. Homo credulis would be more accurate. We all believe, and we all need mythologies. As Einstein brokered it, Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. In his view, nonbelievers dont realize how many unattainable secrets surround us. Einstein tended to be more critical toward debunkers than those of faith. The fanatical atheists, he wrote, are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. He espoused an approach of humility, rather than one of hubris. Just as religious zealots deserve to acknowledge the truths of science, rabid unbelievers could benefit from recognizing the limitlessness of the unknown. We are pattern seekers. And so-called nonbelievers, like the devout of any denomination, are simply doing what humans have always done: they are looking for meaning. The conviction that disbelief is a preferable alternative to religious belief has, paradoxically, transformed atheism into a religion. It isnt very organized, but it is a system of thought based on a relationship with the unknowable. And any story purporting to explain death is an indication of faith. Approximately 5 to 10 percent of Americans dont believe in God. Somewhere between 0.7 and 2 percent of Americans define themselves as atheists. The central tenets of atheism are that humans have no soul, that

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God doesnt exist, and that nothing happens after death. None of these are provable or disprovabletheyre matters of belief. Calling atheism a belief system is anathema to atheists, who insist that their position is one of no beliefs whatsoever. But they do believe. They believe they know what death means, just like others. And they also have key texts, prophets, myths. They attend atheist gatherings, where they can feel that sense of belonging and community others find in traditional churches, temples, or places of meditation. As with traditional believers, they insist things would improve if everyone adhered to their view. Merely talking about belief can be particularly emotional for those who think they understand that the way for the world to be perfect is to dispense with belief. This position stems from a fundamental misapprehension of what belief actually is, and is itself a means of imposing ones own belief system on others. I tell such people that I respect all belief systems (including theirs) as long as nobodys getting hurt. Then again, I hasten to add, Im the sort of centrist who believes that intelligence and faith can coexistand who also believes that conflict is neverending. Such conversations are akin to discussing abortion rights with evangelical Christians. But just because something is difficult to talk about doesnt mean we shouldnt talk about it. Quite the opposite. Atheists arent the only nonbelievers. A large percentage of that unbelieving 5 to 10 percent identify themselves as nothing in particular. Others are agnostics, or undecided. Agnosticism was defined by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1869 as a way to neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man. But being noncommittal does not exempt a person from the need to believe. Even those agnostics who would remove themselves from any position are nonetheless eventually forced into a belief-officiated relationship with death. Whether we take out billboard advertisements calling for religions to be dispensed with or whether we protest the teaching of evolution in schools, its as erroneous to assume scientific theories are the literal Truth as it is to imagine that a religious text contains accurate history. Both methodologies are thought games, tools that allow us to contend with a universe whose ultimate nature will always elude us. An ingrained certainty about eternal life helps many people function, including physical immortalists, even though thanatologists (the technical term for those who advocate an acceptance of the inevitable) think thanatophobes are delusional. Conversely, prolongevists deride deathists as pessimistic pushovers. As a physician, Carl Gustav Jung

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once said, I am convinced that it is hygienic to discover in death a goal toward which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal. But physical immortalists are convinced that human beings think too much about death rather than too little; that we have all been too accepting of deathand that such a viewpoint is self-defeating, serving to perpetuate death. Their fondest hope is to render thanatology obsolete. Attempts to do justice to both sides of the argument rapidly spiral into meaninglessness, which is as it should be: beliefs are illogical. Demonstrable evidence has no place in belief. Regarding death, the only certain thing is uncertainty.

My own inquiries into the topic of immortality began on a fog-enshrouded fall night in London. There to research the history of labyrinths, I had spent the afternoon walking Hampton Courts seventeenth-century hedged maze. The train back to town passed a dilapidated brick brewery with a story-high sign saying take courage. In my hotel room, jotting down some observations about the silvery mirror Id come across at the center of the labyrinth, I fell asleep on the couch, an overstuffed, royalblue antique. Shortly before dawn, I was startled from my slumber by an unsettling, beauteous dream of the fountain at the source of all life. The liquid gushing forth resembled water mixed with mercury. Its droplets crystallized into a blindingly radiant sea of diamonds. The fountains location wasnt specified, and the rest of the dream is hazy, but the image of a crescendo of water bursting into the sky stayed with me. Turgenev spoke of his stories beginning as visions hovering before his eyes, soliciting him. The apparitions that inspired his writing, he said, often seemed to embody the complexities of existence, intricacies he couldnt yet understand, subjects he could only arrive at by completing his story. I didnt know what the fountain was, let alone what it represented, but the dream had an urgency, as though it were a demand, more than a clue, something to pursue. In the end, the dream became the start of a story. Philip Roth, when beginning a book, would always ask himself, If this book were a dream, it would be a dream of what? I felt the reverse. If this dream were a book, I wondered, it would be a book of what? There was only one answer: a book of immortality.