Many believe we must die; it is part of our birthright and carbon-based heritage. It is what we do as organic life forms. We die. That is that; that is human. Immortality, or greatly extended life spans, is a thing of fantasy fiction, only reserved for vampires and their undead brethren.
People have condemned the idea of life extension not only from a place of reason or evidence but because the concept clashes with their theological convictions or code of ethics. For them, life extension is “unnatural.”
People who subscribe to such convictions of guaranteed death are “mortal absolutists.” They believe in death's “absolute” certainty and claim we must not fight against it. We must succumb. These folks have written books like David Livingstone’s polemical anti-extropian book: “Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Most of these books, like Livingstone’s, are anti-scientific and technophobic and could stall vital research.
For instance, over the last few decades, we have made inroads towards combating ageing and fighting critical diseases such as cancer, circulatory disease, and autoimmune conditions. These advances spell a bright future for “regenerative medicine.” The University of Pittsburgh defines the concept:
Regenerative medicine seeks to replace tissue or organs that have been damaged by age, disease, trauma, or congenital issues, vs. the current clinical strategy that focuses primarily on treating the symptoms. The tools used to realize these outcomes are tissue engineering, cellular therapies, and medical devices and artificial organs.
Staving Off Entropy
With advancing knowledge of regenerative medicine, we can now ask: Will we always have to die? Is death via heat decay built into our species as an entropic principle?
Cybernetics thinkers like Norbert Weiner and ilk have discussed life and its entropic nature. All matter in the universe breaks down over a long enough timeline. That is generally true for most things. Entropy is a reality. But we also know the first law of thermodynamics exists: total energy in a closed system is neither lost nor gained — it is only transformed. Yet, even if energy is only changed, this transformation includes the death of organic matter.
Thus, we may never stave off entropy in totality as a grand plan (we may not even want to for various reasons). But we can considerably slow it down in biological systems using a variety of advancements in science. So, where entropy may kill us, it does not have to kill us soon.
Is it possible to live decades longer or even slouch toward immortality?
The Immortal Worm and Chimeric Sorcery
Let me provide an example of an “anti-entropic” living creature from the work of synthetic biologist Michael Levin. He and his team focus on the planarian flatworm. What is unique about this little worm? First, they are genetically more like us than earthworms. They contain an actual brain and nervous system.
More excitingly, these worms are functionally immortal. They don't die of natural causes. They are one of the most evolved known regenerators on the planet. If you cut its head off, the head will grow a new body and the body a new head. Levin points out that one scientist is known to have cut a planarian into 275 different pieces. And each of those pieces spawned a new worm. This means these worms alive today are ancient. Today’s worm is yesterday’s and tomorrow's worm, ad infinitum.
The planaria story hints that ageing and death do not automatically have to occur in biological systems, at least not conventionally. Some people think because we are carbon-based or organic, we must die.
This isn't true for the planarian species; entropy is not business as usual. The problem, of course, is that humans are different from the planaria. We are not natural regenerators. The most regenerative organ in our bodies is the liver, which does regenerate — but as anyone who has an alcoholic in the family can say, there is only so much beating a liver can take. It will falter and eventually kill the person.
Even though we are unlike planaria, we can tap into their tricks, perhaps download the cheat codes for quasi-eternal life.
If they are immortal, that tells us that immortality as a concept is not against the laws of physics. In theory, we should be able to unveil the planaria’s secrets. Dr. Levin and his team have been studying these worms and have begun to shed light on the details. Dr Levin states that the secrets to longevity may not lie in the worm’s DNA, as many would expect. Their DNA is a pile of junk because it stretches back through time to their original form — which collects all the DNA from past incarnations through their cumulative regenerative process.
Dr. Levin and his team have learned that the worms' cells use bioelectricity or the collective bioelectrical network to regenerate. The team knows this because they have actively intervened in the electrical signaling. They used a drug intervention that changes the electrical pattern of the worm's cells. By changing this pattern, they learned they could control the worm’s cells and tell them what tissues to build. To boil the point down, the secret to the worm's regenerative processes likely lies in its electrical cell network.
In the paper, “Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and the bioengineering of chimeric and synthetic organisms,” Dr. Levin says of the planaria:
For hundreds of millions of years, these animals have accumulated mutations and are even mixoploid; different cells within one animal can have different numbers of chromosomes. And despite this messy genome, they are champions of regeneration, building the correct body from even small fragments with very high anatomical fidelity (Saló et al., 2009); each piece of a cut planarian produces a perfect little worm. We have no models in developmental genetics that would predict that the highest fidelity of anatomical outcomes would be associated with genetic diversity that rivals any tumour. Indeed, planarian lines can even be made permanently two headed by manipulating the bioelectric circuit that stores head number (Oviedo et al., 2010; Durant et al., 2017), resulting in permanent ‘strains’ of animals whose cells continue to build worms with a different anatomical body plan from the genomic default.
Paradigm Shift
Dr Levin has worked to see if his team can exploit this electrical signaling in other animals, especially mammals. They conducted experiments on frogs and tadpoles as well. They told the cells of the tadpole to grow a new tadpole tail; the cells obeyed. They said the frog's cells to develop a new frog leg; the cells also followed. These experiments prove that bioelectrical messaging seems to act like the cellular "software" that functions as a way of programming cells to build things: tissues, organs, limbs, and whole bodies. The cell’s electrical systems make them malleable learners. They are susceptible to a kind of electro-pharmaceutical behavioral conditioning.
Some people may not grasp the scope of this research right away. Dr. Levin's work not only represents a sea change regarding our understanding of bioelectricity in cell organization. It ushers in a paradigm shift in the biological sciences. Many biologists and other scientists do not believe cells harbor intelligence or "have goals" as a collective. The reality is that evolution has exploited electricity and physics to store and encode goals (maybe even memories) within collectives of cells.
In retrospect, some of these ideas seem obvious. We have known for a long time that human consciousness and thought are in some way based on the electro-chemical activity and patterns within and between neurons in the brain.
The Logic of Ageing; Cellular Senescence
So, what does all of this mean for gerontology and issues around ageing?
It means that if the logic of bioelectricity stays true for mammals as it does for Planaria, tadpoles, and frogs, one day — sooner than later — we should be able to program human cell collectives to heal bodies and regenerate limbs and organs.
It sounds like science fiction, right?
For most people, it will sound like fiction. Still, the ability to tap into these bioelectrical circuits within cells and harness their collective intelligence could mean a significant breakthrough in understanding and reversing ageing. We should eventually be able to tell the cells in our bodies to kill senescent cells — or perhaps spur them back to life.
One aspect of why we age is that our older cells become “senescent.” They turn into “zombies” that do not perform their jobs. It now looks feasible to overcome cell senescence. We may even be able to tell our cells to regenerate an organ from within the body. This particular scenario negates the need for donors or even for the production of synthetic organs.
Bioelectrical Code and Anatomical Compilers
Of course, there are many unknowns and unknown unknowns within the fields of synthetic biology and bioelectricity.
Our knowledge of mammalian electrical networks is just beginning, primarily due to molecular biologists and other medical fields focusing on the "hardware": the genetic material, proteins, metabolic pathways, etc.
The reality is that focusing on bioelectricity and its ramifications will allow us to generate cures for diseases by manipulating the cell "software" in bioelectrical signaling and patterning. Dr. Levin says we will eventually create a class of "electroceutical" drugs to change cell circuitry as a marching order for the cell networks. This will be done without perturbing the cell at the “hardware” level.
There are many other vectors from which we are starting our journey towards tackling ageing. Still, the advancements on the fringes of bioelectricity can do so much good for regenerative medicine.
If this research pans out without too many hiccups (there are always some), we could have cracked the "bioelectrical code" of life within 30 years. If we do this, regenerative medicine will have reached a pinnacle in Dr. Levin's idea of the anatomical compiler.
This is a device that is not merely a bio 3D printer. Instead, it is more like a computer-bio-organism interface, where a bioengineer can sit down and combine AI and logic to tell a group of cells what to build or regenerate a tissue or organ. The applications for this use case also exist outside of medicine, but that is beyond this scope.
As a parting note, there are ethical considerations and existential risks to weigh with these technologies. Still, the positive outweighs the negative regarding their impact on regenerative medicine. More people will begin to wake up from their “mortal absolutism” as we carve out a new path toward longer or even indefinite life.
The advent of this technology is a eugenicists worst nightmare. Population control would be impossible. There are many such technologies and fields of study across the board of human endeavour, least of all free energy, and these advances are coveted by the ruling class, who are alarmed at our increasing numbers awakening to their con, as it is. People who live longer figure things out eventually and civilisation collapse is ripe to happen, even now.
30 years? But I want it NOW. 🤣