Longevity: a solution rather than a problem

It is becoming increasingly common to encounter thinly disguised views that old people are a burden on the young and healthy.

 As the sanctity of life is attacked by philosophical materialists, as life spans in the world increase, as people feel it is their ‘right’ to have an enjoyable life, and as the cost of caring for the elderly grows, how long before it becomes respectable to talk about encouraging people to terminate their lives when they feel themselves to be a liability, so that anyone refusing to take this option is put under ‘moral’ pressure to do so?

From the little I understand of modern molecular biology and medical science the possibility of very long life spans is by no means a fantasy. I even heard of one group at Cambridge seriously proclaiming a target longevity of 1000 years. The progress in understanding structure and function of biological life is also allowing people to stay active, mentally and physically, to within a short time from death.

Why is this a problem? If we can continue to learn, to enjoy our existence, to cherish and help others, why should we not prolong our earthly existence? (I see this as using the gift of science that God has given us to make Earth as much like heaven as possible – ‘Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven’, although this is incidental to our spiritual mission, if indeed the spiritual can be separated from the material.)

There are two obvious questions concerning the wisdom of increasing life span, even supposing we could stay well right up to the end.

• Population growth.  The population would grow even faster than it is already and become unsustainable. The earth’s ecosystem would collapse.

• Stagnation. New ways of living and evolving depend on the death of each generation. As the recently departed  Steve Jobs observed, death makes way for new life.

But do these problems necessarily follow from longevity?

Population would not necessarily grow.  Should small families become associated with longer lifespan (voluntarily, there is no other way) the population would fall dramatically. A one-child limit for the rest of this century would reduce China’s population to one tenth of its present 1.4 billion by the year 2100 (EconomistOnline, 2 August 2011). However, the limit must be voluntary if humanity is to be retained.

A life measured in centuries could be richer culturally, deeper spiritually and more pleasurable. There would be less tendency to live in a frenetic, consumption-driven, wealth-seeking, pleasure-obsessed way.  Such a change in values and life style looks likely to be forced on us anyway -by environmental  pressures and resource shortages. In the future it could be that art, music, writing, craftsmanship, anthropology, archaeology, antiques, sport, walking, travel, space exploration, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, science, mathematics, engineering, agriculture and innumerable other endeavours could occupy us, rather than consumption and wealth generation, according to our strengths and interests.

Technology could remove the drudgery. Such unpleasant work as remained beyond the capabilities of robots could be done for a short part of one’s life on a citizen’s rota basis. With a life expectancy of 300 years and drudgery removed there would be abundant time

The second danger – stagnation – need not occur either. Why should death always be needed for progress? With individuals living much longer and more healthily and having all the advantages of modern technology to enhance learning and communication, they may well be able to achieve  innovation to a degree not hitherto possible. The diversity of concepts that could be assimilated by the brain in a human lifetime would be so much larger and this could lead to more fusion of diverse ideas into totally new ones with who knows what consequences for technology and the progress of science.

The big question here is what would drive such a society forward? If pursuit of wealth became irrelevant because all material needs could be so easily secured and if accumulation of wealth above a certain level came to be widely regarded as pointless, I suppose people would be driven by curiosity or a sense of achievement or a need for adventure  – e.g. expeditions to other planets could provide all three. Probably the human weakness of status-seeking would remain common.

Overall, then, increased lifespans  could be part of a move to a lower energy, less polluting and more fulfilling way of life, and a whole universe rich with multilayered and fractal mystery to explore.

In my novel 2077 AD people have the option of Life Extension to 300 years and this naturally leads to the need for a natural successor to the nuclear family, one of which, the Kinship Circle, is proposed merely as a possibility to provoke discussion.

As always, this Blog is also to provoke discussion, so please come back to me if you have anything to say.

John

Author, 2077 AD

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

The coming paradigm shifts in science

Occasionally through history there have been very deep, far-ranging changes in our models of reality, reflecting a combination of inspiration,  creativity, technical ability and hard work by philosophers, scientists, priests, artists, musicians, poets and story tellers,  all driven by an unrelenting quest for truth.

As a follower of science across the spectrum, mainly through popular magazines, web-sites and broadcasts, and therefore not having any special authority, it looks like our widely accepted views on the universe and how it works are about to change fundamentally. Not necessarily this year, though it's possible, but in the next few decades, and when it happens it will have a big impact on the whole culture and perception of reality by the West, if not by most of the world.

It could also lead to great technological innovations – e.g. understanding the atomic nucleus led to developments ranging from radiotherapy to nuclear bombs; discovering that germs spread by reproduction rather than spontaneous creation led to huge medical developments. There are thousands of examples.

Three fields basic to our view of the universe are cosmology, physics and biological evolution. In each of these a new awareness is emerging. Partly from new observations and partly from a gradual breaking down of old prejudices. (I have not provided links – there are too many to choose from and they can be distracting when reading an overview like this.)

• COSMOLOGY – only a couple of decades ago it was thought we were close to understanding the whole picture. Now it is accepted that some 95% of the energy in the observable universe is of inexplicable origin, comprising mostly the dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate but also vast amounts of dark matter. (Mass m can be expressed in energy units if you divide the energy by the square of the speed of light c) There are also a plethora of rival, and largely untestable, cosmological models ranging from the multiverse to a holographic universe.

• ELEMENTARY PARTICLE PHYSICS – even the matter we thought we understood is not behaving according to current models. The Standard Model, whose validity depends on the existence of the Higgs Boson (the ‘god particle’ which confers mass on the whole range of elementary particles) may well not be there. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) team may be making an announcement soon. Supersymmetry has also been thrown into doubt by recent observations. We will have to wait for a final official result– it is a painstaking and time consuming process eliminating errors from the data. Note added April 2012: the Higgs Boson is now fairly certain to have been detected by 2 different methods and has a mass of about 125 GeV. Supersymmetry is the next big question - will we find supersymmetric equivalents to ordinary particles (e.g. selectrons matching electrons)?

• QUANTUM PHYSICS – entangled nanometric particles (e.g. pairs of photons emitted from the same atom), even when light years apart, affect each other instantaneously. This is not a cranky idea – it is mainstream peer-reviewed physics. The implications are colossal. It means that time and space are non-existent in certain situations. Events seconds ago, or billions of years ago, can affect an event here and now. How many particles are entangled? Bearing in mind that, according to the Big Bang model the whole universe came from the same point in space-time, could it be that the whole universe is entangled and interconnected independently of time? There is no consensus on this.

• EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY – (NB: the above type of instantaneous action of one entangled particle on another has nothing to do with relativity. It does not involve particles travelling at all but reflects how reality is constructed.) We are all taught that no object is able to exceed the speed of light but CERN physicists may have found one – a neutrino – travelling very slightly faster than light. The whole physics world waits with baited breath. The neutrino is not massless, like a photon of light, so according to Einstein’s equation it would have had infinite mass when it reached the speed of light and then have become ‘imaginary’ in the mathematical sense as it passed the light speed barrier. Yet we would have known about it, so if the neutrino did exceed the speed of light there must be something wrong with the equation. Note added in April 2012: the exceeding of the speed of light by a neutrino in a vacuum was found to be apparent only. Experimental error was responsible.

• TREE OF LIFE – this concept introduced by Darwin is revered by neo-Darwinists who still think life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming multiple branches as new forms of life mutated into existence. It now looks untenable. It is more likely that species have acquired beneficial traits by Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) from each other, not by passing on traits genetically down the generations. Instead, viruses cut out a DNA sequence from one life form, the sequence which encodes the trait in question, find another species and insert the sequence into the appropriate position within its DNA, thereby conferring on it the desired trait once the genes in the DNA are switched on.  Leading molecular biologists are converging on this idea as the evidence mounts. Interbreeding between animal species is more common than thought previously and this can also cause HGT.

• EVOLUTIONARY CONVERGENCE– the idea that chance mutations + natural selection cause new species to form is looking increasingly shaky because there have been innumerable cases of the same traits evolving several times over in different species (e.g. swallows and swifts have evolved similar survival solutions independently yet are genetically different species). Personally I wonder if the trait evolves only once and is then passed on to other species by HGT. Either way the Darwinian tree of life model is undermined.

• BACTERIAL EVOLUTION – the standard explanation has been that bacteria randomly mutate and  accidentally evolve new traits in response to threats like antibiotics. It now appears that the rate of mutation, and probably the type of mutation, adapts to the stresses which the bacteria encounter, in contradiction to neo-Darwinist dogma.

• INFORMATION GENERATION – information within a genome cannot be increased by random mutations plus natural selection. E.g. fruit flies were subject to mutations over 30 years and not a single beneficial trait evolved.  It would be like various Windows operating systems evolving by random code changes. The neo-Darwinists (who seem to be the only authority on evolution accepted by the media) are reluctant to admit this. The nearest to beneficial traits being achieved is within a species (microevolution, such as various forms of beak in finches, matching the seeds available) and in this case the coding is moved from one place in the genome to another, not created by chance.

• EPIGENETICS– against all previous dogma it appears that when one generation acquires a characteristic reflecting its environment this characteristic can be passed on genetically to future generations. There is even some evidence that learned behaviour can be passed on. The genes themselves don’t change but the switches in the future generations turn on the appropriate parts of the genetic sequence.

• JUNK DNA – it is not junk. No one is sure what it is but it’s definitely not junk. This term was used to describe most of the DNA in the human genome because no-one knew what it was for. Now it is becoming clear that it has a definite role.

• ENVIRONMENT INFLUENCES GENE EXPRESSION– the environment actually switches on some parts of a gene that the organism needs to survive.

• MUTATIONS REPAIR THEMSELVES - In every human body millions of cells mutate every day and they repair themselves by editing their own DNA. No way is this a random process. Beneficial mutations are not repaired! Presumably the same happens with all 8 million species (I’m not a professional biologist so please correct me if I’m wrong).

• SELFISHNESS IS NOT SO GREAT– cooperation between species is rife, as the evolution of the biosphere as a single adaptive organism testifies.

There are many more unresolved problems of a fundamental nature. This fills me with joy. It means that the fragmented nature of science is beginning to be recognised and that since Truth is our mission, we are going in the right direction. Humanity can look forward to a new synthesis and a deeper, more inspiring engagement with nature.

Please use the comments facility below if you want to share comments with other readers or email me directly at cosmik.jo@gmail.com 

John

Author, 2077 AD

An appeal to atheists and young earthers - enjoy the mystery

What have atheists and young earthers got in common?

Certainty in the face of mystery.

The atheist believes in  philosophical materialism, assuming that nothing exists outside the space, time, matter and energy which we detect directly with the 5 senses or via technology (microscopes, particle detectors etc.) or via direct inference, and tries to explain our existence in basically two different ways (please correct me if I’m wrong):

1. The material world created itself out of existential nothingness.
2. The material world is infinite in time and space.

1 is obviously irrational but so is 2, since it appeals to the physically meaningless concept of infinity (e.g. infinity is always infinitely far away even when you have travelled an almost infinite way towards it – wherever that may be; or it is 1 divided by zero).

The young earth creationists believe that the Genesis account in the Holy Bible is a literal scientific account of events over six days, ending about 6000 years ago. Since it was inspired by God before humans had evolved a scientific framework in which to interpret it why would our Creator have tried to communicate a scientific description? The biblical account surely is to show the relationship between God and humankind. There are various accounts in Genesis which, taken literally, contradict each other. The author was no fool, so it can only have been intended to deep, sacred truths as a divine metaphor – and I believe this is how the original Jewish mystics saw it. Creationism, as the word is used in the USA, is a modern innovation.

So both atheists and young earthers are denying themselves access to the mystery of being – all is explicable in terms of a magic materialisation out of existential nothingness with no first cause, or it has existed for a meaningless period of time, or it was all created in one week by a rather parochial God and there is no need to look further into the cosmic drama or meditate on its existence.

Atheists persist in refusing to accept that there are signs of intelligent unfolding of events in the living world in the face of overwhelming evidence, lest this should be taken by young earthers to mean there is a God who absolves us from the need to apply our own intelligence to understand the world. Young earthers refuse to accept any evidence which contradicts the 6-day model of creation only 6000 years ago. (Question for young earthers: perhaps I’m being too dismissive – it may be only the evolutionary time scale and details of terrestrial life which differentiates you from the scientific mainstream. What about modern cosmology? Please let me know.)

I believe the universe was created by our Creator somehow, sometime, probably billions of years ago. Just how we will never know but I believe God wants us to keep exploring with open minds, to be curious and to enjoy the wonder, like children (‘the kingdom of heaven is given to such as these’, Matt 19:14). To think we know it all in any sense is a terrible conceit. 

So if you fall into either the atheist or the young earth camp please stop attacking each other.

Why not just keep quiet and enjoy the mystery of being ?

John

Author, 2077 AD


cosmik.jo@gmail.com