Everyone wants to live as long as possible, right? Well, maybe not everyone.
Someone confided in me that their nightmare was they wouldn’t die; they would never get respite from an existence that terrified them, depressed them, hurt them, disappointed and discouraged them; that humiliated them, abused them; that made them wish they were never born.
Another friend confessed she wished she had never been born because she was afraid to die. Certainty of death made living not worth the trouble. Anxiety about end of life robbed her of joy. She found she was unable to kick back and relax because dark angels circled just outside her field of vision. One day, she was certain, those angels would pounce. Her end would be brutal.
I remember hearing a story about a young mother who lay dying while her family knelt at her bedside. A scene of sweet-sorrow unfolded as the woman struggled to breathe in the presence of loved-ones. A worried husband, anxious toddlers, her parents, and a few close friends sang hymns to reassure and cast comfort. They clung to one another united by the belief that God would carry momma gently to heaven in his caring arms.
Momma didn’t experience death that way. She bolted up, away from her pillow. She stared wild-eyed at something behind her visitors; something no one saw.
She screamed. No! No! No!
Momma dropped off the bed, slammed to the floor, and rolled onto her back making a loud crack — like a toppled refrigerator. She stared at the ceiling, face frozen, eyes open; crazed, except now she lay dead, too heavy for anyone to move.
Some people love life and don’t want to leave. I remember Steve McQueen, an actor from yesteryear who had everything to live for. He was a happy race-car enthusiast, leading man in movies, ruggedly handsome, kind, and grateful for every blessing his wonderful life showered on him.
Cancer struck. Stateside doctors said he had no chance. Death was certain. He traveled to Mexico to find a cancer recovery center he learned about from friends.
I remember hearing him weep during a radio interview because, he said, the medical director saved his life. He thanked doctors again and again. He couldn’t say enough. I felt touched. He loved life; his gratitude seemed to resonate with the voices of angels. I would have gladly traded places with him.
Two days later, newspapers & television news reported he died. What went through his mind when he finally understood his life wasn’t going to turn out the way he hoped?
For people who seek death, death is easy to find — if they have courage to face what comes after; if pain of living exceeds risk of non-existence, or being reborn as someone new, or maybe falling into Hell or whatever alternative they imagine for the pain of life. Relief is as close as a closeted gun, the nearest bridge, that lonely bottle of medicine beckoning from the bathroom cabinet.
I feel bad for people who have been ruined, I do. Far more people kill themselves than are killed by others. No one believes it, but it’s true.
I don’t want to dwell on the ruined, because another class of people — a smaller group, I sometimes wonder — want to live.
These are folks who never suffer depression, experience major illness, spend time in hospital or prison, lose a child or spouse, worry about the sparkle of a crooked tooth or the part in their radiant hair. They don’t worry about lack of symmetry that renders others unattractive — or about getting their way in life, because they always do.
I want to talk about powerful, beautiful, effective people who everyone seems to want to be. I want to talk about happy people like Steve McQueen who will always chase a fantasy, because they want to live in the worst, most desperate way.
I want to talk about people who freeze themselves hoping that a benevolent future will permit them to be thawed, and life will continue. I want to talk about people who take 150 pills a day to prevent every ailment and protect every sinew.
I want to talk about brilliant, optimistic people who believe if they just figure things out right, life awaits them as long as they want. It’s up to them. They will make life last, achieve eternal success, because they always have.
Time for reality check?
Maybe reveal some truth? — shocking, perhaps, for some? Why not predict our futures — all our futures — as separate individuals with private lives, and as a species anthropologists describe with Latin words, homo sapiens, (smart folks), which they use to differentiate you & me from other living things we barely notice or think about.
Let’s defend our reputation among the kingdoms of the animals and plants. Consider best case scenarios for survival and figure whether we can make our dreams come true.
One stat easily verified: two-thirds of all deaths are not caused by aging.
Let’s move on.
Who wants to start with species survival? What about life spans?
Most folks want to know how to live longer, right? People want to know how long they will live when everything is set right.
So, why not start with a best-case scenario for individuals?
Here are some simple, best-case-scenario assumptions:
Assume disease is eradicated. We reach a state under protections of Obamacare (or maybe Trump-Care, who knows?) where no one dies in hospital anymore; all diseases have cures and can be prevented; in fact, disease is eliminated from the face of the earth — no bacterial or viral infections; no malevolent genes gone haywire; no Alzheimer’s or mental impairments; no more skin rashes or herpes or warts or annoying ear-wax that morphs into septic brain infections.
Disease gone. Now take another step. Make a leap of faith. Assume that the genetics of aging is solved and no one grows old. No one deteriorates. Skin does not wrinkle; no more age spots or rotting teeth; loss of hair and muscle-mass becomes a thing of the past. Aches, pains, constipation, diarrhea & acid reflux — what be them? They gone!
Our long medical nightmare is over, to paraphrase the words of President Gerald Ford on the night he pardoned Dick Nixon so that no prosecutor could ever charge and convict him for being a crook and throwing an election.
OK. What then become odds for our survival? How long can one person expect to live? I think everyone can see, there’s something we didn’t consider; something no one thought of, a missing piece in the puzzle of living-large that is going to leap up and grab each of us sooner or later — unless we live bundled by bubble-wrap in a bunker, miles below the surface of earth. We all know what it is, right?
It happens when we bike on a country road, and a candy-coking cell-talker in a Corvette runs us over. It happens when we climb Mount Everest (just to cross it off our bucket-list) and whoops! someone in the group forgot to tie their shoelaces. People see a video on the evening news — dead people buried in snow.
It happens when flying an airplane — a flock of geese smashes the windscreen. The pilot gets sucked out the opening — shredded by shards of glass.
We visit an amusement park to thrill ourselves on a ride that throws us upside down and — oops again! — an unscheduled stop; a mechanical malfunction. Two hours later, rescued, we’re vegetables. Homo sapiens don’t do well hanging upside down for long periods.
Yes, the one thing no one counts on is accidents.
Accidents kill a lot of people every single day. And nothing is going to change that fact unless people decide to live in virtual reality and never get off the couch to go outdoors or walk their dog.
What exactly are the statistics of accidents?
Well, every year one person in a thousand dies in a screw-up by somebody, usually themselves. It doesn’t sound like much, but for the person who dies it’s one death too many. Anyone who expects to live 25,000 years should perform a statistical analysis to see what the chances are they will live that long.
Why guess?
The way the math works is this: figure the chances of living deadly-accident-free for one year (it’s 999/1000), then multiply this number by itself for each year of life.
Save time by using the exponent key on a calculator to enter years, anyone who doesn’t want to spend a week multiplying the same number over and over 25,000 times. The result will give the chances for survival over a span of that many years. Try some other numbers to make comparisons.
The bottom line is this: no one has any realistic hope at all of living more than 10,000 years or so. Of the seven billion humans alive today, only one in 22,000 can expect to live to the age 10,000.
A mere 2,000 people out of 7,000,000,000 will survive to see year 15,000. There’s a small chance (one in ten) that a solitary person might make it to 25,000 years, but they will be an outlier; a statistical anomaly. Who wants to be an anomaly? Not me.
In most cases; under the most realistic scenarios, the chances are that everyone alive today is going to be dead at age 25,000 because of accidents alone. They will die healthy though. It might be consolation for some.
No one will make it to year 25,000. That’s my bet. It’s not going to happen 90% of the time.
Accidents happen.
OK. Now that everybody knows that our individual situation is hopeless, what about the survival of our species — the human race (for those who disdain the scientific term, homo sapiens)?
Not sure why this video, but it’s pretty good, so let’s go with it.
I am sorry to report that the survival odds for our species are actually far worse than the odds of our survival as individuals. This depressing fact means we can ignore the individual survival scenario we just made so much effort to describe. If our species dies early, individuals die early too.
How can this terrible situation be possible? It seems unfair.
I’ve been reading the book Global Catastrophic Risks — a collection of essays edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic — first published nine years ago (in 2008) when species survival was more certain than it is now. These brilliant forecasters collected essays written by other forward-thinking eggheads who describe in delirious detail 13 or so existential threats to the survival of humans. Some might want to review the list.
1 – Systems-based risks and failures
2 – Super-volcanism
4 – Supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, and cosmic rays
5 – Climate change
8 – Social collapse
9 – Nuclear War
10 – Nuclear Terrorism
11 – Biotechnology
12 – Nanotechnology
13 – Totalitarianism
The authors argue that certain threat scenarios will create an inevitable cascade of events that lead to civilization melt-down, a kill-strike on the species human. I assigned a 1 in 10,000 chance to each of these 13 catastrophes and crunched the numbers to understand how much danger people might be facing.
What I discovered scared me.
For one thing, it’s not possible to know if 1 in 10,000 is an optimistic or pessimistic assessment of each of these risks. Nuclear war might be 1 in 100; climate change — 1 in 50; asteroids — 1 in 50,000; supernovae — 1 in 100,000,000; artificial intelligence — 1 in 10.
Who knows?
Can humans survive 10,000 years without a pandemic or nuclear war? No one knows.
Experts resort to heuristics, which erupt from biases even they don’t know they carry. I suppose a gut-check by an expert has more validity than a seat-of-the-pants guess by a pontificator. Will give you that. But irony is regardless who’s right, no one will know because we are all going to die.
Evidence in fossil & genetic record shows at least three human-like species have come and gone during the past several 100,000 years or so, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Extinction of intelligent, human-like species happens more often than not — 3 out of 4 times, maybe more if scientists continue to dig and find.
Number-crunching stats above shows humans have no more than 1 in 4 chance to avoid extinction during the next 1,000 years. Our chance to survive approaches zero as the number of years reaches into the realm of 5,000 years and beyond.
Humans have recorded their stories for 5,000 years. Some call these stories, history. Sometime during the next 5,000 years, history will end unless humans lower the odds of these catastrophes to much less than 1 in 10,000.
We are truly stupid — dumber than earthworms — to refuse to make the effort to increase our survival prospects by lowering these probabilities, these ratios, to one-in-one-hundred-thousand or better still, one-in-a-million or even better, one-in-one-hundred million. Why not one-in-a-gazillion?
How? It’s the big question.
Reducing odds of catastrophe is the most important thing. It’s urgent. Failure seals our fate.
We search the heavens. No one seems to be broadcasting out there. Maybe it’s something simple like Miyake events, which some argue make communication infrastructure near stars impossible to sustain.
What science hears is silence… and tiny chirps, yes, but not from crickets.
Doomsday clocks?
They’re ticking.
Billy Lee
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