I
have not fully voiced this paradigm, but life extension is now
becoming feasible. It is even hinted at in the cultural data and
powerfully stated in the original colonizing report in Genesis. The
rate of understanding is accelerating and it is becoming reasonable
to expect this outcome.
Generally
though, we will chose our time of death and this will be generally in
the third century. Obviously that is a superior outcome to the
present dispensation.
This
curious fable makes the argument that it is time to invest heavily.
On the other hand, it is more correct to note that we are investing
heavily and completing our investigation of biology. There is no
need to direct this flow as it is already rushing down river. When
the answer becomes apparent it will then become real and common
place.
The
good news is that no one will need to be left out and we will
remember this world as barbaric.
The Fable of the
Dragon-Tyrant
Nick Bostrom
Journal of Medical
Ethics, 2005, Vol. 31, No. 5, pp 273-277
Once upon a time, the
planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than
the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales.
Its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an
incessant stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded
from humankind a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous
appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every
evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the
dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these
unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up
in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years
before eventually being consumed.
The misery inflicted
by the dragon-tyrant was incalculable. In addition to the ten
thousand who were gruesomely slaughtered each day, there were the
mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends that were
left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones.
Some people tried to
fight the dragon, but whether they were brave or foolish was
difficult to say. Priests and magicians called down curses, to no
avail. Warriors, armed with roaring courage and the best weapons the
smiths could produce, attacked it, but were incinerated by its fire
before coming close enough to strike. Chemists concocted toxic brews
and tricked the dragon into swallowing them, but the only apparent
effect was to further stimulate its appetite. The dragon’s claws,
jaws, and fire were so effective, its scaly armor so impregnable, and
its whole nature so robust, as to make it invincible to any human
assault.
Seeing that defeating
the tyrant was impossible, humans had no choice but to obey its
commands and pay the grisly tribute. The fatalities selected were
always elders. Although senior people were as vigorous and healthy as
the young, and sometimes wiser, the thinking was that they had at
least already enjoyed a few decades of life. The wealthy might gain a
brief reprieve by bribing the press gangs that came to fetch them;
but, by constitutional law, nobody, not even the king himself, could
put off their turn indefinitely.
Spiritual men sought
to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which
included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by
promising another life after death, a life that would be free from
the dragon-scourge. Other orators argued that the dragon has its
place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said
that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the
dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good
for the human species because it kept the population size down. To
what extent these arguments convinced the worried souls is not known.
Most people tried to cope by not thinking about the grim end that
awaited them.
For many centuries
this desperate state of affairs continued. Nobody kept count any
longer of the cumulative death toll, nor of the number of tears shed
by the bereft. Expectations had gradually adjusted and the
dragon-tyrant had become a fact of life. In view of the evident
futility of resistance, attempts to kill the dragon had ceased.
Instead, efforts now focused on placating it. While the dragon would
occasionally raid the cities, it was found that the punctual delivery
to the mountain of its quota of life reduced the frequency of these
incursions.
Knowing that their
turn to become dragon-fodder was always impending, people began
having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon for a
girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday. Couples often spawned
a dozen children. The human population was thus kept from shrinking,
and the dragon was kept from going hungry.
Over the course of
these centuries, the dragon, being well fed, slowly but steadily grew
bigger. It had become almost as large as the mountain on which it
lived. And its appetite had increased proportionately. Ten thousand
human bodies were no longer enough to fill its belly. It now demanded
eighty thousand, to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every
evening at the onset of dark.
What occupied the
king’s mind more than the deaths and the dragon itself was the
logistics of collecting and transporting so many people to the
mountain every day. This was not an easy task.
To facilitate the
process, the king had a railway track constructed: two straight lines
of glistening steel leading up to the dragon’s abode. Every twenty
minutes, a train would arrive at the mountain terminal crammed with
people, and would return empty. On moonlit nights, the passengers
traveling on this train, if there had been windows for them to stick
their heads out of, would have been able to see in front of them the
double silhouette of the dragon and the mountain, and two glowing red
eyes, like the beams from a pair of giant lighthouses, pointing the
way to annihilation.
Servants were employed
by the king in large numbers to administer the tribute. There were
registrars who kept track of whose turn it was to be sent. There were
people-collectors who would be dispatched in special carts to fetch
the designated people. Often traveling at breakneck speed, they would
rush their cargo either to a railway station or directly to the
mountain. There were clerks who administered the pensions paid to the
decimated families who were no longer able to support themselves.
There were comforters who would travel with the doomed on their way
to the dragon, trying to ease their anguish with spirits and drugs.
There was, moreover, a
cadre of dragonologists who studied how these logistic processes
could be made more efficient. Some dragonologists also conducted
studies of the dragon’s physiology and behavior, and collected
samples – its shed scales, the slime that drooled from its jaws,
its lost teeth, and its excrements, which were specked with fragments
of human bone. All these items were painstakingly annotated and
archived. The more the beast was understood, the more the general
perception of its invincibility was confirmed. Its black scales, in
particular, were harder than any material known to man, and there
seemed no way to make as much as a scratch in its armor.
To finance all these
activities, the king levied heavy taxes on his people. Dragon-related
expenditures, already accounting for one seventh of the economy, were
growing even faster than the dragon itself.
Humanity is a curious
species. Every once in a while, somebody gets a good idea. Others
copy the idea, adding to it their own improvements. Over time, many
wondrous tools and systems are developed. Some of these devices –
calculators, thermometers, microscopes, and the glass vials that the
chemists use to boil and distil liquids – serve to make it easier
to generate and try out new ideas, including ideas that expedite the
process of idea-generation.
Thus the great wheel
of invention, which had turned at an almost imperceptibly slow pace
in the older ages, gradually began to accelerate.
Sages predicted that a
day would come when technology would enable humans to fly and do many
other astonishing things. One of the sages, who was held in high
esteem by some of the other sages but whose eccentric manners had
made him a social outcast and recluse, went so far as to predict that
technology would eventually make it possible to build a contraption
that could kill the dragon-tyrant.
The king’s scholars,
however, dismissed these ideas. They said that humans were far too
heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers. And as for the
impossible notion that the dragon-tyrant could be killed, history
books recounted hundreds of attempts to do just that, not one of
which had been successful. “We all know that this man had some
irresponsible ideas,” a scholar of letters later wrote in his
obituary of the reclusive sage who had by then been sent off to be
devoured by the beast whose demise he had foretold, “but his
writings were quite entertaining and perhaps we should be grateful to
the dragon for making possible the interesting genre of
dragon-bashing literature which reveals so much about the culture of
angst!”
Meanwhile, the wheel
of invention kept turning. Mere decades later, humans did fly and
accomplished many other astonishing things.
A few iconoclastic
dragonologists began arguing for a new attack on the dragon-tyrant.
Killing the dragon would not be easy, they said, but if some material
could be invented that was harder than the dragon’s armor, and if
this material could be fashioned into some kind of projectile, then
maybe the feat would be possible. At first, the iconoclasts’ ideas
were rejected by their dragonologist peers on grounds that no known
material was harder than dragon scales. But after working on the
problem for many years, one of the iconoclasts succeeded in
demonstrating that a dragon scale could be pierced by an object made
of a certain composite material. Many dragonologists who had
previously been skeptical now joined the iconoclasts. Engineers
calculated that a huge projectile could be made of this material and
launched with sufficient force to penetrate the dragon’s armor.
However, the manufacture of the needed quantity of the composite
material would be expensive.
A group of several
eminent engineers and dragonologists sent a petition to the king
asking for funding to build the anti-dragon projectile. At time when
the petition was sent, the king was preoccupied with leading his army
into war against a tiger. The tiger had killed a farmer and
subsequently disappeared into the jungle. There was widespread fear
in the countryside that the tiger might come out and strike again.
The king had the jungle surrounded and ordered his troops to begin
slashing their way through it. At the conclusion of the campaign, the
king could announce that all 163 tigers in the jungle, including
presumably the murderous one, had been hunted down and killed. During
the tumult of the war, however, the petition had been lost or
forgotten.
The petitioners
therefore sent another appeal. This time they received a reply from
one of the king’s secretaries saying that the king would consider
their request after he was done reviewing the annual
dragon-administration budget. This year’s budget was the largest to
date and included funding for a new railway track to the mountain. A
second track was deemed necessary, as the original track could no
longer support the increasing traffic. (The tribute demanded by the
dragon-tyrant had increased to one hundred thousand human beings, to
be delivered to the foot of the mountain every evening at the onset
of dark.) When the budget was finally approved, however, reports were
coming from a remote part of the country that a village was suffering
from a rattlesnake infestation. The king had to leave urgently to
mobilize his army and ride off to defeat this new threat. The
anti-dragonists’ appeal was filed away in a dusty cabinet in the
castle basement.
The anti-dragonists
met again to decide what was to be done. The debate was animated and
continued long into the night. It was almost daybreak when they
finally resolved to take the matter to the people. Over the following
weeks, they traveled around the country, gave public lectures, and
explained their proposal to anyone who would listen. At first, people
were skeptical. They had been taught in school that the dragon-tyrant
was invincible and that the sacrifices it demanded had to be accepted
as a fact of life. Yet when they learnt about the new composite
material and about the designs for the projectile, many became
intrigued. In increasing numbers, citizens flocked to the
anti-dragonist lectures. Activists started organizing public rallies
in support of the proposal.
When the king read
about these meetings in the newspaper, he summoned his advisors and
asked them what they thought about it. They informed him about the
petitions that had been sent but told him that the anti-dragonists
were troublemakers whose teachings were causing public unrest. It was
much better for the social order, they said, that the people accepted
the inevitability of the dragon-tyrant tribute. The
dragon-administration provided many jobs that would be lost if the
dragon was slaughtered. There was no known social good coming from
the conquest of the dragon. In any case, the king’s coffers were
currently nearly empty after the two military campaigns and the
funding set aside for the second railway line. The king, who was at
the time enjoying great popularity for having vanquished the
rattlesnake infestation, listened to his advisors’ arguments but
worried that he might lose some of his popular support if was seen to
ignore the anti-dragonist petition. He therefore decided to hold an
open hearing. Leading dragonologists, ministers of the state, and
interested members of the public were invited to attend.
The meeting took place
on the darkest day of the year, just before the Christmas holidays,
in the largest hall of the royal castle. The hall was packed to the
last seat and people were crowding in the aisles. The mood was
charged with an earnest intensity normally reserved for pivotal
wartime sessions.
After the king had
welcomed everyone, he gave the floor to the leading scientist behind
the anti-dragonist proposal, a woman with a serious, almost stern
expression on her face. She proceeded to explain in clear language
how the proposed device would work and how the requisite amount of
the composite material could be manufactured. Given the requested
amount of funding, it should be possible to complete the work in
fifteen to twenty years. With an even greater amount of funding, it
might be possible to do it in as little as twelve years. However,
there could be no absolute guarantee that it would work. The crowd
followed her presentation intently.
Next to speak was the
king’s chief advisor for morality, a man with a booming voice that
easily filled the auditorium:
“Let us grant that
this woman is correct about the science and that the project is
technologically possible, although I don’t think that has actually
been proven. Now she desires that we get rid of the dragon.
Presumably, she thinks she’s got the right not to be chewed up by
the dragon. How willful and presumptuous. The finitude of human life
is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not.
Getting rid of the dragon, which might seem like such a convenient
thing to do, would undermine our human dignity. The preoccupation
with killing the dragon will deflect us from realizing more fully the
aspirations to which our lives naturally point, from living well
rather than merely staying alive. It is debasing, yes debasing, for a
person to want to continue his or her mediocre life for as long as
possible without worrying about some of the higher questions about
what life is to be used for. But I tell you, the nature of the dragon
is to eat humans, and our own species-specified nature is truly and
nobly fulfilled only by getting eaten by it...”
The audience listened
respectfully to this highly decorated speaker. The phrases were so
eloquent that it was hard to resist the feeling that some deep
thoughts must lurk behind them, although nobody could quite grasp
what they were. Surely, words coming from such a distinguished
appointee of the king must have profound substance.
The speaker next in
line was a spiritual sage who was widely respected for his kindness
and gentleness as well as for his devotion. As he strode to the
podium, a small boy yelled out from the audience: “The dragon is
bad!”
The boy’s parents
turned bright red and began hushing and scolding the child. But the
sage said, “Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser than an old
fool like me.”
At first, the boy was
too scared and confused to move. But when he saw the genuinely
friendly smile on the sage’s face and the outreached hand, he
obediently took it and followed the sage up to the podium. “Now,
there’s a brave little man,” said the sage. “Are you afraid of
the dragon?“
“I want my granny
back,” said the boy.
“Did the dragon take
your granny away?”
“Yes,” the boy
said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes. “Granny
promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies for
Christmas. She said that we would make a little house out of
gingerbread and little gingerbread men that would live in it. Then
those people in white clothes came and took Granny away to the
dragon... The dragon is bad and it eats people… I want my Granny
back!”
At this point the
child was crying so hard that the sage had to return him to his
parents.
There were several
other speakers that evening, but the child’s simple testimony had
punctured the rhetorical balloon that the king’s ministers had
tried to inflate. The people were backing the anti-dragonists, and by
the end of the evening even the king had come to recognize the reason
and the humanity of their cause. In his closing statement, he simply
said: “Let’s do it!”
As the news spread,
celebrations erupted in the streets. Those who had been campaigning
for the anti-dragonists toasted each other and drank to the future of
humanity.
The next morning, a
billion people woke up and realized that their turn to be sent to the
dragon would come before the projectile would be completed. A tipping
point was reached. Whereas before, active support for the
anti-dragonist cause had been limited to a small group of
visionaries, it now became the number one priority and concern on
everybody’s mind. The abstract notion of “the general will”
took on an almost tangible intensity and concreteness. Mass rallies
raised money for the projectile project and urged the king to
increase the level of state support. The king responded to these
appeals. In his New Year address, he announced that he would pass an
extra appropriations bill to support the project at a high level of
funding; additionally, he would sell off his summer castle and some
of his land and make a large personal donation. “I believe that
this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this
decade is out, of freeing the world from the ancient scourge of the
dragon-tyrant.”
Thus started a great
technological race against time. The concept of an anti-dragon
projectile was simple, but to make it a reality required solutions to
a thousand smaller technical problems, each of which required dozens
of time-consuming steps and missteps. Test-missiles were fired but
fell dead to the ground or flew off in the wrong direction. In one
tragic accident, a wayward missile landed on a hospital and killed
several hundred patients and staff. But there was now a real
seriousness of purpose, and the tests continued even as the corpses
were being dug out from the debris.
Despite almost
unlimited funding and round-the-clock work by the technicians, the
king’s deadline could not be met. The decade concluded and the
dragon was still alive and well. But the effort was getting closer. A
prototype missile had been successfully test fired. Production of the
core, made of the expensive composite material, was on schedule for
its completion to coincide with the finishing of the fully tested and
debugged missile shell into which it was to be loaded. The launch
date was set to the following year’s New Year’s Eve, exactly
twelve years after the project’s official inauguration. The
best-selling Christmas gift that year was a calendar that counted
down the days to time zero, the proceeds going to the projectile
project.
The king had undergone
a personal transformation from his earlier frivolous and thoughtless
self. He now spent as much time as he could in the laboratories and
the manufacturing plants, encouraging the workers and praising their
toil. Sometimes he would bring a sleeping bag and spend the night on
a noisy machine floor. He even studied and tried to understand the
technical aspects of their work. Yet he confined himself to giving
moral support and refrained from meddling in technical and managerial
matters.
Seven days before New
Year, the woman who had made the case for the project almost twelve
years earlier, and was now its chief executive, came to the royal
castle and requested an urgent audience with the king. When the king
got her note, he excused himself to the foreign dignitaries whom he
was reluctantly entertaining at the annual Christmas dinner and
hurried off to the private room where the scientist was waiting. As
always of late, she looked pale and worn from her long working hours.
This evening, however, the king also thought he could detect a ray of
relief and satisfaction in her eyes.
She told him that the
missile had been deployed, the core had been loaded, everything had
been triple-checked, they were ready to launch, and would the king
give his final go-ahead. The king sank down in an armchair and closed
his eyes. He was thinking hard. By launching the projectile tonight,
one week early, seven hundred thousand people would be saved. Yet if
something went wrong, if it missed its target and hit the mountain
instead, it would be a disaster. A new core would have to be
constructed from scratch and the project would be set back by some
four years. He sat there, silently, for almost an hour. Just as the
scientist had become convinced that he had fallen asleep, he opened
his eyes and said in a firm voice: “No. I want you to go right back
to the lab. I want you to check and then re-check everything again.”
The scientist could not help a sigh escaping her; but she nodded and
left.
The last day of the
year was cold and overcast, but there was no wind, which meant good
launch conditions. The sun was setting. Technicians were scuttling
around making the final adjustments and giving everything one last
check. The king and his closest advisors were observing from a
platform close to the launch pad. Further away, behind a fence, large
numbers of the public had assembled to witness the great event. A
large clock was showing the countdown: fifty minutes to go.
An advisor tapped the
king on the shoulder and drew his attention to the fence. There was
some tumult. Somebody had apparently jumped the fence and was running
towards the platform where the king sat. Security quickly caught up
with him. He was handcuffed and taken away. The king turned his
attention back to the launch pad, and to the mountain in the
background. In front of it, he could see the dark slumped profile of
the dragon. It was eating.
Some twenty minutes
later, the king was surprised to see the handcuffed man reappearing a
short distance from the platform. His nose was bleeding and he was
accompanied by two security guards. The man appeared to be in
frenzied state. When he spotted the king, he began shouting at the
top of his lungs: “The last train! The last train! Stop the last
train!”
“Who is this young
man?” said the king. “His face seems familiar, but I cannot quite
place him. What does he want? Let him come up.”
The young man was a
junior clerk in the ministry of transportation, and the reason for
his frenzy was that he had discovered that his father was on the last
train to the mountain. The king had ordered the train traffic to
continue, fearing that any disruption might cause the dragon to stir
and leave the open field in front of the mountain where it now spent
most of its time. The young man begged the king to issue a
recall-order for the last train, which was due to arrive at the
mountain terminal five minutes before time zero.
“I cannot do it,”
said the king, “I cannot take the risk.”
“But the trains
frequently run five minutes late. The dragon won’t notice! Please!”
The young man was
kneeling before the king, imploring him to save his father’s life
and the lives of the other thousand passengers onboard that last
train.
The king looked down
at the pleading, bloodied face of the young man. But he bit his lip,
and shook his head. The young man continued to wail even as the
guards carried him off the platform: “Please! Stop the last train!
Please!”
The king stood silent
and motionless, until, after while, the wailing suddenly ceased. The
king looked up and glanced over at the countdown clock: five minutes
remaining.
Four minutes. Three
minutes. Two minutes.
The last technician
left the launch pad.
30 seconds. 20
seconds. Ten, nine, eight…
As a ball of fire
enveloped the launch pad and the missile shot out, the spectators
instinctively rose to the tips of their toes, and all eyes fixated at
the front end of the white flame from the rocket’s afterburners
heading towards the distant mountain. The masses, the king, the low
and the high, the young and the old, it was as if at this moment they
shared a single awareness, a single conscious experience: that white
flame, shooting into the dark, embodying the human spirit, its fear
and its hope… striking at the heart of evil. The silhouette on the
horizon tumbled, and fell. Thousand voices of pure joy rose from the
assembled masses, joined seconds later by a deafening drawn-out thud
from the collapsing monster as if the Earth itself was drawing a sigh
of relief. After centuries of oppression, humanity at last was free
from the cruel tyranny of the dragon.
The joy cry resolved
into a jubilating chant: “Long live the king! Long live us all!”
The king’s advisors, like everybody that night, were as happy as
children; they embraced each other and congratulated the king: “We
did it! We did it!”
But the king answered
in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But
damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe
ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.”
The king stepped off
the platform and walked up to the young man in handcuffs, who was
sitting on the ground. There he fell down on his knees. “Forgive
me! Oh my God, please forgive me!”
The rain started
falling, in large, heavy drops, turning the ground into mud,
drenching the king’s purple robes, and dissolving the blood on the
young man’s face. “I am so very sorry about your father,” said
the king.
“It’s not your
fault,” replied the young man. “Do you remember twelve years ago
in the castle? That crying little boy who wanted you to bring back
his grandmother – that was me. I didn’t realize then that you
couldn’t possibly do what I asked for. Today I wanted you to save
my father. Yet it was impossible to do that now, without jeopardizing
the launch. But you have saved my life, and my mother and my sister.
How can we ever thank you enough for that?”
“Listen to them,”
said the king, gesturing towards the crowds. “They are cheering me
for what happened tonight. But the hero is you. You cried out. You
rallied us against evil.” The king signaled a guard to come and
unlock the handcuffs. “Now, go to your mother and sister. You and
your family shall always be welcome at the court, and anything you
wish for – if it be within my power – shall be granted.”
The young man left,
and the royal entourage, huddling in the downpour, accumulated around
their monarch who was still kneeling in the mud. Amongst the fancy
couture, which was being increasingly ruined by the rain, a bunch of
powdered faces expressed a superposition of joy, relief, and
discombobulation. So much had changed in the last hour: the right to
an open future had been regained, a primordial fear had been
abolished, and many a long-held assumption had been overturned.
Unsure now about what was required of them in this unfamiliar
situation, they stood there tentatively, as if probing whether the
ground would still hold, exchanging glances, and waiting for some
kind of indication.
Finally, the king
rose, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.
“Your majesty, what
do we do now?” ventured the most senior courtier.
“My dear friends,”
said the king, “we have come a long way… yet our journey has only
just begun. Our species is young on this planet. Today we
are like children again. The future lies open before us. We shall go
into this future and try to do better than we have done in the past.
We have time now – time to get things right, time to grow up, time
to learn from our mistakes, time for the slow process of building a
better world, and time to get settled in it. Tonight, let
all the bells in the kingdom ring until midnight, in remembrance of
our dead forbears, and then after midnight let us celebrate till the
sun comes up. And in the coming days… I believe we have some
reorganization to do!”
* * *
MORAL
Stories about aging
have traditionally focused on the need for graceful accommodation.
The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and impending death was
resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical
affairs and personal relationships. Given that nothing could be done
to prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense. Rather than
fretting about the inevitable, one could aim for peace of mind.
Today we face a
different situation. While we still lack effective and acceptable
means for slowing the aging process[1], we can identify research
directions that might lead to the development of such means in the
foreseeable future. “Deathist” stories and ideologies, which
counsel passive acceptance, are no longer harmless sources of
consolation. They are fatal barriers to urgently needed action.
Many distinguished
technologists and scientists tell us that it will become possible to
retard, and eventually to halt and reverse, human senescence.[2] At
present, there is little agreement about the time-scale or the
specific means, nor is there a consensus that the goal is even
achievable in principle. In relation to the fable (where aging is, of
course, represented by the dragon), we are therefore at a stage
somewhere between that at which the lone sage predicted the dragon’s
eventual demise and that at which the iconoclast dragonologists
convinced their peers by demonstrating a composite material that was
harder than dragon scales.
The ethical argument
that the fable presents is simple: There are obvious and compelling
moral reasons for the people in the fable to get rid of the dragon.
Our situation with regard to human senescence is closely analogous
and ethically isomorphic to the situation of the people in the fable
with regard to the dragon. Therefore, we have compelling moral
reasons to get rid of human senescence.
The argument is not in
favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of
sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The
argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the
human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process, the
healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be able
to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which they
would otherwise be dead.
In addition to this
general moral, there are a number of more specific lessons:
(1) A
recurrent tragedy became a fact of life, a statistic. In the fable,
people’s expectations adapted to the existence of the dragon, to
the extent that many became unable to perceive its badness. Aging,
too, has become a mere “fact of life” – despite being the
principal cause of an unfathomable amount of human suffering and
death.
(2) A
static view of technology. People reasoned that it would never become
possible to kill the dragon because all attempts had failed in the
past. They failed to take into account accelerated technological
progress. Is a similar mistake leading us to underestimate the
chances of a cure for aging?
(3) Administration
became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to
dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the
U.S. spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation became such an
exclusive focus that it made people neglect the underlying cause.
Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging,
we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on
researching individual diseases.
(4) The
social good became detached from the good for people. The king’s
advisors worried about the possible social problems that could be
caused by the anti-dragonists. They said that no known social good
would come from the demise of the dragon. Ultimately, however, social
orders exist for the benefit of people, and it is generally good for
people if their lives are saved.
(5) The
lack of a sense of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba
of rattlesnakes plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and
the rattlesnakes, and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at
fault, because he got his priorities wrong.
(6) Fine
phrases and hollow rhetoric. The king’s morality advisor spoke
eloquently about human dignity and our species-specified nature, in
phrases lifted, mostly verbatim, from the advisor’s contemporary
equivalents.[3] Yet the rhetoric was a smoke screen that hid
rather than revealed moral reality. The boy’s inarticulate but
honest testimony, by contrast, points to the central fact of the
case: the dragon is bad; it destroys people. This is also the basic
truth about human senescence.
(7) Failure
to appreciate the urgency. Until very late in the story, nobody
fully realized what was at stake. Only as the king was staring into
the bloodied face of the young pleading man does the extent of the
tragedy sink in. Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice
thing that we should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent,
screaming moral imperative. The sooner we start a focused research
program, the sooner we will get results. It matters if we get the
cure in 25 years rather than in 24 years: a population greater than
that of Canada would die as a result. In this matter, time equals
life, at a rate of approximately 70 lives per minute. With the meter
ticking at such a furious rate, we should stop faffing about.
(8) “And
in the coming days… I believe we have some reorganization to
do!” The king and his people will face some major challenges
when they recover from their celebration. Their society has been so
conditioned and deformed by the presence of the dragon that a
frightening void now exists. They will have to work creatively, on
both an individual and a societal level, to develop conditions that
will keep lives flourishingly dynamic and meaningful beyond the
accustomed three-score-years-and-ten. Luckily, the human spirit is
good at adapting. Another issue that they may eventually confront is
overpopulation. Maybe people will have to learn to have children
later and less frequently. Maybe they can find ways to sustain a
larger population by using more efficient technology. Maybe they will
one day develop spaceships and begin to colonize the cosmos. We can
leave, for now, the long-lived fable people to grapple with these new
challenges, while we try to make some progress in our own
adventure.[4]
[1] Calorie
restriction (a diet low in calories but high in nutrients) extends
maximal lifespan and delays the onset of age-related illnesses in all
species that have been tested. Preliminary results from an ongoing
study on rhesus and squirrel monkeys show similar effects. It seems
quite likely that calorie restriction would work for our species too.
Few humans, however, would be willing to put themselves through a
lifelong hunger-diet. Some researchers are searching for
calorie-restriction mimetics – compounds that elicit the desirable
effects of lowered caloric intake without us having to go hungry.
(See e.g. Lane, M. et al. (1999) “Nutritional modulation of aging
in nonhuman primates,” J. Nutr. Health & Aging, 3(2):
69-76.)
[2] A recent
straw poll at the 10th Congress of the International Association
of Biomedical Gerontology revealed that the majority of the
participants thought it either probable or “not improbable” that
comprehensive functional rejuvenation of middle-aged mice would be
possible within 10-20 years (de Grey, A. (2004), “Report of open
discussion on the future of life extension research,” (Annals NY
Acad. Sci., 1019, in press)). See also e.g. de Grey, A., B. Ames, et
al. (2002) “Time to talk SENS: critiquing the immutability of human
aging,” Increasing Healthy Life Span: Conventional Measures
and Slowing the Innate Aging Process: Ninth Congress of the
International Association of Biomedical Gerontology, ed. D. Harman
(Annals NY Acad. Sci. 959: 452-462); and Freitas Jr., R.
A., Nanomedicine, Vol. 1 (Landes Bioscience: Georgetown,
TX, 1999).
[3] See, e.g.
Kass, L. (2003) “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the
Pursuit of Perfection,” The New Atlantis, 1.
[4] I’m
grateful to many people for comments on earlier drafts, including
especially Heather Bradshaw, Roger Crisp, Aubrey de Grey, Katrien
Devolder, Joel Garreau, John Harris, Andrea Landfried, Toby Ord,
Susan Rogers, Julian Savulescu, Ian Watson, and Kip Werking. I am
also very grateful to Adi Berman, Pierino Forno, Didier Coeurnelle,
and others who have translated the fable into other languages, and
everybody who has helped spread the word or who have given
encouragement. Thank you!
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