II: Ethics, Boredom, and Mastering Time and Space

WIE: Let's suppose that some of this really does happen, and human beings suddenly find themselves endowed with immortality. Can you imagine what the social, ethical, or spiritual implications would be?

Sawyer: At least in the short term, immortality will create the ultimate gap between the haves and have-nots. There will be a lot of resentment toward the guy who basically can buy everlasting life. But two things will temper that. One is that eventually, immortality technology, like all technologies, will become cheap and widely available. And two is that in the meantime, although the elite might be able to make their biological bodies last virtually forever, the last thing you'd want is for some poor guy to decide he's so resentful that he puts a bullet in your head, exceeding what the nanotechnology can repair. So as an immortal, it would be in your own self-interest to tackle social justice issues, to make sure that everybody else is happy and content and that there are no ghettos or political hot spots left on the planet where warring factions are going at each other.

But there would be an even bigger motivator than that for positive social change. The huge reality of our short lives, from most religious points of view, is that this is a prologue to the real life that is going to follow. That what you do here, and how you comport yourself in this life, sets the stage for what your existence is going to be in the life that is to come. You know, we use the word “immortality” without really thinking of its ramifications. Immortality does not mean living for several centuries, or until you get bored. Immortality means living forever. It means ceasing to have that dichotomy between this life and some life yet to come. Your present life becomes the only existence that your consciousness will ever, ever know. And that hugely changes the underpinning of most religious arguments for moral behavior. There is no undefined reward yet to come; there is no judgment by a God. There are simply human beings comporting themselves in a way that, hopefully, is beneficial to other human beings. And that makes for an enormous shift in what morality is all about.

Morality, then, is no longer self-serving—trying to get a good report card when you're called up for accounts when you're dead. Morality is making of this world the best possible existence, because it's going to be the only possible existence. You're not telling yourself, “Yeah, I did a little bit of good here, I helped an old lady across the street there. And, you know, I didn't kick the dog when I could have. And therefore I will be rewarded with some paradise-like existence in some other realm that I can't see right now.” Your only route to paradise, if you're immortal, is to make this existence into an Eden, to make our world the best possible place it can be. It moves all of the desire to do good away from the selfish and personal—the sense that “I'm going to be rewarded personally for that”—and into the broadly societal. We all benefit if the world is a wonderful place.

WIE: One criticism that I've often heard being leveled against the idea of immortality is that if no one ever dies, the earth is going to become overpopulated, the resources are going to run dry, and we're going to need to stop having children. Do you think that's a valid concern?

Sawyer: It's a semi-valid concern; it depends first on how we choose to have immortality. If we have biological immortality, as opposed to robotic immortality, then the resource issue is a big question. But one solution is to revitalize the man/space program—and ironically, I don't think that's what George Bush had in mind when he recently decided to do just that. The universe is almost infinite in extent. There are resources to be claimed in profusion outside our planet. You cannot have a combination of immortality, continued unchecked breeding, and no space program. It is literally true that what killed the dinosaurs was their lack of a space program—they couldn't go anywhere else. And it's going to be true of us. The man/space program goes hand in hand with the desire to live forever.

Now, you can extrapolate that at some point, gazillions of years in the future, we might in fact have colonized every habitable world in the universe. And at that point, fortunately, physics tells us that there are other universes, that we live in a multiverse. So I suspect that we will never, ever run out of places to expand to. And in the past, certain population pressures were the reason behind the development of a new world. People from the Old World thought that there were more resources, better economic opportunities, and infinite land to spread out to and develop in the New World. That hasn't changed—there are new worlds aplenty.

WIE: Your novel Starplex featured a ten-billion-year-old immortal human being. Do you suppose that true immortality may eventually lead to eons of boredom?

Sawyer: When I was twenty-five years old, I was doing some work for the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and I had the opportunity to interview a famous science fiction editor named Judith Merril. I asked her what was probably an impertinent question, because she was in her sixties and I was in my twenties, but I said, “One of the things science fiction talks about is immortality. But of course, living forever would be boring.” And she looked at me as somebody who knew she was getting near the end of her life—she is now deceased—and said, “Only somebody who was young would ever say that. When you get near the end of your life, as I am now, you'll realize that for all the accomplishments you've had, no matter how rich and full your life has been, there is an infinite number of things that you wanted to get around to that you just aren't going to be allowed the time to do. The idea that immortality is boring, that you're going to run out of things to do in this universe of possibilities, is a conceit of the young. No matter whether you have a hundred years or ten billion years, there are still going to be things you want to do, people you want to interact with, relationships you want to have, books that you've always wanted to read. No matter how much time you're given, I think you're always going to want more.”

WIE: If you were to look one thousand years into the future, what kind of civilization and technologies do you see us being capable of creating if we do become immortal, versus if we just continue with our brief mortal life spans?

Sawyer: If we're immortal, we will have the ability to tackle the biggest questions of existence and accumulate all the wisdom there is. Gone will be the idea that anybody has to be a specialist in any one thing—for instance, that your specialty might be South American butterflies, and that's all you know about. I mean, you get so incredibly specialized today because in short life spans, you can only learn one very narrow field really well. The great beauty of having unlimited life is that everybody becomes a generalist, and as we have always seen in the past, it's the serendipitous juxtaposition of disparate areas that leads to big ideas. Chaos theory is a beautiful example—you know, the little butterfly wing beating here affects the weather patterns in China. But you have to know about butterflies, and you have to know about meteorology, and you have to know about China before you can come up with chaos theory. Chaos theory didn't exist at all as an idea a hundred years ago. Imagine how big and complex, how new and startling our thoughts are going to be when each of us knows everything that the human race has learned to date.

As we prolong our lives and start having centuries and millennia of time in which to undertake our worldly pursuits, the scale on which we will think thoughts, create works of art, and have discourse on complex sociological issues will allow us, I think, to finally get somewhere. Every politics or philosophy course you take today starts off by discussing the Pre-Socratics, because in the thousands of years since the Pre-Socratics, we haven't really gone very far on these issues. And the reason we haven't is that we're all constrained. Whether it was Plato or Socrates who would live for a handful of decades, or our best thinkers today, we don't have enough time as individuals to achieve any real progress. I mean, Ken Wilber has done enormous, enormous thinking and good work in a constrained human lifetime. Imagine how far he could go, or Albert Einstein could have gone, with a thousand years to beat up on these problems instead of a hundred years.

And so fundamentally, we will be able to have and create any technology that is physically possible in our universe. There are some who think that, for instance, traveling faster than the speed of light will never be possible. If it is, we will have it. We will be able to figure it out if we have a thousand years to approach the problem. If the other technology that even more people think is totally impossible—time travel—actually is possible, we will have it. We will certainly have infinite clean renewable energy; the complete elimination of disease, poverty, material want, and suffering; and the colonization of this galaxy, if not other galaxies as well. All of those things are mere engineering. We already know the steps that have to be taken; we just don't yet have the technology to realize those steps. We'll have them with life spans of a thousand years, for sure. None of these problems are inherently insolvable. And the few that might be inherently insolvable—time travel, traveling faster than the speed of light—will be the only ones that will elude our grasp.

But if there are any loopholes or ways around those problems, we'll come up with those too. We will be the masters of time and space. We will be the lords of creation. Everything will be within our grasp.