Quest for Immortality

Yaksha Prashna: Enigmatic Question

To revive his dead brothers, Yudhisthira must correctly answer one hundred and twenty-six questions which the Yaksha asks. One of these cryptic questions in the Mahabharata, (Q. No. 97), just in two words, was -

Yaksha: किमाश्चर्यं? What is most bizarre?

Yudhishthira:

अहन्यहनि भूतानि गच्छन्तीह यमालयम् ।

शेषाः स्थावरमिच्छन्ति किमाश्चर्यमतः परम् ॥

Day after day, countless beings go to the abode of death. Those that remain desire to be immortal. What can be more bizarre than that?

Quest for immortality is like chasing a mirage; but the numerous current projects by anti-ageing, life-extension enterprises confirm that humans are unwilling to abandon the bizarre aspiration for a long, very long life.

Fear of Death

Fear of Death is the greatest human fear. While survival instinct is common to all living organisms, ‘death-awareness’ is unique to humans.

All religions are rooted in man’s fear of death, and attempt to handle the angst of annihilation of the body with various myths and postulations. In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna consoles Arjuna with one such comforting concept - rebirth:

जातस्य हि ध्रुवो मृत्युर्ध्रुवं जन्म मृतस्य च ।

तस्मादपरिहार्येऽर्थे न त्वं शोचितुमर्हसि ॥2.27॥

Death is certain for the born, and certain is birth for the dead; therefore, you should not grieve over the inevitable.

Religions also offer Heaven as the best country for permanent abode - ambient climate, zero-pollution, high society, freedom from hunger and thirst, eternal joy, etc.- though with citizenship permits more restrictive than US Green Card. Yet, isn’t it ironical that everyone defers a journey to that exotic destination as long as possible and by all means available, preferring life on earth with all its limitations and imperfections?

Chiranjivis

Can humans be immortal? Even the avatars of Vishnu – Sri Ram and Sri Krishna – were not. However, a pratah smarana mantra recites the names of the eight chiranjivis, of whom five are human, in Hindu mythology – Ashwatthama, Bali, Vyasa, Hanuman, Vibhishana, Kripa, Parashurama, and Markandeya – with the hope that the reciter or the listener will be rid of sickness and live up to a hundred years. Eternal life was no blessing for all the chiranjivis; it was a terrible curse for Ashwatthama who had committed the unforgivable sin of deploying Brahmastra for infanticide.

Life Extension Enterprises

The quest for immortality is no longer the stuff of dreams; today it is vigorously pursued globally by more than 700 biotech companies and startups with USD 30 billion or more invested in anti-ageing, life-extension technologies, and solutions.[i] One of these companies aims to ‘cheat death,’ nothing less!

Aubrey de Grey, the promoter of SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) and co-founder of SRF (SENS Research Foundation), claims that the human who would live for 1000 years has already been born!

Ambrosia offers blood plasma from donors aged 16 to 25 at US $8000 per litre, and a bargain price of $12000 for two litres!

Cryonics facility is offered by several US companies - Alcon Life Extension Foundation, Arizona; Necome, San Fransisco; Cryonics Institute, Detroit; etc. Whole body can be frozen, and revived anytime in the future, for a very affordable cost of US $200,000. Freezing only the brain costs much lower. A minor inconvenience is that the liquid which will be injected into the body or brain for freezing will kill the person!

Ray Kurzweil has predicted that AI will surpass human intelligence by 2045, humans and machines will merge, and brain-computer interface will phenomenally enhance human capabilities. The physical limitations of human brain will be transcended by using the vastly superior processing capacity and speed of a virtual brain. It may be feasible then to upload the physical human brains preserved under cryonics to a computer, in which case those brains would be immortal!

Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, takes a gentle dig at the entrepreneurs who are funding or promoting anti-ageing, life extension technologies and research:

These “tech billionaires are mostly middle-aged men (sometimes married to younger women) who made their money very young, enjoy their lifestyles, and don’t want the party to end. When they were young, they wanted to be rich, and now that they are rich, they want to be young.”

An American tech entrepreneur, Bryan Johnson, 47  is determined to achieve a biological age of 18 for which he has adopted an interesting lifestyle under his Blueprint project; he eats his dinner at 11.30 AM, sleeps at 8.30 PM and sleeps for 8 hours and 34 minutes on the average, swallows 30 or more pills a day, and has 43 biomarkers monitored by a team of 30 medical professionals. It costs him about two million US dollars a year.

“I have achieved the best biomarkers of anyone on the planet,” he said in a recent interview. My Hb1ac is 4.7, he mentioned. Hb1ac below 5.7 indicates you are non-diabetic. Your blogger’s Hb1ac is 5.4, almost perfect for his age, without spending two million US dollars per year!

Over the last six months, Bryan claims to have recorded the best sleep score in human history. He also participated in the world’s first multi-generational plasma exchange with his then 17-year-old son and 70-year-old father; but discontinued further exchanges for lack of any tangible benefit!

He is in the news for his first visit to India during which he prudently skipped New Delhi, the toxic gas chamber, but visited Mumbai, a less-toxic gas chamber, and held a free-wheeling discussion with the Economic Times team at their office. Unwilling to jeopardise his lungs with Mumbai’s poor-quality air, he carried his own air purifier, the size of a suitcase, to the media office. ET (Indore/Bhopal edition of 6 December 2024) devoted two full pages to enlighten readers about Bryan’s ‘Don’t Die’ philosophy. His motto is emblazoned in red on his tee-shirt!

But why is Bryan visiting Mumbai, a city with such poor air quality, and drivers with the suicidal hobby of staring at their smartphone screens while driving on the city’s crazy streets? It was a near-death experience, said Bryan.

It is understood that he would meet Ambani, one of world’s richest man. Is he soliciting investment in his age-reversal project? Soon, we will know.

Duet of Life and Death

At the cellular level, there is an amazing, perpetual duet of life and death in our body. Cells, the basic unit of life, die and new cells are regenerated. Blood cells are regenerated rapidly; each RBC lives for about 4 months, 100 billion RBCs are discarded, but more than that are created by the body every day. Most of the cells in the liver are replaced within 3 years; about 40% of the heart tissues are replaced in a life-time. “Millions of our cells die every day. Not only do we not mourn their passing, but we are not even aware of it,’ observes V. Ramakrishnan.

Human Longevity

Some claim that medical technologies – biotech, cellular engineering, stem-cell therapy, gene-editing, etc. - will soon enable humans to live at least up to 150 years provided one can buy new body parts and solutions and supplements. Venki Ramakrishnan thinks human lifespan may have an upper limit of 120 years. In either case, the rich are more likely to enjoy a longer and healthier life; creating a further divide between the rich and the poor. That is a serious ethical issue to address.

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021, this had more than doubled to 71 years. When humans routinely live up to 120 or 150 years, it would significantly change the structure of human society and throw up many challenges.

Thoughts and Views on Death and Immortality

On death and immortality; scriptures, philosophers, thinkers, writers, and humourists offer interesting perspectives a few of which are shared below.

Bhagavad-Gītā (2.28)

अव्यक्तादीनि भूतानि व्यक्तमध्यानि भारत ।

अव्यक्तनिधनान्येव तत्र का परिदेवना ॥

All created beings are unmanifest in their beginning, manifest in their interim state, and unmanifest again when annihilated. So what need is there for lamentation?

Mark Twain

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Twain’s quote echoes the thoughts of the preceding Gita shloka!

Bertrand Russel

“I believe that when I die, I shall rot and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

Woody Allen

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

Susan Ertz

“Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

How best to cope?

Human life comes with inescapable frailties – disease, old age, decrepitude, and death. How best to cope with these limitations?

One could despair:

“What shall I do with this absurdity —

O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog's tail?” (The Tower, W.B. Yeats);

 

Or sing loud in defiance:

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,…”

(Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats)

 

Siddhartha Gautama was so unsettled that he abandoned his wife, infant son, and the royal palace to seek a remedy against these human sufferings. But lesser humans have stayed put, and met these handicaps with stoic resignation or defiant resilience.

 

Resources, References & Suggested Reading List

·      Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality – Venki Ramakrishnan (2024)

·      The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human – Siddhartha Mukherjee (2022)

·      The Body: A Guide for Occupants – Bill Bryson (2019)

·      The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI – Ray Kurzweil (2023)

·      Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI – Yuval Noah Harari (2024)

·      The Death of Ivan Ilych – Leo Tolstoy (1886). A poignant story of a man’s tryst with impending death.

·      The Curious Case of Benjamin Butt – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922). There is also a Hollywood movie with the same title; Brad Pitt plays the character that was born old and grows younger over the years. A fantastical reverse-ageing!

·      My previous blog: https://pkdash-author.blogspot.com/2023/05/why-i-dread-to-live-for-150-years.html

Note

If you have time to read just one book on the subject, I suggest ‘Why We Die’.

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[i] The field of anti-aging and life extension is rapidly evolving, with numerous biotech companies working on innovative solutions. While some companies offer direct-to-consumer products, many are focused on research and development, with their primary goal being to develop groundbreaking therapies and treatments.  

Here are some of the most prominent companies in this field:

•        Altos Labs: This company is focused on cellular reprogramming techniques to rejuvenate cells and potentially reverse aging.  

•        Calico Life Sciences: Backed by Alphabet (Google's parent company), Calico aims to increase human lifespan by understanding the biology of aging.  

•        Unity Biotechnology: This company is developing drugs to target senescent cells, which are believed to contribute to aging and age-related diseases.  

•        Genentech: A leading biotechnology company that is exploring various approaches to aging, including senolytic therapies and regenerative medicine.

•        Elysium Health: This company offers a range of supplements and products designed to promote healthy aging and longevity.  

•        Juvenescence: This company is focused on developing therapies to slow down aging and extend healthy lifespan.