To Be a Machine Page 3

  And this realization was, he said, the moment when he became a transhumanist. If the goal was to maximize the amount of life in the universe, and thereby the amount of information that would be processed, it was clear to him, he said, that humans needed to expand into the outer reaches of space, and to live for an extremely long time. And for those things to become a reality, it was clear that we were going to need AI, and robots, and space colonies, and certain other things he had read about in those sci-fi books in his local library.

  “What is the value of a star?” he asked, and did not pause for an answer. “A star in itself is kind of interesting, if you have just one of them. But if you have trillions of them? Well, they are actually fairly alike. There is very little structural complexity there. But life,” he said, “and in particular the life of individuals—that is highly contingent. You and I have a life story. If we reran the story of the universe, you and I would end up as different human beings. Our uniqueness is a thing we accumulate. That is why the loss of a person is something very bad.”

  Anders’s vision of getting uploaded, of the conversion of human minds into software, was central to this ideal of transcending human limitations, of becoming a pure intelligence that would spread throughout the universe. In many ways, he seemed very different to the person I’d seen in that documentary, the slightly chilling figure making priestly gestures of technological benediction; he seemed not just older, but less machinelike, more fascinatingly human in his desire to be a machine.

  But the visions of the future he was outlining were overwhelmingly strange and unsettling to me—more alien, and alienating, than any of the actual religious ideas I did not subscribe to, precisely because the technological means to their realization were at least theoretically within reach. Some essential element within me reacted with visceral distaste, even horror, to the prospect of becoming a machine. It seemed to me that to speak of colonizing the universe—of putting the universe to work on our projects—was to impose upon the meaningless void the deeper meaninglessness of our human insistence on meaning. I could imagine no greater absurdity, that is, than the insistence that everything be made to mean something.

  The pendant that Anders wore around his neck—the silver medallion that looked very much like a Catholic religious medal, and which added to the overall clerical impression he gave off—was in fact etched with instructions for cryonic suspension of his earthly body in the event of his death. This, I understood, was a wish he held in common with a great many transhumanists: that their bodies would be preserved upon death in liquid nitrogen, against the day when some future technology might allow their thawing and reanimation, or when the 3.3 lbs of neural wetware inside their skulls might be removed, scanned for their repository of information, converted into code, and uploaded into some new type of mechanical body, not subject to decrepitude or death or other human defects.

  The place where Anders’s earthly body was to be sent, according to the instructions etched on the medallion, was a facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, called Alcor Life Extension Foundation. And it turned out that the man who ran this cryonics facility was Max More, the same Max More who had written the “Letter to Mother Nature.” Alcor was where transhumanists went when they died, so that their deaths might not be irrevocable—where abstract concepts of immortality were brought into the physical realm. And I myself wanted to go there to be among those suspended immortals, or at any rate their frozen corpses.

  A Visitation

  IF YOU FLY to Phoenix, and then drive north for half an hour or so across a landscape reclaimed from the radiant emptiness of the Sonoran Desert, you will reach a squat gray block of a building, constructed for the purpose of preparing and storing bodies very much like your own for their eventual return to life. If you press the buzzer, and if someone lets you in, you will enter a vestibule decorated in a manner you might find suggestive of a mid-1990s straight-to-video sci-fi film—gleaming metallic-feature walls and chrome-effect furniture, all suffused in a gentle blue luminescence—and you will be invited to sit on a long and angular couch, there to await your guide to the afterlife.

  In front of you, on a glass coffee table, you will find a slim volume you might care to flip through as you wait: a copy of an illustrated children’s book called Death Is Wrong, the cover of which depicts a small boy scowlingly directing an index finger toward the eponymous leveler, with his hooded robe, his scythe, his terminally grinning skull. You will note, as you wait, the silence of this place, the absence of buzzing phones and humming printers and chattering staff, of all the ambient discourse you would expect in a typical place of business. It is possible that for long stretches of time, the only sounds you will hear will be the low whine of light aircraft taking off and landing at Scottsdale Municipal Airport, beside which this building, the headquarters of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, is conveniently located for the efficient delivery of the freshly dead.

  Alcor is the largest of the world’s four cryopreservation facilities—three of which are in the United States, and one in Russia. (It is no coincidence that these are the two countries whose narratives of national destiny were most firmly tethered, for much of recent history, to the exploration of space, and whose diametrically opposed ideologies were so driven by the notion of scientific progress.) Hundreds of people now living have made arrangements for their bodies to be brought here, as soon as possible after the pronouncement of clinical death, in order that certain procedures—including, as often as not, the removal of the head from the body—may be carried out, enabling their cryonic suspension until science figures out a way to bring them back to life.

  Of Alcor’s client base, there is a small contingent, currently numbering 117, who are no longer among the quick; they are known as “patients”—not as bodies, or as corpses, or as severed heads—because they are considered to be suspended, rather than deceased: detained in some liminal stasis between this world and whatever follows it, or does not. It was these suspended souls I myself had come to the desert suburbs to be among.

  And I had come, too, to meet with Max More, who, as well as being a self-proclaimed founder of the movement, was also the president and CEO of Alcor. I wanted to know how a man who had ostensibly dedicated his life to the overcoming of human frailties, to a resolute transgression of the principle of entropy, had come to spend his days surrounded by corpses in an office park, between a tile showroom and a place called Big D’s Floor Covering Supplies.

  But first I wanted to know what actually went on in this place, what was done to the bodies of Alcor’s clients in order to forestall their decay, their eventual loss to time. Max, a hulking presence in a tight-fitted black T-shirt, walked me down a narrow hallway toward the room where the patients were processed, and informed me that much of this had to do with which of the two main payment options you went for. For $200,000, Alcor would keep your entire body suspended until such time as it might once more be of some use to you; for $80,000, you could become what was known as a “neuro-patient,” whereby your head alone—detached, petrified, chambered in steel—would be cryopreserved, with a view to the later uploading of your brain, or your mind, into some kind of artificial body.

  In the past, the clients’ estates, or their families themselves, would have covered these costs, paying out regular installments after their loved ones’ deaths, but this was soon found to be impractical, as there were cases where the families could not make the payments, or simply saw no compelling reason to do so, and stopped—at which point you were left with basically an orphaned corpse, with no one to cover the cost of its suspension and eventual awakening. And so these days, Alcor’s clients typically paid their bills through their life insurance plans, having kept up annual membership dues through the course of their natural lives.

  I was given to understand that Max himself was a neuro man, despite the evidently significant investment he had made over the years in bulking and sculpting his limbs and torso. (Max was a kind of physical embodiment of his own
ideals: gym-hewn, vigorous, controlled in his movements. His red hair had thinned and retreated toward the high ground of his crown, and this further dramatized the effect of the domed forehead, the strenuous vectors of the brows, the pale and illegible eyes.) His reasoning here, he said, was that he planned to stick around for another forty years or so, by which point, no matter how much of the intervening time he spent lifting weights, his body would likely not be worth retaining. Because part of what you’re banking on with the neuro deal is the scientists of the future finding a way of providing reconstituted brains with new bodies, whatever form those might take.

  Although it is the patient’s brain in which Alcor is primarily interested, it is not the organization’s practice to remove that brain from its casing of bone, its personal integument of muscle and skin—because the skull acts as a useful ready-made casing for the brain, providing extra protection during the period of cryopreservation, and because, technically speaking, it is kind of a hassle to remove the thing entirely, what with all the tissues and ligaments and so on connecting it to the interior of the cranium.

  Max’s manner was smoothly clinical: a GP talking a patient through a procedure. Making calm, steeple-fingered inventory of the benefits, the potential side effects. Ask your doctor if immortality is right for you.

  The scientific basis for all of this was thin—was, in fact, essentially nonexistent. The promise of cryonics was purely theoretical: that science might one day advance to the point where it would be possible to thaw these bodies, these heads, and somehow reanimate them, or digitally duplicate the minds they contained. And this was all so speculative, so remote from anything that might be achievable, that the scientific community as a whole regarded it as barely worth the trouble of refutation. Those who did comment on it tended to do so with outright contempt. Writing in the MIT Technology Review, for instance, the McGill University neurobiologist Michael Hendricks insisted that “reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology,” and that “those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt.”

  —

  Near the entrance to the intake room, lying in an open-casket-like container made of lightweight canvas and filled with plastic imitation ice cubes, was the smooth-bodied likeness of a youngish white male—a mannequin laid low in its prime, its expressionless face largely covered by a respirator mask. This serene figure was intended as a stand-in for the potential client, the still living subject who had come to have explained to him those things that would be done to his body in the minutes and hours after its clinical death, should he choose to become a full member.

  The preferred situation, Max told me, was that in which the client’s clinical death occurred in a relatively predictable fashion, so that Alcor’s standby personnel could be present at the scene in time to begin the process of cooling the body, before its final journey, by air or road, to Phoenix.

  The success of the procedure depends, to a large extent, on the predictability of the death. So cancer, on aggregate, is good: if you want a strong chance of an extended life span, terminal cancer is an excellent place to start from. A heart attack is less good, because it’s extremely difficult to predict when it’s going to get you. An aneurysm or a stroke is worse again, because if it’s strong enough to kill you, it’s likely to leave you with brain damage, and that’s going to be tricky to deal with down the line—although not, of course, impossible, because we are talking here about future science. Accidents and other disasters are really at the bottom of the scale. There wasn’t much that could be done, for instance, with the body of the Alcor client who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. More recently, another member died in a plane crash in Alaska.

  “That was not ideal,” Max informed me, his face a death-mask of irony.

  If you’re a whole body patient, you, or your whole body, will be placed on a tilted operating table, surrounded on four sides by sheets of Perspex. Small holes will then be drilled into your skull, so that your cryonics team can judge the condition of your brain, observe its state of swelling or contraction. Then they will open up your chest to gain access to your heart, connecting your major veins and arteries to a bank of perfusion machinery, so that your blood and bodily fluids can be flushed out and replaced as quickly as possible by a cryoprotectant agent—“Kind of like a medical-grade antifreeze, if you like”—which will guard against the formation of ice crystals. If you want to be preserved in any kind of reasonable shape long enough for future science to restore you to life, you don’t want ice crystals forming in your cells. Ice crystals are high on the list of things that will seriously fuck up your post-resurrection quality-of-life prospects.

  “So what you want to do,” said Max, “is vitrify, rather than freeze. Vitrification forms a kind of resinous block that just holds everything in place. No sharp angles and edges.”

  If you’re a neuro-patient, there is the matter of your decapitation to be attended to. This procedure is performed on the operating table. In the technical vernacular of cryonics, your detached head is referred to as the cephalon. (This, I later learned, was a primarily zoological term, referring to the head section of segmented arthropods such as marine-dwelling trilobites. Why this term was deemed preferable to “head” I could not begin to say, apart from that it deflected attention away from the fact that what we were talking about was severed heads—a deflection that was, I felt, not entirely successful.) And this cephalon, once removed from the body, is taken to a Perspex container known as “the cephalon box,” inside of which it is held in an inverted position by a circular arrangement of clamps, until such procedures have been carried out as will enable its cryonic suspension.

  At no point during this tour did Max betray any acknowledgment of the strangeness of the things he was telling me; the morbid ritual of B-movie dismemberment was outlined as though it were a straightforward matter of medical expediency—which, in the hopeful thanatology of cryonics, is exactly what it is.

  The 117 patients currently suspended at Alcor were located in what was known as the “patient care bay.” This was a large and high-ceilinged warehouse, filled with eight-foot-tall stainless steel cylinders, each of which was branded with Alcor’s blue and white logo. This logo was a stylized letter A. Its predecessor was a more richly emblematic image of a white human figure with raised arms, contained within the larger blue figure of a phoenix, wings aloft. (While we’re on the topic, let’s allow ourselves to dwell momentarily on the novelistic strangeness of this future-resurrection venture having wound up headquartered on the outskirts of a city named after this mythical desert bird, with its cyclical existence of immolation and renewal. It’s a detail at which you, reader, would probably wrinkle your delicate and finely attuned nose if you came across it in a work of fiction. And you’d be right to, of course: it’s obviously a bit much.)

  The cylinders are referred to as dewars; they are, essentially, gigantic thermos flasks filled with liquid nitrogen, each of which contains sufficient room for four whole-body patients, in a circular arrangement of compartments around a central column in which several cephalons can be stacked. The individual patients are stored in sleeping bags inside aluminum pods. Cephalon-only dewars, Max told me, could store as many as forty-five severed heads, each of which is contained inside a small metal cylinder, resembling the sort of stainless steel wastepaper basket you’d pick up in the bathroom section of IKEA. (Storage costs are the main reason it’s cheaper to sign up as a neuro-patient than a whole body patient.)

  As we walked among the shadows of the towering dewars, I tried to imagine the suspended bodies and heads within, this rigid delegation of the dead awaiting its chance to partake of a world to come. I knew that the body of a man named Dick Clair, the creator of the 1970s sitcom The Facts of Life, had been contained in one of these dewars since his death from AIDS in 1988. As was the head of the baseball legend Ted Williams. And I understood, too, that we were in the presence of the remains of the w
riter known as FM-2030—the Iranian futurist who legally changed his name from Fereidoun M. Esfandiary to reflect his conviction that the problem of human mortality would be solved by the year 2030—though I could not say precisely which dewar contained them, because for security reasons members of the public were not to be informed of the specific resting places of individual cryonauts. Max had mentioned to me that his wife, Natasha, had been involved with FM-2030 when they first met, and so I became briefly preoccupied, there in the care bay, with the gothic richness, as an idea, of this man charged with the maintenance of the corpse of his wife’s former lover, a techno-utopian who believed in his own exemption from death.

  But to reiterate: for Max, as for anyone who signs up to cryonics and its taxonomy, these are by no means corpses.

  “Cryonics,” as he put it, “is really just an extension of emergency medicine.”

  It would be easy, in the light of this seemingly bald denial of clinical orthodoxy, to portray cryonics as some kind of cult, or to view this place as a satirical diorama on the theme of modern scientism and its tragicomic excesses. But no one here is claiming that your return to life is assured if you simply sign up. Max himself admits that the whole setup is a Hail Mary pass into the end zone of the future. But the key sales pitch here is that it’s got to be at least worth a shot, because although you may not be guaranteed resurrection if you sign up, you’re seriously diminishing your chances if you don’t. (You would not by any means be the first person to think here of Pascal’s Wager.)

  “Personally,” said Max as we made our way through the patient care bay toward the exit, “I’m hoping to avoid having to be preserved. My ideal scenario is I stay healthy and take care of myself, and more funding goes into life extension research, and we actually achieve longevity escape velocity.” He was referring here to the scenario, projected by the life extension impresario Aubrey de Grey, a scientific advisor at Alcor, whereby for every year that passes, the progress of longevity research is such that average human life expectancy increases by more than a year—a situation that would, in theory, lead to our effectively outrunning death.