Cixin Liu's Essay: The Ladder of Immortality
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Cixin Liu’s Essay: The Ladder of Immortality
October 15, 2023
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by Liu Cixin<br>Translated by Masterdai
Introduction
The Western academic community has begun to discuss a new concept: Technological Singularity.
The term "singularity" is borrowed from cosmology, where it describes the heart of a black hole — a point where mass is infinitely compressed to a size-less spot, causing the smooth fabric of spacetime to rupture. Within this singularity, our current laws of physics cease to apply. The Technological Singularity suggests that technological advancements might, after a certain point of accumulation, undergo a sudden and transformative shift, radically altering the state of the human world in an incredibly short time.
In this article, we will delve into two potential Technological Singularities that might emerge in the near future.
The Ladder of Immortality
If I were to assert that all people throughout history have been fundamentally equal — and by "history," I mean since the dawn of time, not just post-French Revolution — what would you feel? If the majority deem this absurd, it’s perhaps because they’ve yet to witness even greater inequalities, or more precisely, the technological circumstances that could engender such disparities.
Imagine journeying across the plains of life when, suddenly, a wall confronts you. This wall stretches infinitely upward, plummets infinitely deep, and spans infinitely to both the left and right. The nature of this wall shouldn’t be too difficult to discern. In bygone eras, commoners might have encountered this barrier after three to four decades, while emperors and aristocrats might have journeyed for seventy to eighty years. However, the difference between them typically wouldn’t exceed half a century. As we’ll see later, this discrepancy is negligible. Everyone confronts this wall within a time frame that doesn’t differ by an order of magnitude. It embodies the greatest equality, a baseline of egalitarianism established for humanity either by God or nature itself.
Yet, as technology progresses, the wall of mortality that stands before some is set to be dismantled, rendering their life’s plain boundlessly vast.
You might believe I’m delving into the realm of science fiction, that immortality is a distant, unattainable dream — something that, even if possible, lies in the far future and bears no relevance to us. This perspective might have been accurate a century ago, or even fifty years prior. However, advancements in molecular biology, medicine, and information science have placed our society at a delicate turning point. Even so, we acknowledge that within our lifetimes, true immortality will remain unattainable. So, what’s the connection between the potential for eternal life and our current existence? Note that while there might not be a direct expressway to immortality now, a ladder has appeared. Once someone takes that very first step, they might continue ascending indefinitely. If immortality is realized in half a millennium, you don’t need to live another five hundred years—just an additional fifty would suffice.
The first step on the ladder to immortality is to live another fifty years. For the readers of this article, approximately one-fifth may find this goal challenging to achieve. Regrettably, it’s hard for you to fathom what you might miss. For half of the remaining individuals, adhering to a healthy lifestyle, coupled with the continual progress of medical technology, makes living another half-century entirely plausible. For the youngest half, a further fifty years is almost a given.
With that, you would have set foot on the second rung of the ladder to everlasting life. This step is composed of two imminent technologies: human hibernation and cloning. Hibernation isn’t about freezing individuals at liquid nitrogen temperatures and then reviving them; such a super-technique seems elusive in the foreseeable future. Hibernation refers to a state where, at relatively low temperatures, say negative forty degrees, the human body’s metabolism, and other physiological processes drastically slow, perhaps to one-tenth of the normal rate. This way, you could live a century within a ten-year lifespan. Warm-blooded mammals, like bears, innately possess a variant of this capability. There’s no theoretical hindrance to its application in humans. It’s a technology on the cusp of a breakthrough, entirely possible within fifty years.
Alternatively, if hibernation remains unattainable in the short term, there’s a fallback: cloning. Given current research trajectories, full human cloning is almost certain to become a reality within fifty years. With it, you could clone organs...