Well and good.  Now the question to be asked is not, “Is it possible to radically extend human lifespan?”  In my view, anything not specifically outlawed by the laws of physics (as we understand them) is in the end necessary to keep the shadow game up and running.  There are prophecies that need fulfilling, after all.   And there’s nothing in the second law of thermodynamics that says keeping a body running indefinitely — let’s drop ‘forever’ as a metaphysical conceit — is impossible.  Just very hard perhaps.  Fine, then, our cathedrals no longer aspire to the sky, but show themselves on the gels and microarrays run everyday around the world.  The effort is there.   How hard this task will be does not allow easy prediction.

So what’s the end result?  Let’s imagine a scenario, conservative by the standards of Aubrey de Grey/Ray Kurzweil and their clique, that future technologies extend the human lifespan to several hundred years.  Now, the limiting cases are 1) these treatments are widely available and hence adopted OR 2) the treatments are extremely expensive and judged ‘elective’ and hence only available to a small fraction.  Now, the first essentially demands the radical restructuring of society as we know it to avoid a Malthusian outcome.  I don’t think you have to be a Maoist to agree that the only way (short of colonizing other planets) to hold off a total catastrophe in this scenario would be to have strong (read: involuntary) limits on human reproduction.  Malthus may have been wrong, but at some point the planet’s carrying capacity does come into play.   De Grey apparently admits as such (listen to the link above for a take on this) though he adds some kind of utopian spin whereby we all agree to such restrictions voluntarily.  A total joke, obviously, in any real scenario, which in this view resembles Brave New World or Children of Men much more than our present-day.

I think we can agree the second outcome is the more likely of the two, as currently even life-saving HIV drugs are in short supply for those who can’t get insurance coverage or pay the exorbitant fees for them.  This possibility, the “conservative” one, means that the human race splits in two, bringing inequality to its apex.

So whence medical ethics here?  Western medicine has as its goal the delay of death for as long as possible.  There is a point where life-preserving technologies may be withheld, but not in general, and death is not included in our conceptions of medicine.  This gap is brought to its extreme when we consider the actual possibility of immortality.  Is immortality a medical or cosmetic procedure?  What if curing cancer (for instance) implies life extension.  Is it ethical for only those at the top of the pile to have access then?  Or in the other case, must we commit collective suicide to ensure some kind of equality?  There is no answer within the present constellation.  Medical ethics will eat itself.

We keep running faster but time and the machine are running too, and the angel recedes.   I guess we hold them inside us, time and the machine that is.

Looking at the photos also gives another feeling, one connected with the palpable “end of history” that is piped in.  The serenity of the present-day vacant lots has no reference to the wound which ultimately created them.  What’s weird about history is that it actually happened and it actually had an effect, when everything is saying the opposite (except of course, when it comes to 9/11).   Thus ghosts do exist.

My thoughts are not me.  I am not my thoughts.

I’ve been in Chattanooga two days now, plus ou moins.  Met up with old friends on Friday and caught an art show in the recently white-washed Main St. “district.”  Then we chilled with the big crowd at the city-sponsored free music-thing before ending up at Alan’s apartment, where I fell almost asleep on the deck until it started to rain. 

I am realizing the extent of my domestication by big-city living, graduate school, and (gasp!) aging.  “Go home, nothing good happens after 12 o’clock!” Kevin and I shout in Somerville coming home on weekend nights.  They can sort of keep a lid on things what with controlling the means of transport and all.  Of course some people must party all night, and there are many cars, but I do not know these people, do not want their means, and in any case, “if God does not exist then everything forbidden.”

 First of all, you can buy beer in convenience stores down here, or rather, since Mass turns out not to be the center of the universe, you can’t buy beer in the convenience stores up there.  I have become a lightweight. Liberal-Puritanism 1, Other Side 0.   Alan and Steve go on a beer run at 11:30, and take a requests, I sort of shrug noncommitally.  “mm, I don’t know I just want like 1 beer.  Can you pick up something unfiltered?” They look at each other.  “Umm, maybe, we’ll see what we can do.” 

Now is this an unreasonable request?  Certainly if it really was 11:30, and probably in any case, when the evening gets down to the fundamentals, as in we’re not talking about something to complement a nice home-cooked meal at a dinner party.  Anyway, what I got (and I so wish I had a picture) was a 40 of Icehouse with “Unfiltered” written in magic marker on it.  So I’m a weird pseudo-yuppie now apparently.  Bad clothes still, but I tuck in my shirt and sometimes shave. 

And then last night, from which the above picture comes, there was the third night of this massive punkfest somewhere out easterly.  This orgiastic crazyness deserves many many entries of its own, not to mention video, but all I have time to offer is: American Cheeseburger is mighty fine.