Summary

150,000 people die of "natural" causes every day. Fatalism--once an adaptive response--now prevents people from pursuing anti-aging technology. Curing major classes of disease, like heart disease and cancer buys surprisingly little additional life expectancy. That's because human's have a built-in self-destruct mechanism called aging. Unless aging is prevented, every human will die before the age of 135. But even curing aging itself will only buy an additional 1000 - 2800 years of life. Uploading our minds to future robotic brains is the only way we can give humanity long-term control over the duration of their lives. However, uploading is still a distant prospect. Brain preservation technologies (such as cryonics and chemofixation) offer a way for people dying today to preserve their minds until future technology can both cure their disease and the effects of the preservation process.

Five Holocausts a year: the scale of "natural" death

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, three people will have died a "natural" death somewhere in the world. Most of those natural deaths will be due to age-related disease, such as heart disease, cancer, and dementia.

That's 1.74 deaths/second, 104 deaths/minute, 6250 deaths/hour, and 150,000,000+ deaths/day. (Freitas, 2002)

To give you a sense of the scale, the same number of people will die of aging-related causes in two and half months as were killed in the Holocaust (~11 million people).

That's roughly five Holocausts each year.

Here's how annual aging related deaths compare to other historical tragedies:

Moreover, most of those deaths will be preceded by years of increasing decrepitude as each of the human organ systems fail one by one.

Apathy no longer adaptive

For most of human history there was nothing to be done about aging and death. It was just part of the human condition. To dwell too much upon our future deaths would waste time and energy that could be better spent living in the present. Therefore, it was evolutionarily adaptive to shy away from thinking about death, either by simply ignoring it, or by assuaging the fear with religious belief. (Greenberg and Arndt,

However, science has now advanced to the point that we can actually do something about aging and death. Advances in the molecular biology of aging, neuroscience, software, and many other fields, mean that we're both beginning to understand the mechanism of aging, and also to intervene.

But what should we be our highest priority? How can we spend our money to maximize the amount of healthy life we all can enjoy?

Curing cancer and heart disease buys surprisingly little life

Here's how much life expectancy would increase if we completely eliminated a given cause of death:

The top two causes of death in the U.S. are heart disease and cancer. Surprisingly, however, curing all cancers completely would only increase life expectancy by three years. Curing all heart disease related causes of death would only increase life expectancy by about ten years. (Thomas, 2013)

That’s because humans have a built-in self-destruct mechanism that will kill us all by age 135: aging. (Skinner, 2009)

However, even if we cured aging (leaving accidents and homicide/suicide as the remaining causes of death), life expectancy would only increase to 1200 - 3000 years. (Magalhães, 2012)

While 3000 years might seem like an ocean of time now, it will seem all too short once it becomes commonplace. And many of our friends and family will still die from misadventure far too young.

Backing up the Library of Human Life

A company that didn't have multiple backups of its most important data, stored separately in secure locations, would be considered dangerously irresponsible.

Yet the only copy of our minds runs on a single blob of jello.

Can we make our minds more durable? Can we make backups?

If you accept the materialist view that our minds result from the patterns of interconnections between the neurons in our brain, then it follows that preserving those patterns in sufficient detail will also preserve our most important features—our minds.

And if it is this pattern, rather than the particulars of our brain’s biological substrate, then it should be possible to upload our minds to a more durable medium, such as future iterations of robotic brains.

And if we can upload to sturdy silicon brains, then it should also be possible to make backups.

Death then, would only come from events so catastrophic that it destroyed not only our primary mind, but also our backups.

Brain Preservation: An ambulance to future technology

However, curing aging, let alone uploading, are still distant goals. All of us are likely to long dead before either is fully realized. So what do we do now?

In my view, our highest medical research priority should be to find better ways to preserve our brains until technology is mature enough to upload our minds.

Toward that end, the Brain Preservation Foundation prizes offer the most bang for the buck. (Smart, 2016) The prizes right now are a pittance, given the potential payoff. Here’s their long-term goal:

"The nonprofit Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) hereby officially announces a cash prize for the first individual or team to rigorously demonstrate a surgical technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable using today’s electron microscopic (EM) imaging techniques.”

This essay attempts to make the case for brain preservation as accessible as possible. If you'd like to see the case for brain preservation made in much greater detail, check out Tim Urban's "Wait But Why" essay Why Cryonics Makes Sense.

We’re each a living book in Library of Alexandria of human life. Let's find a way tell stories of a length of our own choosing, rather than the cruel page count set by Mother Nature.

Bibliography

Freitas, Robert A. "Death is an Outrage!" November 16, 2002. Accessed September 8, 2016.
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outrage-1/

Greenberg and Arndt, "Terror Management Theory", Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology. 499 - 415.
https://www.uni-ulm.de/fileadmin/website_uni_ulm/iui.inst.160/Psychologie/Sozialpsychologie/19_Greenberg_Arndt_Terror_Management_Theory.pdf

Pedro de Magalhães, João. "Social Implications of curing aging.” Senesence. Accessed September 8, 2016.
http://www.senescence.info/immortal_society.html

Skinner, Brian. “Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates.” Gravity and Levity. July 8, 2009.
Accessed September 8, 2016
https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt-built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/

Smart, John. Brain Preservation Foundation. 2016. Accessed September 8, 2016.
http://www.brainpreservation.org/

Thomas, Kas. "Taeuber's Paradox and the Life Expectancy Brick Wall”
Assert True. February 25, 2013. Accessed September 8, 2016.
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/taeubers-paradox-and-life-expectancy.html#

Urban, Tim. "Why Cryonics Makes Sense" Wait But Why. Accessed September 13, 2016
http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html