In 2016 the geneticist Nir Barzilai hosted a screening of a documentary about longevity, and afterward he posed a question to the three hundred people in the audience. He said, “In nature, longevity and reproduction are exchangeable. So Choice One is, you are immortalized, but there is no more reproduction on Earth, no pregnancy, no first birthday, no first love. Choice Two, is you live to be eighty-five and not one day sick, everything healthy and fine, and then one morning you just don’t wake up.”
The vote was decisive, he said. “Choice One got ten or fifteen people. Everyone else raised their hands for Choice Two.”
This wish to preserve life as we know it, even at the cost of dying, is profoundly human. We are encoded with the belief that death is the mother of beauty. And we are encoded, too, with the contradictory determination to remain exactly as we are, forever — or at least for just a bit longer, before we have to go.
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Adapted from Tad Friend’s article, “The God Pill.”