The next big Trans fight isn't what you think

The oligarchy's chase for immortality through transhumanism is frighteningly real, and will explode the wealth divide, likely creating species within humanity itself.

Art developed with Leonardo AI.

Compound interest. Of all the strands of imagination and provocations and fear and excitement that engage one during Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Weiner's terrific book, "Long For This World: The Strange Science of Immortality," the one that rushes to the fore for me is compound interest.

And civil war.

In "Long For This World" Weiner takes the reader on an accessible-to-the-masses scientific journey through the world's research into aging and the increasing ranks of researchers who look at getting old as a disease, no different than, say, polio, with a cure within man's grasp.

Weiner wrote the book in 2010. At that point, when I read “Long For This World,” it existed somewhere at the intersection of science and science fiction. Its accounts and informed speculations were the stuff of mind-bending night runs or over-a-beer conversations.

Today, as the tech-bro oligarchy chases superman status for its exclusive club, the fallout of the quest for immortality is an urgent question in the broader discussion of life expectancies.

The new masters of the universe see death, mortality, as but glitches in code to be corrected, erased, through transhumanism, the merging of technology and human biology to extend life, possibly forever.

"I think it's absolutely not that hard to solve," Elon Musk said in a recent Peter H. Diamandis podcast.

Then there is the would-be immortalist Bryan Johnson who downs pills, takes injections, undergoes other rigors, in pursuit of his vision — not dying. Ever. Netflix carries a documentary on the provocative Johnson with the straightforward and chilling title — “Don’t’ Die.”

Just this past weekend, Johnson hosted a “Don’t Die Summit” in New York City.

Here is part of what he said, according to Yahoo News.

“Those that exist in the 25th century, I hope they look back at this moment and they say, ‘That was the flicker. You could see that humans were beginning to get the moment that something really big was happening. They were giving birth to super intelligence. Things were changing very quickly, and they were now reimagining what could they become? How long could they live?”

“We want a wonderful day to dance and to do tests and stuff like that, but really it’s this bigger moment of what we can become as a species.”

The speculation that life spans could nearly double in the next 50 years for the most fortunate human beings raises a laundry list of socio-economic and political issues, chiefly the growing divide between the rich and the poor as we march to swim in a fountain of youth, a celebration of 50 as the New 25 or middle age crises starting at 70.

"If a cure for aging became available to the rich before the poor, which is the way the world always turns, then the unfairness of life might become absolutely unsustainable. How would our world of haves and have nots go on spinning?" Weiner wrote in 2010. "If the haves lived for a thousand years while the children of the have nots went right on dying of hunger. At the age of 5."

Much of the world is dealing with life expectancies the U.S. passed by decades ago. In America, we're worried about our population being fat and dying because we eat too much.

Talk about a recruiting tool for revolution and terrorists.

A society with grandparents who are still buying Christmas gifts for their grandparents will be dramatically different in many respects. Today, we often can buy some extra years, but we generally think of this in terms of just that years. Imagine when the rich can buy decades of life, longevity not available to the poor in this nation and others. How will how will we structure entitlement systems?

There are 8.2 billion people in the world. The canyon-sized income divide in our nation, prosperous by comparison to other reaches of the globe, feels on the brink of civil war as a result. Imagine the brew of resentment and entitlement if we have a few hundred people reaching extraordinary life expectancies while many rural American men die deaths of despair in their 50s — outpacing children who don’t hit age 5 in the Third World because of war and poverty.

Think of compound interest. If you invested $1,000 a month for 100 years, based on a return of 7 percent annually, you’d have $185 million in the year 2125. The billionaires are starting out with more than that.

Transhumanism, if if plays out, and there’s every reason to believe life expectancies of the fantastically wealthy will be extended, could create species within humanity itself, the realization of Friedrich Nietzsche's “superman” status for some, and what could only be described in contrast as a “subhuman” life for billions of humans, who had been divided on so much but shared the ultimate end, death. Musk and Trump are killing taxes. Ending death may be next — eliminating the two certainties in life.

As with social media and artificial intelligence, the technology of transhumanism will continue to arrive, function, well before ethics, or regulations, more proof that the out-of-touch gerontocracy in the halls of Congress is no match for brash, break-things-fast Brotopia. Moreover, just as we desperately need regulators to boundary dangerous technologies, the Trump administration is firing federal employees at such a blistering pace that an accidental nuclear launch may very well solve all of our problems with incineration of the globe and heavenly sorting of all that took place here over the the last few years.

But set armageddon aside for now.

If aging is cured, the way people will die is through accidents, which would radically change the way we think about risk.

According to Weiner's book, in 18th Century France, the Marquis de Condorcet, a friend of Benjamin Franklin's, predicted that "a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect of extraordinary accidents."

About The Iowa Mercury

(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )