Would you like to live forever? Or, like the biblical Methuselah, for, say, twelve hundred years? For every one of us who wouldn’t, there will be some one who would. Yet many doctors and scientists now believe that the first person is already alive for whom either immortality or near-immortality is possible. So Appleyard, an incisive journalist and author of iconoclastic books, has done us all stout service by raising this fascinating, and possibly intractable, issue.
He touches all the bases: the literature, philosophy, history, science, psychology and medicine that is germane. His approach is wonderfully eclectic, and crammed with fascinating facts. Michigan’s Cryonics Institute, for example, “has been forced to reclassify itself as a cemetery”. In search of the right questions, let alone their answers, he has travelled the world and interviewed those who believe - and those who don’t. His prose is crisp, lucid and, at times, splendidly wry.
His conclusion? A measured “against”: immortality would beget more problems than benefits. “If we live forever, not only will our particular loves die, love itself will die of thirst, a thirst for death.” Or there is the issue of children: how many, determined by whom? But the ancient Greeks had a word for an indelible characteristic of our species: pleonexia, the wish for too much. The search for immortality will go on - until we die.
How to Live Forever or Die Trying: On the New Immortality by Bryan Appleyard
Pocket Books, £7.99