Longevity in Sci-Fi Literature
How good are our predictions really?
My friend Sufal, who you might’ve seen publish once or twice here, recently shared with me an article titled “Sci-Fi Idea Bank” by Packy McCormick of the Not Boring newsletter. In his article, Packy unpacks (pardon the pun) the fascinating realm of science fiction technologies, documenting when they first came up in literature and if they ever made the jump from inspiration to invention. Using a combination of Technovelgy, the internet’s best page on this very subject, and ChatGPT, the Sci-Fi Idea Bank was born!
As a fan of books like Project: Hail Mary, Children of Time, and the many short stories found in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, to say I was intrigued would be selling myself short. But I was on the hunt for one thing in particular, technologies related to longevity. You see, when people ask me stories related to anti-aging or immortality, my thoughts first drift to those several millennia old like The Epic of Gilgamesh or stories of long lived individuals in the Bible. But I was curious, which technologies in the science fiction literature were related to living longer and did we pursue any of them today? I turned to Packy’s Idea Bank and Technovelgy to find out!
Like any good PubMed or Google Scholar sleuth would, I did a quick search for keywords along the lines of age, aging, longevity, life, preservation, extension, and immortal. In total, I found 16 technologies that were related to life extension or that enhanced our health in some way. Notably, the Negrian Death Ray from Invaders From The Infinite was not included although if it can “cause the cessation of life processes”, maybe that universe also has the scientific prowess to start or enhance these processes as well. Similarly, the Cardioplate from Repent Harlequin' Said the Ticktockman which could take a precise amount of time off your life was not considered as well. I do wonder if the Master Timekeeper could ever administer more time if he so chose however, hmm.
Anyways, here’s some statistics on those 16 technologies taken as a snippet from Packy’s Idea Bank. Check out the full table for yourself if you’d like!
Quick Stats:
The average year of conception appears in 1961 with the earliest description being in 1897 and the latest in 2010.
Samuel R Delany takes the cake for coming up with the most technologies with both the Morgue (cryonics) and the Discorporate Sector (an electronic afterlife) appearing in his 1966 book, Babel-17.
The most common technologies were related to treatments/substances that extend life (4/16), followed by suspended animation or cold storage (3/16), disease prevention/regeneration capsules (2/16), and some form of mind uploading (2/16).
According to the database, cryonics is the only technology to have been “built”. While a handful of people are certainly being frozen, there has yet to be case of successful reanimation after vitrification so don’t get your hopes up just yet. However, the work done by LyGenesis is eerily reminiscent to what Cordwainer Smith dreamed of in his 1961 novel, A Planet Named Shayol. Similarly, the Nutrient Extractor and Maximizer device which “extend the capabilities of the human digestive system” is not such a far off idea compared to the artificial stomachs used in research labs today let alone the mass interest in probiotics for gut health.
However, if we were to categorize these into longevity paradigms (see Ada Nguyen’s article for an overview) we get a very different picture. 6/16 are best categorized as “Reset and Repair” where the focus in on age-related pathways. Anti-Gerasone best fits this category although I also took the liberty of including body preservation technologies which appear to stop or drastically slow aging processes. 4/16 are clearly in the “Replace” category focusing on biological or artificial blood, organs, and body parts. 4/16 claim to extend life but are too vague to categorize despite my best digging on the Internet for more answers. However, these also likely fall into one of the aforementioned groups.
Like the science fiction literature, most longevity biotechnology companies also focus on “Reset and Repair” or “Replace” paradigms. However, a handful of companies working in the space focus on the paradigms of “Reprogramming” which turns older cells embryonic-like and “Discovery” which aims to identify targets through machine learning and datasets.
Why aren’t “Reprogramming” or “Discovery” seen in the science fiction literature?
The rate of technological development has increased so rapidly that the science fiction literature does not yet encompass many emerging technologies. Science inspires science-fiction and vice versa but given that “Reprogramming” and “Discovery” are relatively new, science fiction writers may have less academic material to draw from and certainly less time be exposed to these ideas. I mean, even scientists have a hard time staying up to date!
These technologies may have been subtly referenced but due to their complexity, were not described or explored in full. For example, there are a plethora of supercomputers in science fiction but how many were focused on drug discovery? “Discovery” is a long process and many of these stories were before the time of high-throughput screening let alone the -omics, molecular docking, and machine learning era we have now. As such, drugs may have thought to be magically invented rather than found, isolated, and tested. A similar idea applies to “Reprogramming” which is such a specialized and specific area of science compared to the overall broader idea of “Replace”. A science fiction writer would certainly need quite the imagination and scientific background to have written about something akin to Yamanaka factors and pluripotency decades prior.
“Discovery” and “Reprogramming” are not as promising as other paradigms in the pursuit of longevity. According to a survey by the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, professionals working in the aging biology and longevity biotech space believe organ replacement is expected to lead to the biggest gains in lifespan over the next 25 years. So not only is rejuvenation at an organ level easier to understand conceptually but if the scientific community views organ replacement as being feasible and significant in our near future, why would science fiction writers ever choose to deviate?
Science fiction doesn’t care about big data in longevity or cell reprogramming because these are fundamentally boring to write about. Possibly true. It’s much more fun to imagine silver bullet pills than data churning in terms of a longevity intervention. Public perception of aging “cures” may also be radically different than what scientists are working on (a.k.a. very unlikely to be a one time pill that reverses your biological age by 50 years).
Nevertheless, we can say that science fiction writing represent our problems or hopes of the time and our potential methods to address these are often based on our current knowledge of the universe. Of course, some ideas like flight or communication are timeless and continue to saturate the literature but it’s no surprise that the majority of DNA-related writings come after discovering its structure. One can only hope that for longevity, both more academic and science fiction literature will be here in the years to come! After all, many technologies are predicted, and some truly do come to fruition.
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