We are on our way to living longer (if we don't destroy the planet). Science and technology are going to help us progress, but let's forget about living forever. Immortality poses nearly impossible challenges for complex creatures like humans. It is one of the main conclusions of the dialogue held last night in the Sala Beckett in Barcelona, within the Clàssics Festival, by the biologist Ginés Morata and the doctor in applied physics and specialist in artificial intelligence Ramon López de Mántaras, both from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).
Both scientists exchanged knowledge about the state of their scientific disciplines. López de Mántaras clarified to the public that, although ChatGPT has sparked interest in artificial intelligence for a year, it is a discipline that began to be studied in the middle of the last century and that he himself began his doctoral thesis in 1976. “They have achieved many results and they all have in common that they are very specific AIs. Each one does it very well in one area, independently of the others, but there is no single algorithm that works for everything.”
López de Mántaras observed that today there is not a single area in which it is not applied. But there are many challenges to overcome: "Controlling the autonomy of machines, for example, as lethal weapons, the literacy of the population in this technology and achieving sustainable consumption," he noted. A human brain consumes 100 watts. A large language model consumes terawatts of energy.
Ginés Morata, a specialist in the study of the Drosophila melanogaster fly, also known as the fruit or vinegar fly, explained that it shares 65% of the genes with human beings. From there, with the latest genetic editing techniques, we understand much better how we are made and how we function.
Morata maintains that “death is not necessarily inevitable for many biological subjects.” Some examples may be bacteria and other less complex beings that replicate themselves infinitely. We humans cannot do that, as we do transmit genes between generations. “The germ line is immortal.” Not our bodies.
Those cell lines that can reproduce indefinitely. In a human body there are 30 trillion cells, with a high probability of mutations. Death is not inevitable in these cases, although life can be extended for many more years than now.
To be optimistic, Morata pointed out that if we transferred the science of genetic experiments with simple organisms to human beings, "there is the possibility of genetically intervening in people so that they live much longer, about 350 or 400 years." But that opens up another problem: how many people should we intervene on, humanity as a whole?
“It could be desirable, it can be discussed, but it would be possible,” says Morata. And López de Mántaras notes that “if this were sustainable, it would be interesting to solve social problems. Unless only a few can afford it, but then it is no longer progress.”
Then the story of the Neanderthals arises. They went extinct like other hominid species before them. We too can disappear from the face of the Earth. “But they – Morata evidence – did not have our science.” Both agree that immortality is a challenge of fiction, not science.
