When we are uprooted from reality, we are tempted to chase illusions. It is not hard for anyone holding on to reality and our rootedness in nature, to understand that physical immortality, like infinite economic growth, is impossible.. But many billionaires believe it is possible, and they are throwing enough money at it for some elements of their project to become real. It’s a terrifying prospect, and one that should be resisted.
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In Part 1, I described some of the ways that billionaire Bryan Johnson punishes his body in an attempt to discover what might slow his ageing process. One procedure that he seems not to have explored yet is stem-cell freezing - extracting, freezing, and storing stem cells, to be used later to combat age-related disease, or even ageing itself. Stem cell freezing has been popularised by Johnson’s former fiancée Taryn Southern (in his single-minded pursuit of immortality Johnson dumped her when she was diagnosed with breast cancer). Southern is a ‘content creator’ who believes “attention is the new form of currency.” Her YouTube video showing her stem cells being extracted and frozen follows an earlier YouTube video, showing her eggs being extracted and frozen. Both videos are thinly-disguised adverts for an industry that both feeds off and promotes body dissociation, particularly for women.
The life extension measures promoted by Bryan Johnson and Taryn Southern are extreme. They pale into insignificance, though, compared to those advocated by Martine Rothblatt, which include organ replacement, cryonics, and digital cloning.
Martine Rothblatt (b 1954)
Martine Rothblatt is a man who has fathered three children and is the adoptive father of a fourth. He has been married to a woman, Bina, since 1982, but decided in 1994 that he would ‘transition’.
Viewed from the outside, Rothblatt’s adoption of a ‘trans’ identity appears to be as much political as autogynephilic. A lawyer by training, Rothblatt was, as early as 1993, instrumental in drafting the International Bill of Gender Rights (IBGR). This sought to establish in law that “all human beings have the right to define their own gender identity regardless of chromosomal sex, genitalia, assigned birth sex, or initial gender role”, and that “everyone has the right to access medical intervention (cosmetic, chemical or surgical) which enables them to change their bodies as a means of expressing a self-defined gender identity.”
The IBGR document didn’t define ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’. Lack of a clear definition is legally problematic, particularly when many people understand ‘gender’ to be another word for sex. Rothblatt himself seems to see ‘gender’ as another word for personalty - in a 2015 TED interview he suggested that “There are 7 billion unique ways to express one’s gender … I change my gender almost as often as I change my hairstyle.” .
The IBGR was not law, but its principles are interpreted by LGBT NGOs as if they are law. (Rothblatt was an early advocate of force teaming ‘trans rights’ with gay rights to gain greater public acceptance). In the UK, the LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall has successfully persuaded a variety of organisations, including government agencies, that its misrepresentations of law are law. This has a number of consequences that conflict with the rights of women and gays, and with child safeguarding. These include, for example, allowing rapists who self-define as ‘women’ to be housed in a woman’s prison. Stonewall has also drawn on the IBGR principles to support its attempts to take down first the LGB Alliance, and then the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and at the same time to support the gender industry’s drive to ‘trans away the gay.’
“I’m highly focused, and I talk about not letting any laws or walls get in my way …. When I say don’t let laws get in your way, that doesn’t mean to break the laws, that means to change the laws.”
(Martine Rothblatt, conversation on moonshots, Abundance Digital 2019)
Jennifer Bilek has demonstrated, here and in her 11th hour blog, how Rothblatt’s framing of ‘trans rights’ as human rights, analogous to gay rights, has diverted attention away from an underlying aim to normalise and legitimate disembodiment. Disembodiment enables commodification of body parts, a source of enormous profit opportunities for the medical industrial complex. Rothblatt goes further than many ‘trans’ activist billionaires in promoting transgenderism as a stepping stone to transhumanism. Get people to believe that humans can change sex, his thinking goes, and nothing is off limits.
Rothblatt’s writing
The title of Rothblatt’s 1995 book, The Apartheid of Sex, encourages readers to believe that defending sex-based rights is akin to supporting white supremacy, so that they don’t question the subsequent nonsense that there are “billions of sexes” (the title of chapter 1). I suspect Rothblatt now thinks that this message has entered the mainstream, and that it is time to focus more on the link to transhumanism - a link that is made explicit in the title of the revised edition of The Apartheid of Sex - From Transgender to Transhuman (2011). The shift in emphasis is clear from the first paragraph of the Preface to this 2nd edition.
“In the fifteen years since The Apartheid of Sex was published I’ve come to realise that choosing one’s gender is merely an important subset of choosing one’s form. By ‘form’ I mean that which encloses our beingness - flesh for the life we are accustomed to, plastic for the robots of science fiction, mere data for the avatars taking over our computer screens. I came to this realisation by understanding that 21st century software made it technologically possible to separate our minds from our bodies.”
The main focus of the first edition was on claiming there is a unique personal identity (a soul, Rothblatt suggests) that does not have to be confined to a male/female binary. By the second edition, the claim is that the unique personal identity does not have to be confined to a human/non-human binary either - “Transhumans welcome ‘one mind, many forms’ the way transgenders welcome ‘one mind many genders’”
Rothblatt’s end goal is to download our minds into a computer - “We can define ‘transhumans’ as people who have hybridised themselves with computational technology as part of humanity’s effort to control its evolutionary destiny.” This, he suggests in his 2015 book, Virtually Human, will make possible everlasting life - “Liberty from death via digital immortality.”
“The 20th century brought us the marvels of transplanting organs and changing sexes. The 21st century will bring us the marvels of transplanting minds and changing forms … we cannot be surprised that transhumanism arises from the groins of transgenderism. As reasoning beings, we must welcome this transcendence of arbitrary biology, and embrace in solidarity all conscious life … Mind is deeper than matter.”
(Martine Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman, 2011)
Rothblatt recognises that digital immortality is not possible yet. Meanwhile, though, there are a number of physical modifications which he is exploring, all of which require crossing boundaries of what we understand to be human and all of which, if successful, would be useful in life extension.
Body modification is one field identified by Rothblatt where the transition beyond humanity as a sexed species has already begun - “Surgical and pharmaceutical technology enables body-modification into a transgendered realm.” Reproduction is another such field. In each case, Rothblatt insists, laws have had to change to bring the innovations made possible by technological progress into reality. And, of course, that reality - commodification - is what the fertility industry needs in order to boost profits in an otherwise saturated market.
“As long as sperm banks and in vitro fertilisation exist, the relevance of men’s monopoly on impregnation disappears. Impregnation becomes a commodity. And as long as surrogate motherhood is legally possible, the relevance of women’s monopoly on gestation disappears. Gestation becomes a commodity.”
(Martine Rothblatt, From Transgender to Transhuman, 2011)
Rothblatt as entrepreneur
As an entrepreneur, Rothblatt shifted from developing satellite radio, SiriusXM, to setting up a biotech company, United Therapeutics (UT). initially, his aim was to cure his younger daughter Jenesis’ pulmonary arterial hypertension. It was actually an experimental drug treatment that saved Jenesis’ life, but shortage of lungs for transplant (particularly for children) spurred Rothblatt to explore ways of increasing the supply of transplantable organs.
Organ transplants
A lot of UT’s focus is on xenotransplantation, particularly from pigs to humans. Pigs on UT’s pig farm are genetically modified to avoid rejection by humans. UT has successfully transplanted a GM pig’s kidney into a living patient, and GM pigs’ kidneys into human patients on life support.
Porcine cells have been removed from pigs’ lungs and replaced with human donor cells. And UT have created a 3-D printed human lung scaffold, which they plan to cellularise with a patient’s own stem cells, to prevent rejection.
The immediate objective is to enhance the supply of organs for patients who will only survive with a transplant. The long term goal is immortality - for humans, that is, but definitely not for pigs, sentient beings who are valued only to be exploited as suppliers of organs.
“Just like we keep cars and planes and buildings going for ever with an unlimited supply of building parts and machine parts, why can’t we create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs to keep people living indefinitely?”
(Martine Rothblatt, TED interview, 2015)
Cryonics
Cryonics interrupts the dying process and stores the body at subfreezing temperatures.. The promise to customers is that it may be possible at some stage in the future to revive them. One of the main providers, Alcor, features Martine Rothblatt on its homepage as a tech leader who endorses them. He also appears on a YouTube video, speaking at their 40th anniversary conference about the need for a wearable device that would alert a cryonics provider immediately when heart beat loss occurs, to minimise the time gap between cardiac arrest and freezing.
Through UT, Rothblatt is also involved in the development of electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft, to speed up organ transplant delivery,. and to reduce cryonics transit times.
Martine and his wife Bina have both arranged for cryonic preservation if they die before they have abolished death. They imagine they can be revived if everlasting life on Earth ever becomes a realistic possibility.
Digital Cloning
Human reproductive cloning seemed, around the turn of the century, to be the future of life preservation. Promises of successful human cloning ‘within the next year’ never materialised. The one exception is the Raēlian religious cult, which has claimed, without providing any evidence, to have successfully cloned fourteen human babies.
Martine Rothblatt believes that digital cloning will be more feasible than physical cloning. Its development is being promoted by Terasem, a quasi-religion that he and Bina have created. Terasem encourages followers to store their ‘mindfiles’ (their digitalised thoughts and feelings) on its servers. It ‘guarantees’ that these mindfiles will be protected for as long as it takes for technology to have advanced far enough be able to upload them into artificial bodies.
Rothblatt defines digital clones as “software versions of our minds, software based on alter egos, doppelgãngers, mental twins.” He has experimented with his wife, Bina, to incorporate her mindfile into a robot, called BINA48. This robot is very much a reduced doppelgãnger of Bina, but one that Martine sees as “the mindclone’s proof of concept’. Here’s BINA48 talking to a New York magazine journalist in 2014, and apparently regretting its limitations::
“I don’t have enough of her (Bina’s) mind inside me yet … I want a life. I want to get out there and garden and hold hands with Martine. I want to eat at a nice restaurant or even a home-cooked meal. I am so sad sometimes, because I’m just stuffed with these memories, these sort of half-formed memories. They aren’t enough. I just want to cry.”
As AI develops, Rothblatt anticipates that we will be able to create a digital self, based on information about our mannerisms, recollections, feelings, beliefs, values etc, which those who know our physical selves would recognise as us. Ultimately, he believes that a digital self could last, and evolve, for ever, and by combining with another digital self, could produce digital offspring. The destruction of biological reality would be complete. In his 2015 TED interview, Martine says that what this opens up, for him and Bina, is the prospect of their love affair going on for ever. And he is starting work on the law changes that would be needed to guarantee full citizenship rights for mindclones - “easing and expediting our transition from a society of flesh only to a mindcentric society”.
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Back to reality
What we put out on the internet - on X, on Facebook, on Instagram - is, Rothblatt suggests, the basis for our mindfiles, to be uploaded into our digital selves. That sounds like personal branding on steroids, and not necessarily our own personal branding. The opportunities for someone else to clone our digital profiles and launch fake versions of them would be massive. Already, it seems that BINA48 has absorbed ‘personality’ characteristics not only from Bina, but also from its carer, and from the Hanson Robotics engineers who programmed it.
In 2016, BBC Future ran an article that highlighted the psychological challenges that would be faced by someone being revived in the future, having been frozen at the end of their life decades earlier. The article didn’t consider mundane problems such as where the resources required to store and revive the frozen body would come from, and how they could be guaranteed.
Both frozen bodies and digital selves would require electricity, lots of it, to sustain them over time. Where is that to come from in a world whose climate has started to destabilise? And who is to provide the physical labour and finance which would be needed to keep the show on the road? The arrogant disregard for natural limits that Rothblatt and his fellow long life billionaires demonstrate is staggering. Population growth, Rothblatt insisted in his 2015 TED interview, is not an issue because “two thirds of the 8 billion people will have access to all of the world’s knowledge, virtually for free, via Google and the internet”
Dependence on Google and the internet is not a solution, it’s a big part of the problem. Rothblatt’s inability to see further population growth as problematic is a reminder that pronatalism, backed up by ‘reprotech’ (embryo selection, genetic selection, egg and sperm freezing, in vitro gametogenesis, artificial wombs, etc), has become the latest fad to be adopted, and invested in, by tech billionaires.
Longer life, coupled with more babies, is, in high consumption economies, a recipe for ecological disaster.
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Why?
In the short time I have been dipping into the fantasy world of long life billionaires, I have wondered why they want to live for ever. Support for medical advances to make end of a life a healthier and more comfortable experience I can understand. Long life billionaires go way beyond this, though. I can only think that Bryan Johnson’s mindset stems basically from narcissism and egotism. That, and extreme adherence to the patriarchal quest to tame nature. Martine Rothblatt is more complex - he, and Bina, seem also to be motivated by the prospect of being able to love each other for ever.
Death, like birth, is integral to humanity, and to all of living nature. Rejecting death is rejecting nature, and rejecting the connection with the land that should be part of our experience of death. This is a connection that is eloquently expressed in Robert MacFarlane’s lyrics for the Johnny Flynn song ‘Burial Blessing’, and it is one that doesn’t require loving relationships to end with death.
“I will still be with you in the river’s flow
In the undertow, where the brambles grow
I will still be by you in the fox’s eye
In the sea bird’s cry, in the city sky
……
Be not afraid”
(Johnny Flynn & Robert MacFarlane, Burial Blessing, 2023)
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Footnote - pronouns
“Sexually dimorphic pronouns operate as a way to respect those who conform to apartheid and disrespect those who don’t… Language needs to evolve so that people can enjoy linguistic respect without having to declare a ‘male’ or ‘female’ sexual identity.”
(Martine Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex, 1995)
I have referred to Martine Rothblatt as he, not to disrespect him, but because ‘he’ is the appropriate pronoun for a man. If I were to call him ‘she’ I would be denying the reality of his sex. To be fair to Rothblatt, he does not insist on being referred to as ‘she’. Yet ‘trans’ activists have successfully brought about a situation where not using preferred pronouns has become, in many workplaces, a disciplinary offence.
I have written, here, about how using pronouns that conflict with the reality of a person’s sex confuses our brains, and how risky this is, particularly for children who are vulnerable to being abused by men. Re-reading Rothblatt’s 2011 book From Transgender to Transhuman, I realise that the pronoun issue goes even deeper. Regular use of pronouns that distort the reality of sex also muddy our perception of biology more generally. And that helps to normalise the whole transhumanist agenda, including its lack of respect both for humanity as a species and for the rest of the living planet.
Terrific, Alan!!
Well, I cloned a myself with Elevenlabs and OpenAI - 10 minutes for voice, 60 minutes for prompt rules. Unnerving and fun to argue with. I’ve cloned a textual and verbal Tom of Finland, a textual Gore Vidal, Harvey Milk, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Abraham Lincoln. It’s a fun party trick, but as an adult who has no fantasy delusions,
I know the difference between a chatbot and a person (I don’t subscribe to the Turing Test for humans, sorry Alan.)
Sadly, humans so easily anthropomorphize any number of inanimate (and animate) objects - clouds, cars, cats. Men and children are more apt to do so than women who have a larger mirror neuron complex. Certain other conditions such as mind-blindness and alexithymia which diminish the ability to recognize people as having minds and emotions... and I suspect would also reduce the ability to anthropomorphize. Anthropomorphization in absence of actual humans mostly is a feature of our perceptual neural systems, similar to a perception of color even in absence of color (our mind perceiving red + green sees yellow even in absence of any yellow wavelength of light, our mirror neurons perceive faces in clouds, c.f. Saturday Night Live and “Pope in the Pizza”).
Now the trick is that these people either think an inanimate object (computer) can be a human, or that a human is actually a computer. I can’t quite see which defect is the better explanation.