Steve Jobs famously said that “death is very likely the single best invention of life.” Queen Elizabeth II reigned for a full 70 years, living to 96, as the longest-serving monarch in British history. With advancements in life-extending technologies, and Silicon Valley’s multi-billion dollar quest to reverse human aging, it is worth asking: Was the queen’s death necessary for moral and political progress, or does progress result from something other than funerals?
New age-reversing technologies promise one day to allow humans to live healthily for decades longer, and these therapies could save the U.S. alone trillions of dollars in retroactive measures like retirement pensions and Alzheimer’s care. Aging drugs could be a much-needed response to our demographic crisis, as the U.S. is expected to spend half its federal budget every year on adults aged 65 and older by 2029.
But could older (and healthier) adults holding on to positions of power for longer result in a fiasco for moral, political and technological progress? Would radical life extension lead, as Elon Musk predicts, to less innovation? Is human death a driver of progress or a technical problem, to be solved?
The fact is that Queen Elizabeth’s (or anyone else’s) funeral will not magically ensure moral or ideological progress. Yes, the queen’s death means new UK cash notes and coins will no longer feature her face, but King Charles’s, and the UK national anthem will be updated.
Similarly, when Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un pass away, administrative changes will be bountiful. But Russia will still carry the historical legacy of Russia and go on to be led by a president handpicked by the current president himself. And North Korea will likely be ruled by a healthier Jong-un.
By and large, change occurs when living – not dead – people spur it. Progress isn’t a mystical, dialectical or predetermined process, which wondrously unfolds as soon as burials take place. Progress is the result of the hard work and actions of innovative, living thinkers — like Vitalik Buterin, who co-founded the decentralized blockchain Ethereum at 23 years old, and like Henry Ford, who created the Model T (the world’s first affordable car) at 45. It’s the product of young revolutionaries, like Greta Thunberg, and of older tycoons, like Elon Musk himself.
Progress happens not one funeral, but one healthy, living human at a time. It is not up to the allegorical workings of death, but to each living human to advance our ethics, our politics and our technologies. To reject the development of life-extending therapies on the basis that ill-meaning actors or regimes may live on is as rational as it is to oppose treatments for Alzheimer’s, fearing we may end up with non-demented autocrats.
Life, I suggest, is the single best (and most progress-furthering) invention of life. Anything wrong with the governments of Russia, North Korea, the United Kingdom or the United States would hardly be remedied by the sustained existence of cancers, diabetes, Alzheimer’s or heart diseases. In fact, the diseases of aging and their effects take up so much of our federal budgets (making up over two-thirds of all funerals) that death, as it exists today, ought to be understood as the very antithesis of progress.
Raiany Romani is a bioethicist and an IDEA (In-depth Effective Altruism) Fellow at Harvard University. Follow her on Twitter @raianyromanni.