Cheating Death: The Promise and the Future Impact of Trying to Live Forever

Rating:
Summary: How can we butcher it with soundbites? Let us count the ways
Review: Being an interested layman who has spent quite a bit of time reading and thinking about the economic and philosophical implications of life extension, I was hoping the authors would help me gain new insights. Of the 215 pages of text in "Cheating Deat", 74 actually list general social, political, and economic predictions which have little to do with aging or longevity. A benign interpretation would see them as establishing the "context" in which the changes in aging will take place, but they look more like fillers dug out from old - and outdated - files of Forecasting International, a firm founded by one of the authors. Take number 38 of their "50 Trends for a Postmortal World": "... By 2000, the European Free Trade Association countries will join with the [European Community] to create a market of 400 million people with a $5 trillion GDP. Sweden, Norway, Finland, Austria, and Switzerland will join the founding twelve ..." First, the EC was originally founded by only six countries, not twelve; secondly, Sweden, Finland, and Austria have been members of the EC since 1995 (while voters in Norway and Switzerland decided their countries shouldn't join) - mind you, this book was copyrighted in 1998, and on the back flap one of the authors is described as a consultant to, among others, the CIA. Their domestic forecasts ("Seventy-four Trends for a Postmortal America") don't really inspire more confidence, e.g. number 74: "... by 2000, just three major corporations will make up the computer hardware industry: IBM, Digital, and Apple ..." (At the time the book went to print, IBM was trying hard not to loose even more market share, Digital was struggling, and Apple was fighting for its life.) In the remaining text the authors throw lots of numbers at us (which we can't verify because there is not a single reference), but they don't provide any kind of visualisation of the data, nor do they spend much time putting things in perspective. Most of it remains raw data instead of being digested and transformed into information, and most of the interesting questions remain not just unanswered, but unasked. The authors seem uncomfortable with changes that cannot be quantified, and so the philosophical and religious implications are only briefly touched on in the last and shortest chapter. One of the religious authorities interviewed by them, when presented with the eventual possibility of an indefinite extension of life by medical means, is at loss for words: "We would have to reconsider our whole existence. I'm going to have to think about this for a long time." Yes, exactly, but one wishes the authors had talked to someone who had already done some of this thinking. One comes away from this book wishing that the authors had thought about the subject for a lot longer themselves, rather than producing a concatenation of soundbites much in the style of an early-evening local news program.