Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

I’m in Stockholm for a few weeks, which is why I haven’t been updating this blog. I’ve been in Sweden many times before, but one thing I’ve noticed particularly this time is the way that old existing buildings have been adapted for modern times. It’s quite common to see stone steps which look positively ancient with two pieces of wood, looking nearly as ancient, laid on top of them for use with strollers and/or wheelchairs.

When life changes for an existing city, you can either adapt the city or you can replace it piece by piece. The U.S. pretty reliably picks replacement. It’s interesting to see a place which tries harder to adapt, a spirit no doubt encouraged by the historical nature of the buildings.

Stockholm is also notable for how easy it is to get around on bike. The bike lanes here are serious alternatives to pedestrian or car traffic, with their own signs and traffic lights. They aren’t universal, but they seem to cover the city and the immediate suburbs pretty well. This too is of course fitted into the existing streets and bridges, somehow. Particularly impressive is a few construction sites I’ve come across where a temporary bike lane was built because the existing one was being built over.

Creating high quality bike lanes may seem like an inefficient use of public funds, but of course it’s really no less efficient than building roads. The U.S. does still mostly agree that roads are a common good, and it seems like, in cities, real bike lanes could be as well.

I’ve come across a few articles recently about how modern medicine is on the road to conquer death in the next thirty years or so. I find this to be very unlikely, and I feel that people aren’t thinking about the real issues. I’ve seen two general themes. One is that the singularity will come and change everything, which is essentially unanswerable except by rolling your eyes and backing away. The other is that death is essentially a type of disease, and we will learn to cure it.

Unfortunately, death is not a disease to be cured. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. In the competition for food and other resources necessary for life, the most significant competitors of any individual organism are the other members of its own species. They are the ones who seek to occupy exactly the same niche. Complex organisms which do not die will have more size and experience than their descendants, and will therefore tend to outcompete them. It follows that species whose organisms do not die will tend to not evolve. They will over time be outcompeted by other species which do evolve. Thus death is a key evolutionary strategy for any successful species. The fact that individuals may prefer not to die is irrelevant to long term evolutionary history.

What this means is that death is a finely tuned aspect of ourselves, just as finely tuned as our rather remarkable ability to reproduce ourselves. And it’s not just an aspect of ourselves, it’s an aspect of our evolutionary forebears for eons.

It may seem superficially that humans pass through a period of childhood, then enter a phase of stasis, and then decline and die. However, in fact humans change slowly throughout their lives. Arresting the aging process would be just as complex as arresting the growth process during the teenage years. All our bodily systems are shaped by evolution to head in a particular direction. Stopping that means changing all aspects of our bodies. It would mean a person aged 20 who does not turn into a person aged 30. That means changing a hundred different aspects of how the body grows.

The fundamental argument of the people seeking to conquer death is that the body is a machine, and that we can figure out how to fix the machine so that it does not fail. However, the bodily machine was created by an evolutionary process, not by human design. Think of the ugliest least comprehensible computer program you’ve ever seen, code which is uncommented and full of cross dependencies. Think of the hacker who wrote that code–code that works but is unmaintainable. Imagine letting that hacker work on a computer program for a million years, continually micro-optimizing and never doing a comprehensive overhaul or redesign. Now you have to reverse engineer it. That’s what figuring out the human body is like. Every system in the body has deep layers of complexity and is related to other systems in strange and surprising ways. Despite all the near-miraculous advances of modern medicine, we are still only scratching the surface of understanding how the body works. Increasing computer power will help, of course, but we don’t even know the questions to ask. This is going to be a task of many generations, and even as we start to understand it will take far more work before we have any idea how to actually change anything.

Of course I could be entirely wrong, and I do think that research on aging should continue. I just don’t see any reason for optimism. A human who does not age would really be an entirely different species. What reason do we have to think that we can create such a species any time in the foreseeable future? If we could create it, what reason do we have to think that we can somehow convert ourselves?

I’m puzzled by people who travel to the few remaining parts of our world that are untouched by people, write about how beautiful they are, and encourage us to do what we can to save them in their natural state. The way to save untouched nature is to not go there at all (we could permit small controlled exceptions for scientific study). A better way to preserve nature would be to write about the beauty of our cities. Leave the non-human world to itself.

In fact, the best way to live easy on the earth would be to take residence in a box outside Shinjuku station. In a city of 13 million, one more will have no detectable environmental impact.. Don’t try to practice renewable living in a forest glade. Go where there are lots and lots of people already, and stay there.

Greg Mankiw, a well known economist, has a nice picture of projected U.S. government spending in 2020. Refer to this when you hear somebody say that we can balance the budget by eliminating waste.

I believe that this picture does not cover things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the Bush administration funded through emergency spending measures (they appear indirectly in the interest payments). Fortunately the Obama administration has so far been presenting an honest budget, as the Bush I and Clinton administrations did in the past.

As always, the best way to stay on top of government spending is to grow the economy without growing services, as was done during the Clinton years. The economy is starting to grow again, but too slowly to even keep up with population growth. As China’s economy appears to be currently overheated, it will be interesting to see to see how the U.S. economy reacts as China is forced to slow down.

I spent several hours this weekend pruning back the blackberry bushes in our back yard. It’s not really a yard, as our house backs onto a hillside too steep to build on. We hardly ever go there ourselves, so it’s covered by plants fighting for their little bit of sun, nature green in thorn and bramble. I like blackberries, but I think they should keep their thorns in their place on the sides of our little path; they have no such consideration for us.

Since I hadn’t been down there since the rainy season started, it was incredible to see how much the plants had grown and spread. As an animal myself, there is something deeply weird about the way that plants grow just by sitting there and converting solar energy into leafs and thorns. A kind of alien life in our midst, despite its familiarity. Odd to think that we depend so deeply on them.

Seeing the plants fighting each other for sunlight, each following their different little strategies, it’s hard not to see a form of vegetable intelligence at work. More likely it’s the intentional stance applied to a simple set of algorithms. At least, I hope so. Considering how many scratches I have now, I have to say it’s a good thing they’re so much slower than we are. If the plants could take time from fighting each other to evolve a battery to let themselves move faster when necessary, we animals wouldn’t stand a chance.