Michio Kaku Talks Life on Mars, Genetic Engineering, and Immortality
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
Today is the release of THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY, the latest book by the world-renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku. In it, he explores the astonishing technologies that could propel us to live on other planets and even to live forever. LeapsMag Editor-in-Chief Kira Peikoff recently chatted with Dr. Kaku about some of the ethical implications we need to consider as we hurtle toward our destiny among the stars. Our interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
"Technology is like a double-edged sword. The question is, who wields it?"
A big part of your book discusses living on Mars, and you mention that nanotech, biotech and AI could help us do so in the next 100 years. But you also note that efforts to make the Red Planet habitable could backfire, such as using genetic engineering to produce an ideal fertilizer, which could make one life form push out all the others. How should we judge when a powerful new technology is ready to be tested?
Technology is like a double-edged sword. One side can cut against ignorance, poverty, disease. But the other side can cut against people. The question is, who wields the sword? It has to be wielded by people's interests. We have to look not at the needs of the military or corporations, but society as a whole, and we have to realize that every technology, not just the ones I mentioned in the book, has a dark side as well as a positive side.
On the positive side, you could terraform Mars using genetic engineering to create algae, plants that could thrive in the Martian atmosphere, and a self-sustaining agriculture where we could raise food crops. However, it has to be done carefully, because we don't want to have it overrun Mars, just like we have certain plants that overrun the natural environment here on Earth. So we have to do it slowly. It cannot be done all of a sudden in a crash program. We have to see what happens if we begin to terraform stretches of Martian landscape.
Elon Musk of SpaceX, who has pioneered much of these technologies, has stated that we can jumpstart terraforming Mars by detonating hydrogen bombs over the polar ice caps. Later he had to qualify that by saying that they are airbursts, not ground bursts, to minimize radiation. Other people have said, we don't know what a nuclear weapon would do. Would it destabilize Mars? Would it open cracks in the ice caps? So we have to think things through, not just make proposals. Another proposal is to use silver mirrors in space to reflect sunlight down to melt the ice caps, and that would be more environmentally friendly than using hydrogen bombs.
"Our grandkids, when they hit the age of 30, they may just decide to stop aging, and live at age 30 for many decades to come."
As far as colonizing Mars, you also talk about technologies that could potentially help us end aging, but you note that this could exacerbate overpopulation and an exodus from Earth -- the double-edged sword again. What's your personal view on whether anti-aging research should be pursued?
Anti-aging research is accelerating because of the human genome. We're now able to map the genomes of old people, compare them with the genomes of young people, and we can see where aging takes place. For example, in a car, aging takes place in the engine, because that's where we have moving parts and combustion. Where do we find that in a cell? The mitochondria, and so we do see a concentration of error build-up in the mitochondria, and we can envision one day repairing the mistakes, which could in turn increase our life span. Also we're discovering new enzymes like telomerase which allow us to stop the clock. So it's conceivable, I think not for my generation, but for the coming generations, perhaps our grandkids, when they hit the age of 30, they may just decide to stop aging, and live at age 30 for many decades to come.
The other byproduct of this of course is overpopulation. That's a social problem, but realize in places like Japan, we have the opposite problem, under-population, because the birth rate has fallen way below the replacement level, people live too long, and there's very little immigration there. Europe is next. So we have this bizarre situation where some places like Sub-Saharan Africa are still expanding, but other places we're going to see a contraction. Overall, the population will continue to rise, but it's going to slow down. Instead of this exponential curve that many people see in the media, it's going to be shaped like an "S" that rises rapidly and then seals off. The UN is now beginning to entertain the possibility that the population of the Earth may seal off sometime by the end of the century--that we'll hit a steady state.
"In the future, that composite image may be holographic, with all your videotapes, your memories, to create a near approximation of who you are, and centuries from now, you may have digital immortality."
Later in the book, you talk about achieving immortality through storing your digital consciousness, uploading your brain to a computer. Many people today find that notion bizarre or even repulsive, but you also wisely note that "what seems unethical or even immoral today might be ordinary or mundane in the future." What do you think is the key to bridging the gap between controversial breakthroughs and public acceptance?
I imagine that if someone from the Middle Ages, who is fresh from burning witches and heretics and torturing non-believers, were to wind up today in our society, they might go crazy. They might think all of society is a product of the Devil, because attitudes toward morality change. So we humans today cannot dictate what morality will be like 100 years from now. For example, test tube babies. When Louise Brown (the first test tube baby) was first born, the Catholic Church denounced it. Now, today, your wife, husband, you may be a test tube baby and we don't even blink.
There's a Silicon Valley company today that will take what is known about you on the Internet, your credit card transactions, your emails, and create a composite image of you. In the future, that composite image may be holographic, with all your videotapes, your memories, to create a near approximation of who you are, and centuries from now, you may have digital immortality—your memories, your sensations, will be recorded accurately, and an avatar will recreate it. Like for example, I wouldn't mind talking to Einstein. I wouldn't mind sitting down with the guy and having a great conversation about the universe.
And the Connectome Project, by the end of the century, will map the entire brain--that's every neuron--just like the genome project has mapped every gene. And we live with it, we don't even think twice about the fact that our genome exists. In the future, our connectome will also exist. And the connectome can reproduce your thoughts, your dreams, your sensations. We'll just live with that fact; it will be considered ordinary.
"A hundred years from now, we may want to merge with some of these technologies, rather than have to compete with robots."
Wow. In such a "post-human" era, our bodies could be replaced by robots or maintained by genetic engineering. Once these technologies become commercially available, do you think people should have the freedom to make changes or enhancements to themselves?
I think there should be laws passed at a certain point to prevent parents from going crazy trying to genetically engineer their child. Once we isolate the genes for studying, for good behavior, things like that, we may be tempted to tinker with it. I think a certain amount of tinkering is fine, but we don't want to let it get out of control. There has to be limits.
Also, we are in competition with robots of the future. A hundred years from now, robots are going to become very intelligent. Some people think they're going to take over. My attitude is that a hundred years from now, we may want to merge with some of these technologies, rather than have to compete with robots. But we're not going to look like some freaky robot because we're genetically hardwired to look good to the opposite sex, to look good to our peers. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, and hundreds of thousands of years into the future, we'll still look the same. We'll genetically modify ourselves a little bit, but we'll basically look the same.
That's an interesting point. It's amazing how fast technology is moving overall. Like at one point in the book, you mention that primates had never been cloned, but a few weeks ago, news broke that this just happened in China. Do you think we should slow down the dramatic pace of acceleration and focus on the ethical considerations, or should we still move full-steam ahead?
Well, CRISPR technology has accelerated us more than we previously thought. In the past, to tinker with genes, you had to cut and splice, and it was a lot of guesswork and trial and error. Now, you can zero in on the cutting process and streamline it, so cutting and splicing genes becomes much more accurate, and you can edit them just like you edit a book. Within the field of bioengineering, they have set up their own conferences to begin to police themselves into figuring out which domains are ethically dangerous and which areas can provide benefits for humanity, because they realize that this technology can go a little bit too fast.
"Where does truth come from? Truth comes from interaction with incorrect ideas."
You cannot recall a life form. Once a life form is created, it reproduces. That's what life does. If it reproduces outside the laboratory, it could take over. So we want to make sure that we don't have to recall a life form, like you would recall a Ford or a Chevrolet. Eventually governments may have to slow down the pace because it's moving very rapidly.
Lastly, you talk about the importance of democratic debate to resolve how controversial technology should be used. How can science-minded people bring the rest of society into these conversations, so that as much of society as possible is represented?
It's a question of where does truth come from? Truth comes from interaction with incorrect ideas--the collision of truth and untruth, rumors and fact. It doesn't come from a machine where you put in a quarter, and out comes the answer. It requires democratic debate. And that's where the Internet comes in, that's where the media comes in, that's where this interview comes in. You want to stimulate and educate the people so they know the dangers and promises of technology, and then engage with them about the moral implications, because these things are going to affect every aspect of our life in the future.
Kira Peikoff was the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org from 2017 to 2021. As a journalist, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Nautilus, Popular Mechanics, The New York Academy of Sciences, and other outlets. She is also the author of four suspense novels that explore controversial issues arising from scientific innovation: Living Proof, No Time to Die, Die Again Tomorrow, and Mother Knows Best. Peikoff holds a B.A. in Journalism from New York University and an M.S. in Bioethics from Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @KiraPeikoff.
MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history
Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.
The recipient was a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman who had been living with end-stage kidney disease caused by diabetes. While Slayman had received a kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor, his diabetes ultimately caused the kidney to fail less than five years after the transplant. Slayman had undergone dialysis ever since—a procedure that uses an artificial kidney to remove waste products from a person’s blood when the kidneys are unable to—but the dialysis frequently caused blood clots and other complications that landed him in the hospital multiple times.
As a last resort, Slayman’s kidney specialist suggested a transplant using a pig kidney provided by eGenesis, a pharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Mass. The highly experimental surgery was made possible with the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” initiative, which allows patients with life-threatening medical conditions access to experimental treatments.
The new frontier of organ donation
Like Slayman, more than 100,000 people are currently on the national organ transplant waiting list, and roughly 17 people die every day waiting for an available organ. To make up for the shortage of human organs, scientists have been experimenting for the past several decades with using organs from animals such as pigs—a new field of medicine known as xenotransplantation. But putting an animal organ into a human body is much more complicated than it might appear, experts say.
“The human immune system reacts incredibly violently to a pig organ, much more so than a human organ,” said Dr. Joren Madsen, director of the Mass General Transplant Center. Even with immunosuppressant drugs that suppress the body’s ability to reject the transplant organ, Madsen said, a human body would reject an animal organ “within minutes.”
So scientists have had to use gene-editing technology to change the animal organs so that they would work inside a human body. The pig kidney in Slayman’s surgery, for instance, had been genetically altered using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to remove harmful pig genes and add human ones. The kidney was also edited to remove pig viruses that could potentially infect a human after transplant.
With CRISPR technology, scientists have been able to prove that interspecies organ transplants are not only possible, but may be able to successfully work long term, too. In the past several years, scientists were able to transplant a pig kidney into a monkey and have the monkey survive for more than two years. More recently, doctors have transplanted pig hearts into human beings—though each recipient of a pig heart only managed to live a couple of months after the transplant. In one of the patients, researchers noted evidence of a pig virus in the man’s heart that had not been identified before the surgery and could be a possible explanation for his heart failure.
So far, so good
Slayman and his medical team ultimately decided to pursue the surgery—and the risk paid off. When the pig organ started producing urine at the end of the four-hour surgery, the entire operating room erupted in applause.
Slayman is currently receiving an infusion of immunosuppressant drugs to prevent the kidney from being rejected, while his doctors monitor the kidney’s function with frequent ultrasounds. Slayman is reported to be “recovering well” at Massachusetts General Hospital and is expected to be discharged within the next several days.Niklas Anzinger is the founder of Infinita VC based in the charter city of Prospera in Honduras. Infinita focuses on a new trend of charter cities and other forms of alternative jurisdictions. Healso hosts a podcast about how to accelerate the future by unblocking “stranded technologies”.This spring he was a part of the network city experiment Zuzalu spearheaded by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin where a few hundred invited guests from the spheres of longevity, biotechnology, crypto, artificial intelligence and investment came together to form a two-monthlong community. It has been described as the world’s first pop-up city. Every morning Vitalians would descend on a long breakfast—the menu had been carefully designed by famed radical longevity self-experimenter Bryan Johnson—and there is where I first met Anzinger who told me about Prospera. Intrigued to say the least, I caught up with him later the same week and the following is a record of our conversation.
Q. We are sitting here in the so-called pop-up network state Zuzalu temporarily realized in the village of Lusticia Bay by the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. To me this is an entirely new concept: What is a network state?
A. A network state is a highly aligned online community that has a level of in-person civility; it crowd-funds territory, and it eventually seeks diplomatic recognition. In a way it's about starting a new country. The term was coined by the crypto influencer and former CTO of Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan in a book by the same title last year [2022]. What many people don't know is that it is a more recent addition or innovation in a space called competitive governance. The idea is that you have multiple jurisdictions competing to provide you services as a customer. When you have competition among governments or government service providers, these entities are forced to provide you with a better service instead of the often worse service at higher prices or higher taxes that we're currently getting. The idea went from seasteading, which was hardly feasible because of costs, to charter cities getting public/private partnerships with existing governments and a level of legal autonomy, to special economic zones, to now network states.
Q. How do network states compare to charter cities and similar jurisdictions?
A. Charter cities and special economic zones were legal forks from other existing states. Dubai, Shenzhen in China, to some degree Hong Kong, to some degree Singapore are some examples. There's a host of other charter cities, one of which I'm based in myself, which is Prospera located in Honduras on the island Roatán. Charter cities provide the full stack of governance; they provide new laws and regulations, business registration, tax codes and governance services, Estonia style: you log on to the government platform and you get services as a citizen.
When conceptualizing network states, Balagi Srinivasan turns the idea of a charter city a bit on its head: he doesn't want to start with this full stack because it's still very hard to get these kinds of partnerships with government. It's very expensive and requires lots of experience and lots of social capital. He is saying that network states could instead start as an online community. They could have a level of alignment where they trade with each other; they have their own economy; they meet in person in regular gatherings like we're doing here in Zuzulu for two months, and then they negotiate with existing governments or host cities to get a certain degree of legal autonomy that is centered around a moral innovation. So, his idea is: don't focus on building a completely new country or city; focus on a moral innovation.
Q. What would be an example of such a moral innovation?
A. An example would be longevity—life is good; death is bad—let's see what we can do to foster progress around that moral innovation and see how we can get legal forks from the existing system that allow us to accelerate progress in that area. There is an increasing realization in the science that there are hallmarks of aging and that aging is a cause of other diseases like cancer, ALS or Alzheimer's. But aging is not recognized as a disease by the FDA in the United States and in most countries around the world, so it's very hard to get scientific funding for biotechnology that would attack the hallmarks of aging and allow us potentially to reverse aging and extend life. This is a significant shortcoming of existing government systems that groups such as the ones that have come together here in Montenegro are now seeking alternatives too. Charter cities and now network states are such alternatives.
Q.Would it not be better to work within the current systems, and try to improve them, rather than abandon them for new experimental jurisdictions?
A. There are numerous failures of public policies. These failures are hard, if not impossible, to reverse, because as soon as you have these policies, you have entrenched interests who benefit from the regulations. The only way to disrupt incumbent industries is with start-ups, but the way the system is set up makes it excessively hard for such start-ups to become big companies. In fact, larger companies are weaponizing the legal system against small companies, because they can afford the lawyers and the fixed cost of compliance.
I don't believe that our institutions in many developed countries are beyond hope. I just think it's easier to change them if you could point at successful examples. ‘Hey, this country or this zone is already doing it very successfully’; if they can extend people’s lifespan by 10 years, if they can reduce maternal mortality, and if they have a massive medical tourism where people come back healthier, then that is just very embarrassing for the FDA.
Q. Perhaps a comparison here would be the relationship between Hong Kong and China?
A. Correct, so having Hong Kong right in front of your door … ‘Hey, this capitalism thing seems to work, why don't we try it here?’ It was due to the very bold leadership by Deng Xiaoping that they experimented with it in the development zone of Shenzhen. It worked really well and then they expanded with more special economic zones that also worked.
Próspera is a private city and special economic zone on the island of Roatán in the Central American state of Honduras.
Q. Tell us about Prospera, the charter city in Honduras, that you are intimately connected with.
A. Honduras is a very poor country. It has a lot of crime, never had a single VC investment, and has a GDP per capita of 2,000 per year. Honduras has suffered tremendously. The goal of these special economic zones is to bring in economic development. That's their sole purpose. It's a homegrown innovation from Honduras that started in 2009 with a very forward-thinking statesman, Octavio Sanchez, who was the chief of staff to the president of Honduras, and then president. He had his own ideas about making Honduras a more decentralized system, where more of the power lies in the municipalities.
Inspired by the ideas of Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer, who gave a famous Ted Talk in 2009 about charter cities, Sanchez initiated a process that lasted for years and eventually led to the creation of a special economic zone legal regime that’s anchored in the Hunduran constitution that provides the highest legal autonomy in the world to these zones. There are today three special economic zones approved by the Honduran government: Prospera, Ciudad Morazan and Orchidea.
Q. How did you become interested and then involved in Prospera?
A. I read about it first in an article by Scott Alexander, a famous rationalist blogger, who wrote a very long article about Prospera, and I thought, this is amazing! Then I came to Prospera and I found it to be one of the most if not the most exciting project in the world going on right now and that it also opened my heart to the country and its people. Most of my friends there are Honduran, they have been working on this for 10 or more years. They want to remake Honduras and put it on the map as the place in the world where this legal and governance innovation started.
Q. To what extent is Prospera autonomous relative to the Honduran government?
A. What's interesting about the Honduran model is that it's anchored within the Honduran constitution, and it has a very clear framework for what's possible and what's not possible, and what's possible ensures the highest degree of legal autonomy anywhere seen in the world. Prospera has really pushed the model furthest in creating a common law-based polycentric legal system. The idea is that you don't have a legislature, instead you have common law and it's based on the best practice common law principles that a legal scholar named Tom W. Bell created.
One of the core ideas is that as a business you're not obligated to follow one regulatory monopoly like the FDA. You have regulatory flexibility so you can choose what you're regulated under. So, you can say: ‘if I do a medical clinic, I do it under Norwegian law here’. And you even have the possibility to amend it a bit. You're still required to have liability insurance, and have to agree to binding arbitration in case there's a legal dispute. And your insurance has to approve you. So, under that model the insurance becomes the regulator and they regulate through prices. The limiting factor is criminal law; Honduran criminal law fully applies. So does immigration law. And we pay taxes.
Q. Is there also an idea of creating a kind of healthy living there, and encourage medical tourism?
A. Yes, we specifically look for legal advantages in autonomy around creating new drugs, doing clinical trials, doing self-medication and experimentation. There is a stem cell clinic here and they're doing clinical trials. The island of Roatán is very easily accessible for American tourists. It's a beautiful island, and it's for regulatory reasons hard to do stem cell therapies in the United States, so they're flying in patients from the United States. Most of them are very savvy and often have PhDs in biotech and are able to assess the risk for themselves of taking drugs and doing clinical trials. We're also going to get a wellness center, and there have been ideas around establishing a peptide clinic and a compound pharmacy and things like that. We are developing a healthcare ecosystem.
Q. This kind of experimental tourism raises some ethical issues. What happens if patients are harmed? And what are the moral implications for society of these new treatments?
A. As a moral principle we believe in medical freedom: people have rights over their bodies, even at the (informed) risk of harm to themselves if no unconsenting third-parties are harmed; this is a fundamental right currently not protected effectively.
What we do differently is not changing ethical norms around safety and efficacy, we’re just changing the institutional setup. Instead of one centralized bureaucracy, like the FDA, we have regulatory pluralism that allows different providers of safety and efficacy to compete under market rules. Like under any legal system, common law in Prospera punishes malpractice, fraud, murder etc. This system will still produce safe and effective drugs, and it will still work with common sense legal notions like informed consent and liability for harm. There are regulations for medical practice, there is liability insurance and things like that. It will just do so more efficiently than the current way of doing things (unless it won’t, in which case it will change and evolve – or fail).
A direct moral benefit ´to what we do is that we increase accessibility. Typical gene therapies on the market cost $1 million dollars in the US. The gene therapy developed in Prospera costs $25,000. As to concern about whether such treatments are problematic, we do not share this perspective. We are for advancing science responsibly and we believe that both individuals and society stand to gain from improving the resiliency of the human body through advanced biotechnology.
Q. How does Prospera relate to the local Honduran population?
A. I think it's very important that our projects deliver local benefits and that they're well anchored in local communities. Because when you go to a new place, you're seen as a foreigner, and you're seen as potentially a danger or a threat. The most important thing for Prospera and Ciudad Morazan is to show we're creating jobs; we're creating employment; we're improving people's lives on the ground. Prospera is directly and indirectly employing 1,100 people. More than 2/3 of the people who are working for Prospera are Honduran. It has a lot of local service workers from the island, and it has educated Hondurans from the mainland for whom it's an alternative to going to the United States.
Q. What makes a good Prosperian citizen?
A. People in Prospera are very entrepreneurial. They're opening companies on a small scale. For example, Vehinia, who is the cook in the kitchen at Prospera, she's from the neighboring village and she started an NGO that is now funding a school where children from the local village can go to instead of a school that's 45 minutes away. There's very much a spirit of ‘let's exchange and trade with each other’. Some people might see that as a bit too commercial, but that's something about the culture that people accept and that people see as a good thing.
Q. Five years from now, if everything goes well, what do we see in Prospera?
A. I think Prospera will have at least 10,000 residents and I think Honduras hopefully will have more zones. There could be zones with a thriving industrial sector and sort of a labor-intensive economy and some that are very strong in pharmaceuticals, there could also be other zones for synthetic biology, and other zones focused on agriculture. The zones of Prospera, Ciudad Morazan and Orchidea are already showing the results we want to see, the results that we will eventually be measured by, and I'm tremendously excited about Honduras.