The Other Inheritance Tax

Repealing the estate tax has long been a dream of Republican lawmakers. This is a 40% tax on all assets exceeding $5.45 Million for an individual decedent or twice that exemption for a couple. Those who want to repeal it believe that our descendants are all entitled to the fruits of our labor and to live at least as well as their forebears.

I share the ideal that our descendants should enjoy a quality of life at least as good as ours, which makes it crucial to abolish the other inheritance tax: the quality of life taxed to future generations for every gallon of fossil fuel burned.

Global warming as a consequence of human activity has become an incontrovertible fact of science. The cost to future generations is incalculable. Effects include a rapidly increasing frequency of severe storms, floods, droughts, and other natural disasters, the accelerating loss of the polar ice caps accompanied by rising seas, acidification of the oceans with an accompanying decimation of marine biodiversity, and extinctions of species leading to a staggering loss of terrestrial biodiversity. A huge unanswerable question is whether or not we would be one of the surviving species.

Sweeping changes to the landscape of our planet will likely include coastal flooding and the reshaping of the boundaries of our land masses as well as regional climate changes that will threaten the food and water supplies of whole populations, leading to mass migrations and a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions. Aside from the inherent suffering of these populations, such conditions become breeding grounds for violent conflict and recruitment to radical causes.

Since the process of global warming feeds itself, much has been said of the “tipping point,” the moment in time at which the process becomes irreversible and life on earth is eventually doomed. Some believe that we have already crossed it. Others suggest that it is close at hand. It is likely, in any case, that every year in which we contribute to the problem matters. Even the next four years could determine whether or not we step off the edge of the cliff.

It is time for those we elect to public office to put aside their differences and address the big problems that will shape the world to come. Ignoring or denying these problems gambles the survival of our species. Putting off the solutions in the interest of short-term gains may deprive future generations of a chance to live. And that’s the ultimate pro-life position.

Where Does Identity Reside?

Having spent recent months crafting a sequel to The Methuselarity Transformation, I have felt suspended between the reality of my everyday life and relationships and the lives of the characters in my fantasy world. Between stints at the laptop turning out words that portray the experience of my characters, I’ve found myself drawn inside their heads and points of view, experiencing their crises and working through their solutions to the conflicts they face as their stories unfold. In this way, my characters teach me what it’s like to be them, sometimes providing unexpected lessons about the nature of experience, of consciousness, and of identity.

In Brink of Life, a woman suddenly plunges into consciousness in the midst of what seems like someone else’s life, sending her on a quest to discover who she is and to craft an identity that makes sense within the context of her present circumstances. One of the lessons that emerged as I watched her life unfold through her eyes was that consciousness is more than a state of mind. It’s a state of being defined not only by the brain, but by the characteristics of the body that is the interface for perceiving the world and for acting upon it. And each of our bodies comprises a complex array of elements that color the way we understand our surroundings and ourselves.

Just a few of the ways our bodies are hardwired include the sensitivity of tuning of each of our senses (or even whether those senses are working at all), potential for muscle development and coordination, sexual preference and identification, our ability to taste salty or bitter things, our thresholds for pain and for pleasurable reward, and even the limits of our capacity to experience joy. Fold in a lifetime of sensorimotor experience within these bodies to round out the complexity of how we perceive our identities. Our adaptation to aging, to disease, and to recovery from disease further illustrates the fluid relationship between the body and the self.

Futuristic concepts of immortality have included models in which consciousness is uploaded to computers (Transcendence), embodied within digital avatars (The Matrix), or even linked to other physical entities (either biological or artificial) capable of interacting with the physical world (Avatar). These conceptions assume a model of consciousness and identity as something abstractly residing within the brain, apart from their physical incarnation. Perhaps our intelligence is separable from our bodies, but what would it take to maintain a persistent sense of self rather than just to create an authentic looking copy?

Sex on the Reef

When some people think of coral, they imagine chunks of rock resembling the human brain or delicately branching structures of exquisite detail and fragility. For others, coral brings to mind colorful jewelry, strung as beads of white and pink. These are all the calcified secretions of a vibrant community of microscopic animals that make their homes upon the structures that they create, animals that reproduce sexually in their struggle to survive. And struggle they must, our tiny heroes, because only one out of many thousands of fertilized eggs survives and may take hundreds of years to grow as big as the specimens that dazzle in a seaside souvenir shop.

In the best of circumstances, our reefs teem with life, supported by a luminous community of coral species responsible for both creating the structural backbone of the reef and mediating the cycle of life within it. Cyanobacteria living symbiotically with the corals extract nitrogen from seawater and convert it to a form that is nutritive to plants, and in turn moves up the food chain of the animal population.

While coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor, they support astounding biodiversity that accounts for at least a quarter of all marine species, including at least 4000 species of fish and possibly millions of distinct species ranging from microorganisms and plants to crustaceans and sponges. A quarter of all fish harvested for human consumption come from reef environments. Aside from their crucial contribution to our food source, reefs provide a physical barrier that protects coastlines from the erosive effects of waves and the destructive force of storms, buffering coastal communities against the threats posed by rising sea levels and increasingly turbulent weather. Corals have also been a source of naturally occurring medicinal compounds.

These aquatic colonies and the reefs that support them have come under pressure that now threatens their existence and ultimately ours. Much of this pressure arises from human activity, including coastal development, dredging, pollution, fishing, mining for building materials and...yes...souvenirs, oil spills, even sunscreen! And the effects of manmade global warming include rising temperatures and acidification, both of which cause coral bleaching, reducing reefs to lifeless stone. Even without the need to adapt to drastically changing conditions, the slow growth of these organisms makes it impossible for them to replenish themselves without help. And marine scientists have spent years trying to raise corals with which to reseed reefs.

* * *

Enter Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in the Florida Keys and Dr. David Vaughan, a weathered looking biologist with a bushy rust and salt beard that frames an animated smile underscoring his enthusiasm for educating visitors about corals. A pivotal moment of serendipity combined with mindful observation and inspiration led to a discovery that has accelerated the rate of coral growth in the laboratory by orders of magnitude. While corals tend to repair themselves by growing faster when broken, they grow many times faster when fractured into tiny fragments. Dr. Vaughan first observed this effect as the result of a laboratory accident and has since utilized it as a cultivating technique that has increased new colonies from tens to many thousands and is expected within the next several years to create hundreds of thousands of colonies that will be planted in the wild and are expected to rebuild reefs in a fraction of the time that nature once required.

Even more exciting is the assist that Dr. Vaughan and his team is giving to natural selection. By creating microenvironments with gradations of both pH and temperature, they have managed to simulate a range of possible conditions that might occur decades from now and select coral cultures best adapted to the most stressful conditions that we can predict, while still preserving biodiversity.

All life as we know it would be threatened by the extinction of the corals. While we may worry more about international conflict and terrorism as threats to our existence, the coral nurseries at Mote may well be ground zero for the survival of our species.

Life Overtakes Art

One of the challenges of writing science fiction is to imagine future technology that has a plausible scientific foundation but is still likely to be sufficiently ahead of its time to be truly futuristic. So it is simultaneously validating and discouraging when present day technological advances rapidly eclipse fictional scenarios set decades in the future.

In The Methuselarity Transformation, I envisioned a process that could arrest the aging process at the cellular level and make young adults virtually immortal. Meanwhile, scientists seem to be closing in on ways not only to arrest aging, but to reverse it.

When the circulations of young and aged mice were linked, the elderly mice became more youthful in a number of meaningful ways, including rejuvenation of both heart and skeletal muscle and an improved sense of smell suggesting some reversal of brain aging. These changes apparently derived from something in the younger animals’ blood that neutralized the effects of aging. A team at Harvard subsequently identified a protein, GDF11, isolated from the blood of young animals that appears in decreasing concentrations with age and seems to mediate anti-aging effects. This appears the closest mankind has come so far to discovering a fountain of youth...at least for mice.

While it has been painfully found in the quest for a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease that agents that work in mice don’t easily translate to effective drugs for humans, other basic science advances have potentially shortened the time it will take to determine whether such cures will prove helpful in humans. Induced pluripotent stem cells, derived from people with various disease states, can act as substrates for testing chemicals on disease processes outside the body. This same strategy might well prove useful in testing the effects of GDF11 or similar molecules on human tissue as a stepping stone to human clinical trials.

A separate line of investigation is pursuing the effects of CRISPR, a new technology for precisely editing genes as well as regulating gene activity. This could soon provide a way to turn on specific genes that may have a role in extending longevity. It may even become possible in the very near future to harvest skin cells from patients, induce the stem cell state, edit their genomes and then supply the modified cells to malfunctioning organs to restore their youthful states. And the next decade may even bring a real possibility of rolling back aging altogether and reversing the effects of age-related diseases.