The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant – Nick Bostrom
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

  
    
      
        
          Once upon a time, the planet
            was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than the
            largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its
            red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant
            stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded from humankind
            a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand
            men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark
            to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes
            the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes
            again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither
            away for months or years before eventually being consumed.
          The misery inflicted by the dragon-tyrant was incalculable. In addition
            to the ten thousand who were gruesomely slaughtered each day, there
            were the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends
            that were left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones.
          Some people tried to fight the dragon, but whether they were brave
            or foolish was difficult to say. Priests and magicians called down
            curses, to no avail. Warriors, armed with roaring courage and the
            best weapons the smiths could produce, attacked it, but were incinerated
            by its fire before coming close enough to strike. Chemists concocted
            toxic brews and tricked the dragon into swallowing them, but the only
            apparent effect was to further stimulate its appetite. The dragon’s
            claws, jaws, and fire were so effective, its scaly armor so impregnable,
            and its whole nature so robust, as to make it invincible to any human
            assault.
          Seeing that defeating the tyrant was impossible, humans had no choice
            but to obey its commands and pay the grisly tribute. The fatalities
            selected were always elders. Although senior people were as vigorous
            and healthy as the young, and sometimes wiser, the thinking was that
            they had at least already enjoyed a few decades of life. The wealthy
            might gain a brief reprieve by bribing the press gangs that came to
            fetch them; but, by constitutional law, nobody, not even the king
            himself, could put off their turn indefinitely.
          Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten
            by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied
            it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would
            be free from the dragon-scourge. Other orators argued that the dragon
            has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They
            said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up
            in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was
            good for the human species because it kept the population size down.
            To what extent these arguments convinced the worried souls is not
            known. Most people tried to cope by not thinking about the grim end
            that awaited them.
          For many centuries this desperate state of affairs continued. Nobody
            kept count any longer of the cumulative death toll, nor of the number
            of tears shed by the bereft. Expectations had gradually adjusted and
            the dragon-tyrant had become a fact of life. In view of the evident
            futility of resistance, attempts to kill the dragon had ceased. Instead,
            efforts now focused on placating it. While the dragon would occasionally
            raid the cities, it was found that the punctual delivery to the mountain
            of its quota of life reduced the frequency of these incursions.
          Knowing that their turn to become dragon-fodder was always impending,
            people began having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon
            for a girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday. Couples often
            spawned a dozen children. The human population was thus kept from
            shrinking, and the dragon was kept from going hungry.
          Over the course of these centuries, the dragon, being well fed, slowly
            but steadily grew bigger. It had become almost as large as the mountain
            on which it lived. And its appetite had increased proportionately.
            Ten thousand human bodies were no longer enough to fill its belly.
            It now demanded eighty thousand, to be delivered to the foot of the
            mountain every evening at the onset of dark.
          What occupied the king’s mind more than the deaths and the dragon
            itself was the logistics of collecting and transporting so many people
            to the mountain every day. This was not an easy task.
          To facilitate the process, the king had a railway track constructed:
            two straight lines of glistening steel leading up to the dragon’s
            abode. Every twenty minutes, a train would arrive at the mountain
            terminal crammed with people, and would return empty. On moonlit nights,
            the passengers traveling on this train, if there had been windows
            for them to stick their heads out of, would have been able to see
            in front of them the double silhouette of the dragon and the mountain,
            and two glowing red eyes, like the beams from a pair of giant lighthouses,
            pointing the way to annihilation.
          Servants were employed by the king in large numbers to administer
            the tribute. There were registrars who kept track of whose turn it
            was to be sent. There were people-collectors who would be dispatched
            in special carts to fetch the designated people. Often traveling at
            breakneck speed, they would rush their cargo either to a railway station
            or directly to the mountain. There were clerks who administered the
            pensions paid to the decimated families who were no longer able to
            support themselves. There were comforters who would travel with the
            doomed on their way to the dragon, trying to ease their anguish with
            spirits and drugs.
          There was, moreover, a cadre of dragonologists who studied how these
            logistic processes could be made more efficient. Some dragonologists
            also conducted studies of the dragon’s physiology and behavior, and
            collected samples – its shed scales, the slime that drooled from its
            jaws, its lost teeth, and its excrements, which were specked with
            fragments of human bone. All these items were painstakingly annotated
            and archived. The more the beast was understood, the more the general
            perception of its invincibility was confirmed. Its black scales, in
            particular, were harder than any material known to man, and there
            seemed no way to make as much as a scratch in its armor.
          To finance all these activities, the king levied heavy taxes on his
            people. Dragon-related expenditures, already accounting for one seventh
            of the economy, were growing even faster than the dragon itself.
          Humanity is a curious species. Every once in a while, somebody gets
            a good idea. Others copy the idea, adding to it their own improvements.
            Over time, many wondrous tools and systems are developed. Some of
            these devices – calculators, thermometers, microscopes, and the glass
            vials that the chemists use to boil and distil liquids – serve to
            make it easier to generate and try out new ideas, including ideas
            that expedite the process of idea-generation.
          Thus the great wheel of invention, which had turned at an almost
            imperceptibly slow pace in the older ages, gradually began to accelerate.
          Sages predicted that a day would come when technology would enable
            humans to fly and do many other astonishing things. One of the sages,
            who was held in high esteem by some of the other sages but whose eccentric
            manners had made him a social outcast and recluse, went so far as
            to predict that technology would eventually make it possible to build
            a contraption that could kill the dragon-tyrant.
          The king’s scholars, however, dismissed these ideas. They said that
            humans were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers.
            And as for the impossible notion that the dragon-tyrant could be killed,
            history books recounted hundreds of attempts to do just that, not
            one of which had been successful. “We all know that this man had some
            irresponsible ideas,” a scholar of letters later wrote in his obituary
            of the reclusive sage who had by then been sent off to be devoured
            by the beast whose demise he had foretold, “but his writings were
            quite entertaining and perhaps we should be grateful to the dragon
            for making possible the interesting genre of dragon-bashing literature
            which reveals so much about the culture of angst!”
          Meanwhile, the wheel of invention kept turning. Mere decades later,
            humans did fly and accomplished many other astonishing things.
          A few iconoclastic dragonologists began arguing for a new attack
            on the dragon-tyrant. Killing the dragon would not be easy, they said,
            but if some material could be invented that was harder than the dragon’s
            armor, and if this material could be fashioned into some kind of projectile,
            then maybe the feat would be possible. At first, the iconoclasts’
            ideas were rejected by their dragonologist peers on grounds that no
            known material was harder than dragon scales. But after working on
            the problem for many years, one of the iconoclasts succeeded in demonstrating
            that a dragon scale could be pierced by an object made of a certain
            composite material. Many dragonologists who had previously been skeptical
            now joined the iconoclasts. Engineers calculated that a huge projectile
            could be made of this material and launched with sufficient force
            to penetrate the dragon’s armor. However, the manufacture of the needed
            quantity of the composite material would be expensive.
          A group of several eminent engineers and dragonologists sent a petition
            to the king asking for funding to build the anti-dragon projectile.
            At time when the petition was sent, the king was preoccupied with
            leading his army into war against a tiger. The tiger had killed a
            farmer and subsequently disappeared into the jungle. There was widespread
            fear in the countryside that the tiger might come out and strike again.
            The king had the jungle surrounded and ordered his troops to begin
            slashing their way through it. At the conclusion of the campaign,
            the king could announce that all 163 tigers in the jungle, including
            presumably the murderous one, had been hunted down and killed. During
            the tumult of the war, however, the petition had been lost or forgotten.
          The petitioners therefore sent another appeal. This time they received
            a reply from one of the king’s secretaries saying that the king would
            consider their request after he was done reviewing the annual dragon-administration
            budget. This year’s budget was the largest to date and included funding
            for a new railway track to the mountain. A second track was deemed
            necessary, as the original track could no longer support the increasing
            traffic. (The tribute demanded by the dragon-tyrant had increased
            to one hundred thousand human beings, to be delivered to the foot
            of the mountain every evening at the onset of dark.) When the budget
            was finally approved, however, reports were coming from a remote part
            of the country that a village was suffering from a rattlesnake infestation.
            The king had to leave urgently to mobilize his army and ride off to
            defeat this new threat. The anti-dragonists’ appeal was filed away
            in a dusty cabinet in the castle basement.
          The anti-dragonists met again to decide what was to be done. The
            debate was animated and continued long into the night. It was almost
            daybreak when they finally resolved to take the matter to the people.
            Over the following weeks, they traveled around the country, gave public
            lectures, and explained their proposal to anyone who would listen.
            At first, people were skeptical. They had been taught in school that
            the dragon-tyrant was invincible and that the sacrifices it demanded
            had to be accepted as a fact of life. Yet when they learnt about the
            new composite material and about the designs for the projectile, many
            became intrigued. In increasing numbers, citizens flocked to the anti-dragonist
            lectures. Activists started organizing public rallies in support of
            the proposal.
          When the king read about these meetings in the newspaper, he summoned
            his advisors and asked them what they thought about it. They informed
            him about the petitions that had been sent but told him that the anti-dragonists
            were troublemakers whose teachings were causing public unrest. It
            was much better for the social order, they said, that the people accepted
            the inevitability of the dragon-tyrant tribute. The dragon-administration
            provided many jobs that would be lost if the dragon was slaughtered.
            There was no known social good coming from the conquest of the dragon.
            In any case, the king’s coffers were currently nearly empty after
            the two military campaigns and the funding set aside for the second
            railway line. The king, who was at the time enjoying great popularity
            for having vanquished the rattlesnake infestation, listened to his
            advisors’ arguments but worried that he might lose some of his popular
            support if was seen to ignore the anti-dragonist petition. He therefore
            decided to hold an open hearing. Leading dragonologists, ministers
            of the state, and interested members of the public were invited to
            attend.
          The meeting took place on the darkest day of the year, just before
            the Christmas holidays, in the largest hall of the royal castle. The
            hall was packed to the last seat and people were crowding in the aisles.
            The mood was charged with an earnest intensity normally reserved for
            pivotal wartime sessions.
          After the king had welcomed everyone, he gave the floor to the leading
            scientist behind the anti-dragonist proposal, a woman with a serious,
            almost stern expression on her face. She proceeded to explain in clear
            language how the proposed device would work and how the requisite
            amount of the composite material could be manufactured. Given the
            requested amount of funding, it should be possible to complete the
            work in fifteen to twenty years. With an even greater amount of funding,
            it might be possible to do it in as little as twelve years. However,
            there could be no absolute guarantee that it would work. The crowd
            followed her presentation intently.
          Next to speak was the king’s chief advisor for morality, a man with
            a booming voice that easily filled the auditorium:
          “Let us grant that this woman is
            correct about the science and that the project is technologically
            possible, although I don’t think that has actually been proven. Now
            she desires that we get rid of the dragon. Presumably, she thinks
            she’s got the right not to be chewed up by the dragon. How willful
            and presumptuous. The finitude of human life is a blessing for every
            individual, whether he knows it or not. Getting rid of the dragon,
            which might seem like such a convenient thing to do, would undermine
            our human dignity. The preoccupation with killing the dragon will
            deflect us from realizing more fully the aspirations to which our
            lives naturally point, from living well rather than merely staying
            alive. It is debasing, yes debasing, for a person to want to continue
            his or her mediocre life for as long as possible without worrying
            about some of the higher questions about what life is to be used for.
            But I tell you, the nature of the dragon is to eat humans, and our
            own species-specified nature is truly and nobly fulfilled only by
            getting eaten by it...”
          The audience listened respectfully
            to this highly decorated speaker. The phrases were so eloquent that
            it was hard to resist the feeling that some deep thoughts must lurk
            behind them, although nobody could quite grasp what they were. Surely,
            words coming from such a distinguished appointee of the king must
            have profound substance.
          The speaker next in line was a spiritual sage who was widely respected
            for his kindness and gentleness as well as for his devotion. As he
            strode to the podium, a small boy yelled out from the audience: “The
            dragon is bad!”
          The boy’s parents turned bright red and began hushing and scolding
            the child. But the sage said, “Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser
            than an old fool like me.”
          At first, the boy was too scared and confused to move. But when he
            saw the genuinely friendly smile on the sage’s face and the outreached
            hand, he obediently took it and followed the sage up to the podium.
            “Now, there’s a brave little man,” said the sage. “Are you afraid
            of the dragon?“
          “I want my granny back,” said the boy.
          “Did the dragon take your granny away?”
          “Yes,” the boy said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes.
            “Granny promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies
            for Christmas. She said that we would make a little house out of gingerbread
            and little gingerbread men that would live in it. Then those people
            in white clothes came and took Granny away to the dragon… The dragon
            is bad and it eats people… I want my Granny back!”
          At this point the child was crying so hard that the sage had to return
            him to his parents.
          There were several other speakers that evening, but the child’s simple
            testimony had punctured the rhetorical balloon that the king’s ministers
            had tried to inflate. The people were backing the anti-dragonists,
            and by the end of the evening even the king had come to recognize
            the reason and the humanity of their cause. In his closing statement,
            he simply said: “Let’s do it!”
          As the news spread, celebrations erupted in the streets. Those who
            had been campaigning for the anti-dragonists toasted each other and
            drank to the future of humanity.
          The next morning, a billion people woke up and realized that their
            turn to be sent to the dragon would come before the projectile would
            be completed. A tipping point was reached. Whereas before, active
            support for the anti-dragonist cause had been limited to a small group
            of visionaries, it now became the number one priority and concern
            on everybody’s mind. The abstract notion of “the general will” took
            on an almost tangible intensity and concreteness. Mass rallies raised
            money for the projectile project and urged the king to increase the
            level of state support. The king responded to these appeals. In his
            New Year address, he announced that he would pass an extra appropriations
            bill to support the project at a high level of funding; additionally,
            he would sell off his summer castle and some of his land and make
            a large personal donation. “I believe that this nation should commit
            itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of freeing
            the world from the ancient scourge of the dragon-tyrant.”
          Thus started a great technological race against time. The concept
            of an anti-dragon projectile was simple, but to make it a reality
            required solutions to a thousand smaller technical problems, each
            of which required dozens of time-consuming steps and missteps. Test-missiles
            were fired but fell dead to the ground or flew off in the wrong direction.
            In one tragic accident, a wayward missile landed on a hospital and
            killed several hundred patients and staff. But there was now a real
            seriousness of purpose, and the tests continued even as the corpses
            were being dug out from the debris.
          Despite almost unlimited funding and round-the-clock work by the
            technicians, the king’s deadline could not be met. The decade concluded
            and the dragon was still alive and well. But the effort was getting
            closer. A prototype missile had been successfully test fired. Production
            of the core, made of the expensive composite material, was on schedule
            for its completion to coincide with the finishing of the fully tested
            and debugged missile shell into which it was to be loaded. The launch
            date was set to the following year’s New Year’s Eve, exactly twelve
            years after the project’s official inauguration. The best-selling
            Christmas gift that year was a calendar that counted down the days
            to time zero, the proceeds going to the projectile project.
          The king had undergone a personal transformation from his earlier
            frivolous and thoughtless self. He now spent as much time as he could
            in the laboratories and the manufacturing plants, encouraging the
            workers and praising their toil. Sometimes he would bring a sleeping
            bag and spend the night on a noisy machine floor. He even studied
            and tried to understand the technical aspects of their work. Yet he
            confined himself to giving moral support and refrained from meddling
            in technical and managerial matters.
          Seven days before New Year, the woman who had made the case for the
            project almost twelve years earlier, and was now its chief executive,
            came to the royal castle and requested an urgent audience with the
            king. When the king got her note, he excused himself to the foreign
            dignitaries whom he was reluctantly entertaining at the annual Christmas
            dinner and hurried off to the private room where the scientist was
            waiting. As always of late, she looked pale and worn from her long
            working hours. This evening, however, the king also thought he could
            detect a ray of relief and satisfaction in her eyes.
          She told him that the missile had been deployed, the core had been
            loaded, everything had been triple-checked, they were ready to launch,
            and would the king give his final go-ahead. The king sank down in
            an armchair and closed his eyes. He was thinking hard. By launching
            the projectile tonight, one week early, seven hundred thousand people
            would be saved. Yet if something went wrong, if it missed its target
            and hit the mountain instead, it would be a disaster. A new core would
            have to be constructed from scratch and the project would be set back
            by some four years. He sat there, silently, for almost an hour. Just
            as the scientist had become convinced that he had fallen asleep, he
            opened his eyes and said in a firm voice: “No. I want you to go right
            back to the lab. I want you to check and then re-check everything
            again.” The scientist could not help a sigh escaping her; but she
            nodded and left.
          The last day of the year was cold and overcast, but there was no
            wind, which meant good launch conditions. The sun was setting. Technicians
            were scuttling around making the final adjustments and giving everything
            one last check. The king and his closest advisors were observing from
            a platform close to the launch pad. Further away, behind a fence,
            large numbers of the public had assembled to witness the great event.
            A large clock was showing the countdown: fifty minutes to go.
          An advisor tapped the king on the shoulder and drew his attention
            to the fence. There was some tumult. Somebody had apparently jumped
            the fence and was running towards the platform where the king sat.
            Security quickly caught up with him. He was handcuffed and taken away.
            The king turned his attention back to the launch pad, and to the mountain
            in the background. In front of it, he could see the dark slumped profile
            of the dragon. It was eating.
          Some twenty minutes later, the king was surprised to see the handcuffed
            man reappearing a short distance from the platform. His nose was bleeding
            and he was accompanied by two security guards. The man appeared to
            be in a frenzied state. When he spotted the king, he began shouting
            at the top of his lungs: “The last train! The last train! Stop the
            last train!”
          “Who is this young man?” said the king. “His face seems familiar,
            but I cannot quite place him. What does he want? Let him come up.”
          The young man was a junior clerk in the ministry of transportation,
            and the reason for his frenzy was that he had discovered that his
            father was on the last train to the mountain. The king had ordered
            the train traffic to continue, fearing that any disruption might cause
            the dragon to stir and leave the open field in front of the mountain
            where it now spent most of its time. The young man begged the king
            to issue a recall-order for the last train, which was due to arrive
            at the mountain terminal five minutes before time zero.
          “I cannot do it,” said the king, “I cannot take the risk.”
          “But the trains frequently run five minutes late. The dragon won’t
            notice! Please!”
          The young man was kneeling before the king, imploring him to save
            his father’s life and the lives of the other thousand passengers onboard
            that last train.
          The king looked down at the pleading, bloodied face of the young
            man. But he bit his lip, and shook his head. The young man continued
            to wail even as the guards carried him off the platform: “Please!
            Stop the last train! Please!”
          The king stood silent and motionless, until, after while, the wailing
            suddenly ceased. The king looked up and glanced over at the countdown
            clock: five minutes remaining.
          Four minutes. Three minutes. Two minutes.
          The last technician left the launch pad.
          30 seconds. 20 seconds. Ten, nine, eight…
          As a ball of fire enveloped the launch pad and the missile shot out,
            the spectators instinctively rose to the tips of their toes, and all
            eyes fixated at the front end of the white flame from the rocket’s
            afterburners heading towards the distant mountain. The masses, the
            king, the low and the high, the young and the old, it was as if at
            this moment they shared a single awareness, a single conscious experience:
            that white flame, shooting into the dark, embodying the human spirit,
            its fear and its hope… striking at the heart of evil. The silhouette
            on the horizon tumbled, and fell. Thousand voices of pure joy rose
            from the assembled masses, joined seconds later by a deafening drawn-out
            thud from the collapsing monster as if the Earth itself was drawing
            a sigh of relief. After centuries of oppression, humanity at last
            was free from the cruel tyranny of the dragon.
          The joy cry resolved into a jubilating chant: “Long live the king!
            Long live us all!” The king’s advisors, like everybody that night,
            were as happy as children; they embraced each other and congratulated
            the king: “We did it! We did it!”
          But the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed
            the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have
            been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have
            had to die.”
          The king stepped off the platform and walked up to the young man
            in handcuffs, who was sitting on the ground. There he fell down on
            his knees. “Forgive me! Oh my God, please forgive me!”
          The rain started falling, in large, heavy drops, turning the ground
            into mud, drenching the king’s purple robes, and dissolving the blood
            on the young man’s face. “I am so very sorry about your father,” said
            the king.
          “It’s not your fault,” replied the young man. “Do you remember twelve
            years ago in the castle? That crying little boy who wanted you to
            bring back his grandmother – that was me. I didn’t realize then that
            you couldn’t possibly do what I asked for. Today I wanted you to save
            my father. Yet it was impossible to do that now, without jeopardizing
            the launch. But you have saved my life, and my mother and my sister.
            How can we ever thank you enough for that?”
          “Listen to them,” said the king, gesturing towards the crowds. “They
            are cheering me for what happened tonight. But the hero is you. You
            cried out. You rallied us against evil.” The king signaled a guard
            to come and unlock the handcuffs. “Now, go to your mother and sister.
            You and your family shall always be welcome at the court, and anything
            you wish for – if it be within my power – shall be granted.”
          The young man left, and the royal entourage, huddling in the downpour,
            accumulated around their monarch who was still kneeling in the mud.
            Amongst the fancy couture, which was being increasingly ruined by
            the rain, a bunch of powdered faces expressed a superposition of joy,
            relief, and discombobulation. So much had changed in the last hour:
            the right to an open future had been regained, a primordial fear had
            been abolished, and many a long-held assumption had been overturned.
            Unsure now about what was required of them in this unfamiliar situation,
            they stood there tentatively, as if probing whether the ground would
            still hold, exchanging glances, and waiting for some kind of indication.
          Finally, the king rose, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.
          “Your majesty, what do we do now?” ventured the most senior courtier.
          “My dear friends,” said the king, “we have come a long way… yet our
            journey has only just begun. Our species is young on this planet.
            Today we are like children again. The future lies open before us.
            We shall go into this future and try to do better than we have done
            in the past. We have time now – time to get things right, time to
            grow up, time to learn from our mistakes, time for the slow process
            of building a better world, and time to get settled in it. Tonight,
            let all the bells in the kingdom ring until midnight, in remembrance
            of our dead forbears, and then after midnight let us celebrate till
            the sun comes up. And in the coming days… I believe we have some reorganization
            to do!”
          
          * * *
          
          MORAL
          
          Stories about aging have traditionally focused on the need for graceful
            accommodation. The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and impending
            death was resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in
            practical affairs and personal relationships. Given that nothing could
            be done to prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense. Rather
            than fretting about the inevitable, one could aim for peace of mind.
          Today we face a different situation. While we still lack effective
            and acceptable means for slowing the aging process[1],
            we can identify research directions that might lead to the development
            of such means in the foreseeable future. “Deathist” stories and ideologies,
            which counsel passive acceptance, are no longer harmless sources of
            consolation. They are fatal barriers to urgently needed action.
          Many distinguished technologists and scientists tell us that it will
            become possible to retard, and eventually to halt and reverse, human
            senescence.[2] At present, there is little agreement about the
            time-scale or the specific means, nor is there a consensus that the
            goal is even achievable in principle. In relation to the fable (where
            aging is, of course, represented by the dragon), we are therefore
            at a stage somewhere between that at which the lone sage predicted
            the dragon’s eventual demise and that at which the iconoclast dragonologists
            convinced their peers by demonstrating a composite material that was
            harder than dragon scales.
          The ethical argument that the fable presents is simple: There are
            obvious and compelling moral reasons for the people in the fable to
            get rid of the dragon. Our situation with regard to human senescence
            is closely analogous and ethically isomorphic to the situation of
            the people in the fable with regard to the dragon. Therefore, we have
            compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence.
          The argument is not in favor of life-span extension per se.
            Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would
            be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible,
            the human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process,
            the healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be
            able to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which
            they would otherwise be dead.
          In addition to this general moral, there are a number of more specific
            lessons:
          (1)  A
            recurrent tragedy became a fact of life, a statistic. In the fable,
            people’s expectations adapted to the existence of the dragon, to the
            extent that many became unable to perceive its badness. Aging, too,
            has become a mere “fact of life” – despite being the principal cause
            of an unfathomable amount of human suffering and death.
          (2)  A
            static view of technology. People reasoned that it would never
            become possible to kill the dragon because all attempts had failed
            in the past. They failed to take into account accelerated technological
            progress. Is a similar mistake leading us to underestimate the chances
            of a cure for aging?
          (3)  Administration became
            its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to dragon-administration
            (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the U.S. spends on healthcare).
            Damage-limitation became such an exclusive focus that it made people
            neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive publicly-funded
            research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health
            budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.
          (4)  The social good became
            detached from the good for people. The king’s advisors worried
            about the possible social problems that could be caused by the anti-dragonists.
            They said that no known social good would come from the demise of
            the dragon. Ultimately, however, social orders exist for the benefit
            of people, and it is generally good for people if their lives are
            saved.
          (5)  The lack of a sense
            of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba of rattlesnakes
            plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and the rattlesnakes,
            and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at fault, because
            he got his priorities wrong.
          (6)  Fine phrases and hollow
            rhetoric. The king’s morality advisor spoke eloquently about human
            dignity and our species-specified nature, in phrases lifted, mostly
            verbatim, from the advisor’s contemporary equivalents.[3]
            Yet the rhetoric was a smoke screen that hid rather than revealed
            moral reality. The boy’s inarticulate but honest testimony, by contrast,
            points to the central fact of the case: the dragon is bad; it destroys
            people. This is also the basic truth about human senescence.
          (7)  Failure to appreciate
            the urgency. Until very late in the story, nobody fully realized
            what was at stake. Only as the king was staring into the bloodied
            face of the young pleading man does the extent of the tragedy sink
            in. Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we
            should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral
            imperative. The sooner we start a focused research program, the sooner
            we will get results. It matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather
            than in 24 years: a population greater than that of Canada would die
            as a result. In this matter, time equals life, at a rate of approximately
            70 lives per minute. With the meter ticking at such a furious rate,
            we should stop faffing about.
          (8)  “And in the coming days…
            I believe we have some reorganization to do!” The king and his
            people will face some major challenges when they recover from their
            celebration. Their society has been so conditioned and deformed by
            the presence of the dragon that a frightening void now exists. They
            will have to work creatively, on both an individual and a societal
            level, to develop conditions that will keep lives flourishingly dynamic
            and meaningful beyond the accustomed three-score-years-and-ten. Luckily,
            the human spirit is good at adapting. Another issue that they may
            eventually confront is overpopulation. Maybe people will have to learn
            to have children later and less frequently. Maybe they can find ways
            to sustain a larger population by using more efficient technology.
            Maybe they will one day develop spaceships and begin to colonize the
            cosmos. We can leave, for now, the long-lived fable people to grapple
            with these new challenges, while we try to make some progress in our
            own adventure.[4]
          
          
            [1] Calorie restriction (a diet low in
            calories but high in nutrients) extends maximal lifespan and delays
            the onset of age-related illnesses in all species that have been tested.
            Preliminary results from an ongoing study on rhesus and squirrel monkeys
            show similar effects. It seems quite likely that calorie restriction
            would work for our species too. Few humans, however, would be willing
            to put themselves through a lifelong hunger-diet. Some researchers
            are searching for calorie-restriction mimetics – compounds that elicit
            the desirable effects of lowered caloric intake without us having
            to go hungry. (See e.g. Lane, M. et al. (1999) “Nutritional modulation
            of aging in nonhuman primates,” J. Nutr. Health & Aging,
            3(2): 69-76.)
          [2] A recent straw
            poll at the 10th Congress of the International Association
            of Biomedical Gerontology revealed that the majority of the participants
            thought it either probable or “not improbable” that comprehensive
            functional rejuvenation of middle-aged mice would be possible within
            10-20 years (de Grey, A. (2004), “Report of open discussion on the
            future of life extension research,” (Annals NY Acad. Sci., 1019, in
            press)). See also e.g. de Grey, A., B. Ames, et al. (2002) “Time to
            talk SENS: critiquing the immutability of human aging,” Increasing
            Healthy Life Span: Conventional Measures and Slowing the Innate Aging
            Process: Ninth Congress of the International Association of Biomedical
            Gerontology, ed. D. Harman (Annals NY Acad. Sci. 959: 452-462);
            and Freitas Jr., R. A., Nanomedicine, Vol. 1 (Landes Bioscience:
            Georgetown, TX, 1999).
          
            [3] See, e.g. Kass,
              L. (2003) “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit
              of Perfection,” The New Atlantis, 1.
            [4] I’m grateful
            to many people for comments on earlier drafts, including especially
            Heather Bradshaw, Roger Crisp, Aubrey de Grey, Katrien Devolder, Joel
            Garreau, John Harris, Andrea Landfried, Toby Ord, Susan Rogers, Julian
            Savulescu, Ian Watson, and Kip Werking. I am also very grateful to
            Adi Berman, Pierino Forno, Didier Coeurnelle, and others who have
            translated the fable into other languages, and everybody who has helped
            spread the word or who have given encouragement. Thank you!
          
      
    
  
