The Future We Care For

Imagine that we learn to gather the energy of a star.

Across distances that now defeat us, our descendants build places to live. They repair damage within the body that we can scarcely understand, let alone mend. An illness that once ended a life becomes an interruption in it. People who would have died young have time to grow old, and perhaps growing old itself means something different. A century becomes a season in a human life.

We cannot know whether such a future is possible. But we can begin to ask what we would want from it.

Who would get the extra time? Who would make the decisions? Would a person born far from the centers of wealth have reason to welcome these achievements? Would the people doing the caring have lives of their own, with enough rest and freedom to enjoy them? And would the living world that sustained our ascent remain a home?

The answers would tell us something that the size of our machines could not.

I want to know what medicine might yet make possible, what intelligence might help us understand, and how far life might travel. Yet whenever I try to picture that future, I find myself returning to a room with very little equipment and a child we did not know how to help.

In 2009, I was in a jungle clinic near the border between Thailand and Myanmar. I had come with a doctor from New Zealand, also named Stu. We were working toward starting a medical school in the area. The aim was to help develop medical knowledge and training where they were urgently needed.

The boy was eight years old. His name was Sai Boi.

His body was twisted into severe muscle contractions. He had a longstanding scabies infection, and we feared that complications of infection had affected his kidneys. The clinic had very few medicines. Whatever the precise sequence of illness, we were looking at a child who was desperately unwell.

We were preparing to leave. I was returning to Chiang Mai, where I lived, and Stu had a flight back to New Zealand. Those arrangements belonged to an orderly world of roads, departures, and onward journeys. Sai Boi’s situation had no such clear next step. We had reached the limits of what we could think to do with what was available.