RSS feedWe’re an inquisitive lot, humans. We want to know, see, experience as much as we can, well most of us anyway, and there’s never enough time in our lives to do all the things we want to do.
A recent CNet article titled Just how old can he go?, talks about Ray Kurzweil’s new book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Although I’ve yet to read the book, it apparently talks about the three bridges to immortality, and if we can live for the next 20-50 years, then science will have advanced enough to if not make us immortal, then at least keep us alive until it is possible to do so. Effectively, stay alive for 20 more years, and you may become immortal.
Aside from the obvious ethical concerns, and the overpopulation and environmental impact that would have Dave Pollard in a panic, what would life be like with eternal life? Life would become even more precious than it currently is, as with immortality at stake, who’d want to chance a car accident, an airline crash, or being caught in a bush fire? The stakes would definitely be raised, and what we do from day to day in our mundane lives, would change forever.
Immortality would also change our attitudes to looking after this fragile planet, as again, the risk of a shortened life would be much much higher.
And with age comes experience, knowledge, and subsequently wisdom, and with wisdom we would perhaps become a more tolerant and pacifist society, caring more for all of the flora and fauna of our world.
Would the atheists survive, unconcerned for the eternally delayed afterlife, while the Christian based religions refuse immortality for the sake of a life beyond the mortal? Or would religions yet again have cause for change, doctoring biblical writings so that the sheep may be saved without passing over into the afterlife? Who would set the benchmark for saviour without requirement of death?
And when we consider that we have nature by the short and curlies, that we have broken the back of mortality, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake comes along and proves that we really don’t understand the universe in which we live. At last count, the earthquake took almost 200 000 lives, shifting some affected islands by up to 20 metres, the total energy released exceeding the yearly energy consumption of the U.S. by 30%, and altering the earth’s rotation by an as yet unknown amount.
Religious groups may say God’s just cause. More likely we’re just sitting on a fragile lump of spinning rock with nowhere else to go, and mother nature likes to remind us of this every once in a while.
Although, having shortened the length of an average day by around 3 microseconds, the average life of a human being will therefore have been extended by a little over 7.7 milliseconds. Not exactly immortality, but a somewhat ironic gift from mother nature none the less.