What if…we fight disease and defeat death? And they lived a long, long, endless life...
According to the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil, human immortality is already close. In his vision of the future, we may die in a car accident or fall from a rock, but not from old age. Proponents of this idea believe that immortality, understood in this way, may become a reality in the next forty years.
If that were the case, then it must be related to radical social change, shrimp i business in the world. For example, no pension plan in the world can feed a person if they stop working at 65 and then live to be 500 years old. Well, logically, overcoming the short cycle of human life is unlikely to mean eternal retirement. You will also have to work forever.
Immediately there is a problem of the next generations. With the unlimited resources, energy, and advancements featured elsewhere in this issue, overpopulation might not be a problem. It seems logical to leave the Earth and colonize space not only in the variant of "immortality", but also in the case of overcoming other barriers that we write about. If life on Earth were eternal, it is difficult to imagine the continuation of normal population growth. The earth would turn into hell faster than we think.
Is eternal life only for the rich?
There are fears that such kindness is real, as "immortality»Available only to a small, wealthy and privileged group. Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari presents a world in which humans, but not all but a small elite, can finally achieve immortality through biotechnology and genetic engineering. An unambiguous prediction of this "eternity for the chosen few" can be seen in the efforts in which many billionaires and biotech companies are funding and researching methods and drugs to reverse aging, prolong healthy lives indefinitely. Proponents of this study point out that if we have already succeeded in extending the life of flies, worms and mice by manipulating genetics and limiting calorie intake, why wouldn't this work for humans?
1. Time magazine cover about Google's fight against death
Founded in 2017, AgeX Therapeutics, a California-based biotechnology company, aims to slow down aging through the use of technologies related to the immortality of cells. Similarly, CohBar is trying to harness the therapeutic potential of mitochondrial DNA to regulate biological functions and control cell death. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have invested heavily in Calico, a company focused on understanding and overcoming aging. Time magazine covered this in 2013 with a cover story that read, "Can Google solve Death?" (one).
Rather, it is clear that even if we could achieve immortality, it would not be cheap. That's why people like Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and the founders of Google, support companies that want to fight the aging process. Research in this area requires huge investments. Silicon Valley is saturated with the idea of eternal life. This means that immortality, if ever achieved, is probably only for a few, since it is likely that billionaires, even if they do not keep it only for themselves, will want to return the money invested.
Of course, they also care about their image, implementing projects under the slogan of fighting diseases for all. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, recently announced that through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, they plan to invest $XNUMX billion over ten years to address everything from Alzheimer's to Zika.
Of course, the fight against the disease prolongs life. Advances in medicine and biotechnology are a path of “small steps” and incremental progress over the long term. Over the past hundred years, during the period of intensive development of these sciences, the life expectancy of a person in Western countries has lengthened on average from about 50 to almost 90 years. The impatient, and not only the billionaires of Silicon Valley, are not satisfied with this pace. Therefore, research is underway on another option for achieving eternal life, known as "digital immortality", which in various definitions also functions as a "singularity" and was presented by the mentioned (2). Supporters of this concept believe that in the future it will be possible to create a virtual version of ourselves, which will be able to survive our mortal bodies and, for example, contact our loved ones, descendants through a computer.
In 2011, Dmitry Ikov, a Russian entrepreneur and billionaire, founded the 2045 Initiative, whose goal is to “create technologies that allow the transfer of a person’s personality to a more perfect non-biological environment and prolong life, including to the point of immortality.”
The boredom of immortality
In his 1973 essay entitled "The Makropoulos Affair: Reflections on the Boredom of Immortality" (1973), the English philosopher Bernard Williams wrote that eternal life would become unspeakably boring and dreadful after a while. As he noted, we need new experience to have a reason to continue.
Unlimited time will allow us to experience whatever we want. So, what is next? We would leave out what Williams calls "categorical" desires, that is, desires that give us a reason to continue to live, and instead, there would be only "conditional" desires, things that we might want to do if we are alive. but not important. alone is enough to motivate us to stay alive.
For example, if I'm going to go on with my life, I want to have a filled cavity in my tooth, but I don't want to continue living just to have a filled cavity. However, I may want to live to see the end of the great novel that I have been writing for the last 25 years.
The first is conditional desire, the second is categorical.
The more important is “categoricalness”, in the language of Williams, we realize our desires, having finally received at our disposal any long life. A life devoid of categorical desires, Williams argued, would turn us into vegetable creatures without any serious purpose or reason to continue living. Williams cites Elina Makropoulos, the heroine of an opera by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, as an example. Born in 1585, Elina drinks a potion that will keep her alive forever. However, at three hundred years old, Elina has experienced everything she wanted to, and her life is cold, empty and boring. There is nothing more to live on. He stops drinking the potion, freeing himself from the boredom of immortality (3).
3. Illustration for the story of Elina Makropoulos
Another philosopher, Samuel Scheffler from New York University, noted that human life is completely structured in that it has a fixed duration. Everything we value and therefore can desire in human life must take into account the fact that we are beings of limited time. Of course, we can imagine what it's like to be immortal. But it obscures the fundamental truth that everything people value only makes sense in light of the fact that our time is finite, our choices are limited, and each of us has a finite time.
