Life is a journey of desirable and undesirable events. Remember, while you are reading this sentence, more than 10 people will pass away. This includes helpless children as well as those suffering from an extreme agony. In the span of a day, 2,700 children are killed by measles; 6,000 children die from diarrhea; 1,400 women die during childbirth and 24,000 people die from starvation.
There are roughly 150,000 humans who die per day. Many of these are elders. However, old age should not be a death sentence. Besides, not only elders will die but also young adult and children due to diseases. There is an absence of treatments for illnesses and diseases, which are responsible for this terrifying death toll per day.
It is definitely time to end all the precursors of death. There is an immense effort being done daily to combat diseases and alleviate the pain that they bring with them. There is even great research being conducted to eradicate the aging process once and for all. This is how Robert Ettinger proclaimed the cycle of life.
“Being born is not a crime, so why must it carry a sentence of death?”
By Robert Ettinger
It is thus highly possible that death will be overturned in the years to come. The court of science and technology will ideally execute the manoeuvre of the demise of death in our lifetime.
Interfering in The Natural Order
The hubristic attitude of believing that death is natural and man shall not interfere to play god prevents science to progress. Nonetheless, humans have always tried their best to improve comfort, security and efficacy of life by deploying their creativity and resourcefulness.
In contemporary marketing most products are promoted as being “natural”. But, what is natural or unnatural? An accurate definition to what is natural is that everything that happens in the world (synthetic or not) is bound to be natural. The very fact that humans are an element of nature means that every handcraftsmanship or invention produced by humans such as machines are also natural. They become incorporated to nature through our natural presence. However, most people do not consider ‘natural’ through this definition. They consider that all events, occurrences or products that are generated without the involvements of humans are natural. For instance, milk generated by cows is natural. However, the milk that is bought in the supermarket is practically unnatural.
Other more important debates about the word ‘natural’ are related to the spur to defeat aging and death. The many scientific measures initiated to enhance human conditions were at their development phase scorned as intolerable and unacceptable, but today they are universally accepted. There are various examples from vaccination to anaesthesia; blood transfusions to organ transplant; birth control pills to abortion. Now let us imagine how the world without the so called ‘unnatural’ development and improvement produced by man would be like. Some of the natural things that humans have overcome are Polio, Tooth decay, Cholera, but without these “unnatural” cures developed by humans, we would still be at the battle against death in face of these very diseases. More significantly, death is natural but must it be an accepted hubris.
It is certain that creativity and innovation must be deployed to improve human life. It has been done for ages. The benchmarks are just around us; fire (ignition with wood to matches), electricity (fossil fuel slowly changing to renewable), antibiotics, organ transplants, etc. It is absurd not to use science and technology for our well-being. If technology can be used to alleviate natural limits such as aging and death, it is thus best to use it towards this end. The idea of determine what is wrong or right by questioning whether it is natural or unnatural is simply unrealistic.
It is not claimed that moral and ethical issue should be ignored. It is definitely sure that concerns of safety, individual choice, overpopulation, resource distribution and environmental challenges must be addressed at an equal stance. This is all possible when an arena of progressive thinking is harnessed.
The Journey Towards Emancipation of Death
There is probably a great deal of people who still believe that opposing death is unnatural and wrong. It shall be remembered that some centuries ago opposing slavery was considered as a dystopia and foolish idea.
Arthur C. Clarke Revolutionary Ideas
Arthur C. Clarke, says that revolutionary ideas mainly go through 3 phases. The first reaction of people is that “It’s completely impossible.” They will then re-think as the current situation is worsening and claim that it “Maybe it’s possible to it, but it would cost too much”. The final say to revolutionary ideas is “I always thought it was a good idea”.
The observation by Clarke is aligned with the truth of human psychology. The analogy of human slavery reveals a ground-breaking example of challenging something taken for granted. In history, humans have since time possessed other humans in the form of slavery. It had even become a way of living. The emancipation of freedom and fundamental rights has only been present for a century or two. It took years to end slavery. It went through the phases of being “impossible”, to “possible but too costly” and thereafter to our current position as being a “good idea”.
The abolition of death will soon come to the foreground. Humans are enslaved and condemned by death. Scientists are those who will be fighting the battle to unleash us from our enslavement of death.
Nano-medicine and biotechnology hold prospective solutions to alleviate illnesses, diseases and to assure youthfulness forever. This will finally free us from our decrepit precursors of natural death. We will surpass physical frailty and ill healthy by new wondrous technological advancement.
The dream is to live without the fear of death. However, there is a multi-facet agenda of solution to extend our lifespan. The most advanced solution might be to extract our personality and inject it into an indestructible robot. This would require a sophisticated process to dislocate our brain away from our feeble body and implant it into a futuristic robot. Nonetheless, this process would probably be done by creating a digital copy of the content of our brain and thereby downloading it into a robot. The advantage of opting for an “upload and download” approach is that a backup copy of our personality can be maintained in case something cataclysmic happen to the robot structure. This would for sure make us truly immortal; we could even have copies of “ourselves” stored in various corners of the universe.
The Birth of Immortality
It is a bit repugnant to see an incredible creation such as the human brain enclosed in a feeble, fragile and ephemeral structure, which is our human body. The human body might be attractive and stunning, but it is disappointingly short-lived. The body that we live in is unfortunately not a creation of extreme intelligence. It has been created or has evolved mainly for reproduction and survival.
The human body is also being forced by biological and social conditions to turn into an attractive design. This is why our body has stunning and beautiful contours, which establishes a standard behaviour model. It is thus hard for us to deviate from the standard preconceptions evolved over-time. This is why people tend to shy away when they come across an individual with missing limbs or a disfigured face. It is also one of the reasons why humans are opposing the substitution of our natural body with an artificially developed one. The body that we inhabit has been subject to directionless modifications. It is a derivate of cumbersome, dumbness, and tortuous evolution through millions of years.
The body was not designed to yield maximum benefits. It is rather a product of auspicious twists occurring through its evolution. Moreover, our body is still evolving with the derived genetic mutations based from ancestors to a descendant. We are lucky that we have evolved into a highly intelligent being. We can now anticipate our own future development. The use of marvelous tools and our creative mind we can produce a new body. An intelligent body that does encompass our preferences and needs.
In our short life span, we have already seen dozens of new prototypes of automobiles and aircrafts. In addition, engineers are able to speed up the pace of progress through simulated environments, which are both cheaper and easier to manipulate. The use of intelligent computers with well elaborated programs enables tests to be conducted under normal and extreme conditions.
The future lies in something that scientists refer to as a “Posthuman Body”. The new sophisticated simulation approach is making it possible to abstain from the cumbersome effort to construct a molecule by molecule and then test them one by one. Simulation in a virtual reality environment is making it feasible to test molecular changes easily without this manual burden of building and testing each piece.
Moreover, simulations are also advancing at rocket speed. It is certain that soon the experience of entering a simulated body will be inseparable from the physical reality. Life and virtual life will converge as the same. People might even want to inhabit into this virtual reality. A world where every experience is as in the real world and one can enjoy and interact with close-friends and families.
Many people would retreat from the ideology of living in a virtual realm. However, an advanced simulation could make the experience practically synonymous with our real experience today. Let us consider our actual physical body as an organic robot. When we enter the physical world our brain and mind are the only criteria that distinguish an individual in terms of identity and personality. Furthermore, the organic robot body can hear, see, touch, smell and taste. These sensors are sent to the brain via electrical pathways just like processing in a computer system. A computer system could produce the same process, as the organic robot, which would practically make us aware and believe that this is “me” in the real world. The whole concept of virtual reality is based on creating such an environment. A surrounding that creates experiences that is true. We could be on earth simulating a robot that is physically on the surface of Mars. The definition of virtual environment will gradually change as we progress.
It is believed that in a century or even less, many people will be having their human personality living in the cyberspace. There will definitely be hurdles such as new types of emotions and sensations felt in comparison to what we know today, but it is a step worth taking. Cyberspace is no longer mere science fiction. The actual trends in computing technology are even making it feasible that living in cyberspace will occur within 2 to 3 decades.
An Inconceivable Future
Something unimaginable today but perhaps soon a question too many is whether we should live in one, two or three bodies. The very fact that we have a wild imagination makes it hard to anticipate the future. It is hard to know what type of creature we will become in the upcoming centuries.
The lowest prediction of tomorrow’s evolution of humans is that we would merely be as we are today. However, the wildest speculations suggest that we might inhabit in several bodies at once. This appears similar to a recent Bruce Wills Film, entitled: Surrogates In the film, people can live in various bodies and can buy different clones, or rather body structures to live in. However, such a radical change could change our personal identity, consciousness, and body functioning as well.
The emergence of immortal super-beings is something that probably will happen in the future. This can be a possible path towards the evolution of Posthumans. However, in the years to come the first aims in extending longevity is in the sphere of medical improvement and regenerative medicine.
References
1. Mike Treder .(2004) The scientific conquest of Death, Imminst.org
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Immortality, Longevity, Nanotechnology, Stem cells