June 19th, 2005
Frontiers of Aging
Aubrey de Grey pointed me to an Australian ABC Radio National show on religion and radical life extension. Here is the summary:
Living longer fascinates us today as much as it ever did. The modern elixirs of life are the special foods and fad diets while the cosmetics industry profits more than ever from our desire to look young. Scientists too, are in on the act as they always have been, though now they have a new weapon - genetic engineering - which promises to be able to cure and prevent the processes in our cells that lead to ageing and death - and to increase our life-spans dramatically. Like magic and alchemy before it, modern science may be on the verge of solving the long quest for immortality. But what if it's our mortality that makes us human? Encounter this week explores the frontiers of ageing.
The RealPlayer audio file can be downloaded here. I'm sure we all know where I stand on the "mortality that makes us human" point - so far as I'm concerned all that mortality makes us is dead. It's hard to be human, or much of anything for that matter, when you're dead. I have nothing against people who want to age and die, but please respect our right to engineer longer, healthier lives for those who want them!
Reason,
I love your comment that all mortality does is makes us dead. I would say that it is rather difficult to feel "human" when you are dead.
Underlying the "mortality is what makes us human" idea is the rarely discussed notion that the feeling of preciousness we have about our lives (and hence our happiness) comes from the finality and mystery of death. I think it comes out of paganism: celebrate life, and live fully, for tomorrow you may be dead. I can understand where they're coming from in the sense that an unhappy life is not made any better by virtue of extenstion.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition life is precious because God made it, and we should do all we can to extend it.
Luckily, we in the 21st century can have the best of both: live a long, long time and party like pagans! And maybe by the 22nd century we'll figure out a way to make back-up copies of ourselves so that, should we meet with an accident while freeclimbing El Capitan, we can start again from our last backup.
Your backup would no doubt be happy to have been brought into existence, but you would still be dead - a copy of you is just a copy of you. It isn't you.