Another "Live Forever or Die Trying" Review

Here, via the Guardian is another commentary on "How to Live Forever or Die Trying" to accompany the reviews noted in past days at Fight Aging! "Will immortality even devalue love, and work, and other things we find meaningful in this earthly life? If there is a limitation to Appleyard's field of reference, it is that he doesn't acknowledge the fact that such questions have been worried at, and dramatised, for a long time now by science-fiction writers. The colourful, scholarly, serially monogamous existences of very long-lived humans in the novels of Iain M Banks or Peter F Hamilton - the writers of 'space operas' who combine cosmological speculation with dense social imagination - certainly don't seem bored to death. And if such existences can be imagined, they may not turn out to be quite so alien to us as the pessimists suppose. Appleyard rightly notes that the initial advent of medical immortality will have huge and perhaps dangerous social consequences, but disruptive technologies always do: the question is whether the benefit - freedom from death, which is the condition of all other possible freedoms - can really be passed up."

Link: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,,1999578,00.html

Comment Submission

Post a comment; thoughtful, considered opinions are valued. New comments can be edited for a few minutes following submission. Comments incorporating ad hominem attacks, advertising, and other forms of inappropriate behavior are likely to be deleted.

Note that there is a comment feed for those who like to keep up with conversations.