More than mortal?
In the 2015 Santo Domingo TEDx conference, David Simpson (best-selling novelist of the Post-Human series, a Kindle All-Star and has been ranked the most popular scifi Author in America by Amazon.com), explains how, as nano technologies get smaller and smaller, not only will they be able to flow through your veins destroying pathogens and intruders as being researched now (2019) but by following current trends in 10-20 years they will be able pass into the cells themselves. They could tackle our Telomeres. Telomeres are the caps at the end of each strand of DNA that protect our chromosomes. Fixing and changing these, Simpson suggests in his conference, would mean we could pick an age and stick to it. Are we humans if we don’t die?
Ray Kurzweil, of Google notoriety, is an American inventor and futurist. He is famously quoted as saying: “Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.”
Kurzweil also does great TED talks on the subjects of the accelerating power of technology and ‘what the future holds’.
Kurzweil, Ray. ‘The singularity is near.’ In Ethics and emerging technologies, pp. 393-406. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014.
Kurzweil is also an ardent forecaster of human level intelligence (by 2029, he specifically predicts). His article ‘Enhanced Longevity’ is acclaimed by the Independent and he appears on TED on the 2nd of June 2014 with a conference talk on Hybrid Thinking.
The obvious problem, if people don’t die, is how we sustain them. A burgeoning population of 7.7 billion is proving to be a big problem. Over-population is perhaps the greatest issue affecting all humanity today, so what if our numbers were not to reduce. Money will surely play a factor in who can buy more life or youth, but who decides how long you can have? It would fast become an ethical nightmare.
The next problem is the workforce – who stays to work on? How do we earn money to pay for these experiences/existences? There are almost certainly more questions than answers as we reach this futuristic, hypothetical and predicted phase, which does seem extremely science-fiction. It is honest prediction, however, by professionals, are few of these are old ideas. Pre ‘Matrix’ films such as Robocop, Tron, Total Recall.
Eternal life has been one of man’s ultimate quests. There is an irony that, in achieving it, flying in the very face of nature, we will have achieved post-humanism in a way that, should an individual wish to, they needn’t become a post human. The Independent ran with a boldly titled article on the 8th May 2018 ‘The first person to live to be 1000 years old is alive today’. To quote my boss (Josh Johnson), “How tired and pissed off would you be?!”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/live-longer-longevity-stem-cells-ageing-a8332701.html
After some hours research it becomes difficult to to remember that much of this is no longer dabbling with science fiction but science prediction, although it is fun to confuse the two.