Defeating old age is not exactly a new concept, even our oldest work of literature in the world i.e. the epics of Gilgamesh deals with search for immortality. The only difference is that lately the quest has started to look less like fallacy and more like science. With the rise of humanism philosophy, apart from advocating extension of democracy and expansion of open society, certain scientists, futurists and philosophers are also advocating for options of life extension i.e. defy death through manmade solutions. Hence studies on live sciences, genetics, cybernetics and gene therapy are getting maximum traction and funding in recent times. Theories like cryonics are emerging further for resurrection of human body in future or the concept of mind uploading for preservation of soul.
With players like Google in the p
icture, Silicon Valley is getting into this area of human immortality and working towards finding the ‘fountain of youth’ to fight against old age problems and eventually death. Then we have emerging organizations like 2045 initiative, founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov, which claims to achieve cybernetic immortality by the year 2045 and create a new era for humanity with holographic bodies. Many other futurists like Ray Kurzweil, Aubray De Grey etc. are continuously working in this field of life extension and preaching the world to join them in their quest for death less life. Here in India as well, we have organizations like India Future society, which supports aging and longevity research works in the country.
Many are of the view that no one was ever incentivised enough to fix up this underlying cause of aging because the whole medical and insurance industry works on this fear of death; and hence benefits maximum from this life and death model. And the other part of the discussion says, we humans are unable to resist the urge to ‘upgrade’ ourselves and become more powerful to defy the crutches of God for our survival, thereby gaining complete control and jumping on inorganically to post human era.
In one view, we are disrupting the natural human cycle by these forceful principles of life extension and on the other, we are just trying to find a cure for aging like any other life threatening disease. We have already once disrupted the natural human cycle during the plague epidemic to increase our life extension, but are we ready to re-invent ourselves again in such a short span of time? Also what about the economic and political stability of this human community? How would immortal humans deal with issues like ever increasing population or limited availability of essential resources? What about the divide in society created by these immortal humans as Professor Yuval Noah Harari predicted that the rich are set to become God like cyborgs in the next 200 years?
Or the most important question, are we ready to live like AVATARS in reality?