When I tell friends, family members, and co workers that there is a very real hunt to find the key to live forever, I’m scoffed at. Some inform me that the prospect of unending eternity is never going to happen.. They assure me God will step in and disallow any science to give us the ability to extend life far beyond the measure we currently can. I’m told it’s the stuff of science fiction and improbable if not just downright impossible.
Of course at one time that was also said about discovering the world.. Imagine the first person who announced that he or she would set sail across the world to find new land–not Columbus of course, since we know he was not first in 1492 no matter how much the ocean was blue.. They were most likely mocked too, told that their mission was in vain and success would never be found. Impossible!
The future is coming very quickly.. actually the future 2 seconds ago just became the present. With each discovery and invention, each new medical advancement and treatment, we get closer and closer to solving the unnerving mysteries of life. We also inch closer to the real possibility of life extension.. And virtually living forever..
Will it be just for the wealthy, rich and famous? Will they feast on the blood of the young? Will the poor and middle class be subjected to slavery to the masses of elite? These are questions we often comfortably think future generations will need to answer. At the rate of discovery, though, people living today may have to grapple with such moral problems..
Take this story for example from REUTERS. Will Dunham writes for the news service that scientists are actively scouring the genomes of people who live past 110. A professor from Stanford University, Stuart Kim, was quoted by Dunham. Kim says this marks the beginning of the scientific reality of living forever–the hunt is on for the genes that create this exclusive club of people. Notably, most of them who live long are women.. Another surprising myth that may crush your current way of thinking: Half of the people who live really, really long also were smokers… Put that in your pipe and smoke it…
There are some other movements being made in the hunt for eternal existence. It’s elementary, Dear Watson. IBM’s Watson is helping.. the IBM Watson supercomputer is setting out to examine your DNA, as PCMAG reports.. It will tell you how much you should exercise..eat..drink.. It will supply the answers on the best way to keep yourself healthy and fit. A computer will be your dietitian, medical adviser, and exercise instructor.. no more need for people. They are being phased out.
There is an interesting dynamic setting up for the future, if you have not noticed. On one hand, we are eliminating the need for people. Robots to do our jobs and kiosks to perform our services. While some wild eyed politicians and union officials are arguing until they are blue in the face about a minimum wage increase for fast food workers, fast food restaurants are quickly outsourcing the jobs of people cooking hamburgers and taking orders to robots. No more talking to pimply faced teenieboppers who plug in your order and have a computer to tell them the change to give you.. instead you do it yourself, swipe you card and maybe one day our bitcoin, and your processed plate of sludge comes out of the conveyor. Error free..
And on the flipside of so many efforts being made to end the need for people, we are in a hunt to live forever.. a desire to get blood transfusions from the healthy and fit, and have a diet of steady goodness without the additives and Monsanto flavored GMO killers.
At what point does this meet in the middle?
And at what stage does a breaking point come?
I spoke before of the disbelief of some that we will ever really live forever. But if we do, they tell me, they don’t want to. Instead they are compelled to just die, give up, and resign from life. I tell them, though, that they are either lying to me or lying to themselves..
I say this: If future advancements will be enough to create the possibility of a healthy life with virtually no death via cancer and other diseases, people will want to live forever.. Imagine having the years of experience of someone who is 200 but only feeling like someone who is 30!
So often people say they want to die, but when a serious illness befalls them they attempt to gain the best and brightest people in medicine to find a way for them to live longer.. see family grow a little older.. see grandchildren graduate or get married.. Just a few more years. Just a few more hours.. We all want to buy some more time, and fear death like nothing else.
That is why it’s a completely natural endeavor, this quest for living until eternity tells us not to. It is remarkable that more people don’t admit the obvious: That they want to live forever..
Sure, some with those awful diseases and sicknesses that plague happiness will give up and throw in the proverbial towel.. but even some of them would fight to die another day if there’d be a promise of health and medical advancement to wipe away their pain and suffering..
And just think.. if we can live forever, the idea of the fate of a death penalty would be much worse for people to contemplate than it is now..
Some religious people tell me that God will not permit people to live forever on earth. That is, they say, the reward of heaven..
But why does it have to be?
God never said to die young.. even those who take the Bible literally would admit that people of old days, as it is written, lived well into the hundreds.. So why couldn’t we in our modern reality do as those old fabled men and women did in Bible times before a flood and rainbow changed the world?
We can..
And God willing, or unwilling, we will strive to..
I think if there is a God, he wants us to live forever.. he wants us to reach for the stars.. at this point, with the trash buildup on the planet earth, I think a God would even want us to find another barren planet to dump our rubbish.. Why not?
We are human beings, who really have not been alive very long in the totality of the universe.. we are young.
Maybe one day when the first person lives to 200, 300, 500, and 1,000, we will look back at these days of people living until a ‘ripe old age’ of social security receivership, we will break down in laughter at these dark ages.
The future is coming..
One small step for man.. one giant leap to living forever..
Embrace it.