Immortality_On Agenda!

 

How long do you want to live? 80 years? Or 100? Or 150 years? Or forever? and what if you are asked what would your last wish be? Don’t you want to leave forever? Be immortal? At least when that is possible and everyone around you prefers to do so....

 Industrialisation, urbanization, economic growth, geographical enhancement, politics, education has some limits in market, but the field which has infinite market is ’Health’. Once we are ill why would we not prefer to be healthy? And if healthy why not healthier, and may be above normal? and why would we not want to be immune against any diseases in future?

 Health is a sector which can help turning healing to upgradation. Just for example when plastic surgery was developed to heal injuries and for facial reconstruction during World war I, now it is used to upgrade beauty and to redesign yourself. Or think of ‘designer babies’ or so called ‘test tube’ babies. Simultaneously many combinations can be draw out of DNA fusion and then the best one can be choose out. Even that one can be altered to make a child more as ‘wanted.’

 Now with the growing world and New Era the diseases, war, famine are under control and would even be completely eradicated soon. So, what would be the new human agenda? Well it would be, rather it already is on agenda to make humans, the Homo sapiens immortal or to overcome death. When now we as humans can almost do anything that was beyond the scope of human imagination long ago and we believed in some supernatural entities called ‘God’. Who could communicate at any place being somewhere else, we can do it with latest communication gadgets now. They could travel long distance as quickly, which is now not beyond our reach. Be it travel beyond the planets or under the seas and oceans, is now all possible. But they were also believed to be ‘immortal’ and how far are we from attaining it?

 All over the world the studies and experiments are going step by step and bit by bit to increase human life. Human evolution and computer evolution or development in artificial intelligence is why the world is like it is today. These streams are infinitely growing and they are on fore front coming together to make human immortal.

There can broadly be 3 ways of doing so. Firstly, it can be through ‘Bio engineering,’ which would mean to modify, rejuvenate and recover our body timely to keep them surviving. Second way can be through ‘Cyborg engineering’ in which we can have micro robot like entities programmed and injected in our bloodstream which can heal and operate our body just by computer software. Third way is by creating completely ‘Inorganic immortal entities’ just like us, maybe better. Just like it goes in science fiction movies. But then will it really be ‘We’ who would be living?

 Other efforts are taken on the concept of mind uploading which would simply mean to upload all the stuff in your brain the memories, emotions, feelings, thoughts on a computer system. It could then be duplicated and stored and worked on for ages.

 A strong argument against all this which we usually have is we are humans because we have ‘consciousness’ and that's what distinguishes us from machines. Even in so many years there have been much development and progress in ‘artificial intelligence’ but not must as such in ‘artificial consciousness.’ But just give it a thought what economy, growth and military needs is not consciousness but intelligence, and then the innovations like ‘chat GPT’ further depends the matter.

 Once we believed or even today we do, that the authority of everything of creation, existence and destruction resides in clouds with the divine powers, ‘the god’. This authority then shifted to land, to humans their consciousness and now when we are in age when our devices know so much about us, even more than we ourselves do. For Example the Google knows your search history, your location, where and how much do you travel, your likes & dislikes, your tastes, your biometrics, account balance. Further now with gadgets like fitness watches and applications it records your blood pressure, your breath rate, amount of sleep, your interactions, your phone calls, about your vision and what not. It with so much of information and knowing us better than we do is simply manipulating our decision making. That is we are shifting the authority we believe to have received from clouds to software clouds.

 When we think of such huge is concept on individual level, what would it mean? If not immortal we can better referred to it as being ‘a-mortal’, because there would still be chances of death by accidents or in war. But if so, just imagine when you know that everyone around us is going to live forever then how conscious you would be about your own self while driving a car or crossing a road so as to prevent in accident? Would we at all risk lives? And if you are immortal how long would you work in same profession? When would you retire or get married? How many memories would you have and how long would you retain them? Just give it a thought.

 About the society as a whole, if everyone is immortal how much would the population of the planet be? Imagine family structure with so many generations and there interrelations. Who would inherit whose property if the person has to live with that forever? and then what about resources like land and food would they suffice? Immortality would be built on corpses of human ethics.

 In Politics every generation has different ideologies and interests and needs representation with that respect. If you are a Chinese, where everyone is immortal how long could you tolerate Xi Jinping? Or in Russia Vladimir Putin?

Moreover thinking about a country like India with so much of economic disparity the major question is if this facility or necessity (as one sees it) is available who can actually afford it? Will it be available worldwide and to everyone to suffice is the question. But then when if we have genetically and technologically modified beings and super machines what would our careers and jobs look like? with computers taking up law and order, operating patients, and engineering all of us would be transformed to unemployed further unemployable. But if still we find out some way out of it who and how long would count into working population and pay taxes? and how long would one receive pensions (if any).

After all it would affect our entire education system, imagine a teacher who is 200 years old who learnt what he knows in his 20s and teaching over many generations the same content. Will it not be outdated? And what would really mean ‘History’ and how would one define it? Max Plank’s principle says that:

 "Science advances one funeral at a time."

 This means only when one generation passes away do new theories come up.

 So, the question arises that does this all have any brakes? Applying brakes would mean to halt the growth, revolution and economy willingly. And at individual level will one be willing not to be immortal especially knowing that everyone around would live forever? But one thing is clear that if anything like this happens it would be hard to say that it would still be us, the ‘Homo sapiens’ into existence. And finally how long would it take?.....Maybe not much. Just like the internet which would have not have been imagined only a few decades ago is now a reality. So maybe it would be wise to say then that we are perhaps the ‘last generation of Homo sapiens’. (Unless history takes another turn.)