Jenny and I finally got our lazy bones over to Bonaventure Cemetery… a place Jenny has been wanting to see for quite some time. She insisted I bring my “good” camera, and I’m glad I did. We walked around the huge grounds through crazy wind and blowing dust, contemplating life and death.
It always amazes me that people dump tons of money into elaborate grave sites… they set up “perpetual care” contracts to keep the sites pristine… all in an effort to maintain some kind of immortality. I kept seeing phrases on the stones like “to live on in the hearts of the living is to live forever”, but really it’s futile… you are dead. No legacy or elaborate grave site or anything can change that. Even Alexander The Great, Caesar of Rome, and Hitler himself… just a few of the most remembered men in history… they are dead. No matter what their legacy was, is, or will continue to be, they are simply gone. Their essence is rendered forever insignificant in the face of existence.
I, for one, never want to die. Death scares the crap out of me. I want to selfishly clone my body over and over and just keep transporting my brain from vessel to vessel. Even now, while I sit here and type this, I remember the gravestones with dates on them all the way back to the mid 1800s and all I can do is pray for the day to come when I can make full biological backups of my entire brain structure and chemistry so I can continue to live indefinitely. I say, death is for the weak! Death is for the uneducated! Death is for the have-nots! … and there I’ve come to it… the crux of the argument. Many people argue that the technological advances like cloning, quantum computer processing, artificial intelligence, stem cell research, DNA research, and neural mechanics will ultimately upset the balance of humanity. Death, the great equalizer, will have lost its potency… it will only affect the have-nots. How very 21st century.
Without death, there is no evolution. Many argue we’re on the verge of rendering evolution obsolete by being able to screen out DNA imperfections and even begin to design our own DNA based biological machines. The day may very well come where a person can choose to grow bird wings, or decide they like the look and feel of having snake skin. Simply inject the DNA/RNA strands and your internal DNA software is changed to suit what you want. This may all be very well and true, but it does not render another form of evolution obsolete… social evolution.
Imagine a world where most people, not only the rich and powerful, have access to life extended treatments. A world where everyone could live to 500 or 1000 years old or more! Aside from the obvious population control problems and services problems like social security and taxes and such, there is the real problem of social and cultural stagnation. Imagine if the world never changed its views on anything… if the world was still held fast and true to the ideas and concepts of people who are now 80 years old.
People don’t change their minds fast enough… people need to die. New people need to be born, learn new ideas, think in new ways, and most importantly, take the place of those who die. If everyone simply kept on living indefinitely, there would be no spaces for new people to fill… no room for new ideas to take root… no room for new people to even be born for that matter.
Right now China has so many people they have a government mandated birth policy in effect. You are limited to the number of children you can have. That could easily become the global norm if life extending treatments became a reality. On one hand, it forces everyone to realize we’re in a closed system here on Earth, a place where cause and effect is a global phenomenon. We only have so many resources to share, and a free market approach like survival of the fittest can’t continue to work once we’ve broken the rules of evolution on this planet.
