Talk 20: Glorious eternal life in 2045

Talk 20: Glorious eternal life in 2045

18 December 2020 Off By Naginder Sehmi

No surprise

Human beings named Homo sapiens do not surprise us anymore. We know these animals are the Bacterium homo grǣdigus, the greedy human bacteria. Not too long ago, these animals learnt to stand upright on two legs. This liberated their arms and fingers. Their tall shoulders supported a big brainy head enabling them to observe all around. In this way, the Homo sapiens acquired the power to dominate over almost the entire nature, living and non-living.

Homo Deus

Yuval Noah Harari, in his two books Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, has convincingly exposed to me that human beings have always been God. However, at the beginning they failed to perceive this divine power as a single attribute of nature. Individuals, tribes, ethnic groups, and later nations strived to acquire this power. This was not easy. So, each one invented its own imaginary supreme authority and called it God. Each one claimed that its God revealed the truth and bestowed it with supreme power. This arrangement helped the multiple claimants of that position to maintain some order in the proliferating human social groups.

Origin of humankind

At the same time some thinkers were of the view that we human beings were born from a virus transmitted by a meteorite. Charles Darwin postulated that we originated from chance genetic combinations together with pressure from natural selection. The Frenchman, Lamarck, concluded that human beings were born from a voluntary adaptation.  Then there were those who believed that human beings issued from the necessity to surpass all other animals so that they could eat them. For Hindus, these human-like gods have always existed; they just continue to reincarnate. Middle Eastern humans set up their own separate God and used its authority to govern the quarrelsome people, often fighting for leadership. The followers of that ideology authorized themselves in the name of this God to acquire a total control over the entire world and nature.

Glorious eternal life

Since those times, the span of human life has doubled. At what astronomical cost and detriment to Earth? All the past wise humans must be turning in their graves, horror-struck with nightmares, when they know that the high-tech titans like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon want to make human beings eternal, just like God we have been portraying – no ageing, no getting sick, no death. For the mathematician, Peter Thiel, death is simply a technical problem that the computer power will sort out shortly. People like Mark Zuckerberg are investing millions to eradicate all diseases. Google’s California Life Company has a similar objective of escaping ageing. It does not matter at what cost, these obsessed “thanatophobes” want to live forever, perfectly divine, free from reincarnation. One wonderful gift: there will be no need to pray and pay to some imaginary divinities of the past. Such glorious eternal life is expected to start in 2045 according to one expert. I will not make it.