2045 - Ghost In Meme Machines -

http://2045.com/news/30293.html
According to Dr. Igor Vishev (b. 1933), a distinguished Russian scientist and philosopher, it is likely that there are people alive today who will never die. Just stop for a moment and think about that. Alive today. Never die.
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But from Fedorov on, a main cosmist idea has been to overcome death. For Fedorov individual immortality was not sufficient; our ultimate task was to bring back to life all humans who had ever lived. A devout if eccentric Christian, Fedorov viewed the resurrection as a human task, the Christ-like duty of the sons and daughters of humanity to restore life to those from whom it had been taken. Children would use future scientific technology to resurrect their parents, who in turn would resurrect theirs, all the way back to Adam and Eve.

As fantastic as Fedorov's idea seemed to his contemporaries, and as parts of it still seem to us, thinkers today, like Igor Vishev, have devoted very serious attention to the prospects and consequences of practical immortality. And Vishev knows something about overcoming apparent difficulties. Totally blind since age 14, due to a chemical accident, he has enjoyed a full academic career, addresses international conferences, works on a computer in several languages, plays chess, skis, and skates with his grandchildren.

The important question now may not be whether remaking ourselves and our universe to eliminate limits to present life is possible, but whether it is desirable. For centuries poets have intuited profound value in the mystery of death. As Shakespeare tells us in Sonnet 73, death gives life meaning, and love grows more strong for that "which thou must leave ere long." Or, as Wallace Stevens wrote in "Sunday Morning," "Death is the mother of beauty." Could many of our best intangibles be lost in the transition from human to "transhuman"?

And maybe we don't even need to fight death. Many traditions of religious and spiritual thought tell us that we are already immortal in part or in potential, that what we call death is simply a transition from one state of existence to another, worm to butterfly. And Socrates argued that because we don't know what death is, to fear it is hubris, pretending to know, and know well enough to fear, what we do not know. As he prepared to drink the hemlock, he famously told his friends that now was the time of parting, they to live and he to die, and which was better only the gods knew.

The question of what death is and how or whether we should attempt to eliminate it won't be settled here, or anywhere, anytime soon. But if Igor Vishev is right, someone alive today -- certainly not the one writing these words, but maybe someone reading them -- may be around long enough to know the answer.