Sunday, December 18, 2011

Time Magazine and Human Immortality

On the latest Time Magazine with "The Protestor" as person of the Year it notes on page 11 that the most attention of any subject they wrote about last year was "2045:The Year Man becomes Immortal". You will find it in the the very center of "Most emailed Time.com stories, Most @Time retweets, and Time cover stories that got the most mail.

I mentioned "2045" to a retired nuclear physicist from the South originally. His reaction to my statement was "Bullshit". However, my reaction to his reaction was that I felt like I was witnessing one of the people at the first heavier than air flight whose pipe fell out of his mouth who just saw "a rock fly" (something heavier than air fly from a standing stop). So, I see human immortality much like Wilbur and Orville Wright and their first motorized plane flight. It is sort of "Once it is accomplished everyone will be doing it soon". It's not that planes don't sometimes crash and people don't sometimes die. The whole point is that potentially once some people don't die, this changes everything about what it means to be a human being just like motorized flight did in 1903.

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