Adam Leith Gollner cracks open the history books:
Each time technology attains a new paradigm, some of us start imagining we’ll live forever as a result. When Craig Venter created the first synthetic genome in 2010, newspapers claimed science had “officially replaced God.” After CERN’s particle accelerator seemingly established the existence of the Higgs boson in 2012, journalists announced that we’d soon be traveling around the galaxy at light speed. Each small step for science becomes a giant leap for immortalists.
We’ve always been like this. As soon as frozen food became standard in grocery stores, cryonicists began staging demonstrations in front of funeral parlors, carrying placards saying why die? you can be immortal. Our ability to program computers filled us with more of the same hopes. If we can make motherboards, we assured ourselves, why, surely we can code our own DNA to attain immortality!
Examples of such thinking still abound today. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corporation, gives out more than $40 million a year through his foundation dedicated to ending mortality, or at least to “understanding lifespan development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities.” His biographer Mark Wilson notes that Ellison sees death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.”
Recent Dish on Google’s initiative here. Previous Dish on immortality here, here, and here.
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