I was around eight years old when my childhood ended, and it was the moment I found out about death and properly understood what that actually meant. If I am honest, I still fear death, so the idea of immortality really appeals to me. Take a moment and just think about it, the ability to live long into the future which would make deep space travel possible even with the technology we have now, never mind in fifty or one hundred years in the future and beyond even that possibly into the millennia, but I am getting ahead of myself lets focus on the immediate future There are many new and future technologies that are increasingly appearing publicly that are leading many in humanity to believe that we could one day find immortality. All you need to do is google immortality, and It seems to be coming along at quite a pace that appears to suggest anyone under the age of forty could be the first generation of immortals. I will be talking about a few of these on this blog but the main focus being on transhumanism. Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations utilizing science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values. – Max More (1990) This leads us to biotechnology, genetic engineering, molecular nanotechnology, and the possibility of uploading your consciousness to a machine hybrid or the possibility of the singularity. These are just a few of the avenues that transhumanists are exploring in their quest for immortality. I have to hand it to them it’s ambitious, to say the least, but in a world where overpopulation is becoming a problem can we really with good knowledge go down this road? The population growth worldwide just for today is approximately one hundred and eighty thousand people today, but if people stopped dying that number would rise to approximately three hundred and ten thousand people which is the level of births at present. We really would need to send billions of people to off-world colonies just to combat the increased population. The main problem I see in all of this is the fact that as amazing as our bodies with our ability to heal we cannot as yet stop ageing which makes our bodies frail and unable to heal as well as when we are young. This leads us for the need of some sort of genetic engineering to turn off the ageing switch in our DNA which as farfetched as it sounds, major discoveries are happening all the time with the increasing drive in innovative technology. One of these new innovations is CRISPR which is described by ThermoFisher Scientific as "The transformative CRISPR-Cas9 technology is revolutionizing the field of genome editing. Able to achieve highly flexible and specific targeting, the CRISPR-Cas9 system can be modified and redirected to become a powerful tool for genome editing in broad applications such as stem cell engineering, gene therapy, tissue and animal disease models, and engineering disease-resistant transgenic plants." So in summing up, I think the technology that the transhumanism movement are looking at, has amazing potential for the future self-evolution of the human species but still a great many hurdles to go. These hurdles will most likely be ethical and political ones opposed to actual scientific ones because honestly if I close my eyes, I can already see the protesters, most of whom are just protesting because they love a good protest in this country, but that my friends are a topic for someone more suited to the subject. Sources What is transhumanism (2010) available at: http://whatistranshumanism.org/ (accessed 23 March 2018) What is biotechnology? (2018) available at: https://www.bio.org/what-biotechnology (accessed on 23 March 2018) What is bioengineering? (2018) available at: https://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-is-genetic-engineering (accessed 23 March 2018) Markle, R (2018) Nanotechnology. Available at: http://www.zyvex.com/nano/ (accessed 23 March 2018) Singularity symposium(2012) available at http://www.singularitysymposium.com/definition-of-singularity.html (accessed 23 March 2018) What is CRISPR-Cas9?(2018) available at https://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-is-crispr-cas9 (accessed 23 March 2018)
