On “inescapable mortality”, I would like to suggest a different view, partly in light of your following post Just Say Yes.

Many atheists make something of a fetish of displaying their equanimity in the face of death, but fatalism is against the spirit of our civilization and is not the way progress has been achieved in the past. We didn’t get where we are today by passively accepting massive epidemics, slavery, and the dominance of absolute monarchies and stupid religions as immutable fixed features of reality, however much they may have seemed to be in earlier centuries, We developed antibiotics and vaccines, we fought to advance justice and rationality and science. And we succeeded in changing a great many things for the better.

The development of therapies to cure the human aging process, which would mostly abolish involuntary death, is fundamentally the same kind of thing as the eradication of smallpox or bubonic plague. Yes, it’s a more complex problem, but fundamentally similar, and of course advancing technology is able to tackle more complex and difficult problems generation by generation. I’ve been researching this issue (and posting about it) for years and my assessment is that actually accomplishing this could be decades, not centuries, away.

I choose “to place my bets on the optimist in me… that ‘crazy’ man who refuses to accept NO for an answer when he knows the answer is YES… and who ‘naively’ keeps on trying even when things seem hopeless”, especially when things don’t seem hopeless at all — some of the relevant therapies have shown great promise in testing on animals, for example. I choose not to “make a virtue of the word ‘can’t’.” I believe we should aim high. Science has already accomplished many things that would have been firmly declared impossible in earlier centuries.

A century from now we will look back on a world that passively accepted a fixed and limited lifespan with the same pity and horror with which we now look back on a world that accepted being helpless in the face of the Black Death as normal (and yes, I believe I have a shot at still being around when we get there).

Sorry for the lengthy comment — this is rather a passion of mine. 🙂

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