No More Death
I’m making three points about in the future humans not dying anymore:
1. I will present a roadmap on how to get to physical immortality.
2. Adopting this aim will require us to stop the worst things we’re doing.
3. A side result of this one goal will be a perfect world without hatred.
A return to paradise on earth, including to physical immortality, may not come from a supernatural miracle one day mysteriously descending upon us or from finding one or several magic potions. Neither from a flight of wishful thinking born from our fear of death. Rather, it may be the result of hard and persistent planning and work, as I will now detail.
Some religious thinkers would object that G^d should effectuate such a thing. I suggest that He’s waiting for us (or He could’ve done it yesterday).
Most science fiction is far too near-sighted, not far-sighted enough. It’s still full of primordial aggression and addiction and ugliness. But a vision of perfection could become reality really not so long from now.
The best reason for striving for physical immortality is that it’s an inborn potential that we should stop ruining — not just because we’d hate to die.
A Proper Perspective Reassures and Heals
When humankind arrives at its final destination, even the horrors of the past will become less horrible. They will be seen as stages we needed to go through to get to universal peace and goodness on earth.
We will understand why physical death once was needed. We used to get sick and age and if we wouldn’t have died, later generations would have been so overburdened with taking care of the elders that no time or energy would have been left to take care of, raise and save the kids. And humans are born relatively helpless to allow parents to have their (good) influence on them for years. (Just like the world awaits our stewardship.)
We will be so grateful for having arrived at a stage of no one dying anymore and we would have great honor and respect for all those who lived before us and got us there.
The Nature of Dangers to Our Survival Has Changed
It used to be that threats to our immortality mostly came from outside. Dangerous animals, famines, colds, microbes, etc.
But now, the endurance of our species is mostly threatened by ourselves. Climate change, destruction of the environment, war, greed, etc.
These challenges may be sturdier but they are also more directly under our control — as soon as we master to control and behave ourselves.
If we’d move to other planets, who knows if we could survive the different radiation, gravity, night-day cycle, etc. But for sure we should be able to learn to live with ourselves and each other in peace and harmony, to the benefit of everyone on this planet. And clean up the mess we made.
Surpassing Blind Nature
At first, Nature dictated that we should get to know as many microorganisms as possible because, in the distant past, our DNA and our cells were enriched by some of them. How could our bodies at any time close the door to such golden opportunities for any further enrichment?
But, we’ll get to a stage that we could make any improvements of our bodies in the lab without going through the costly process of everyone getting sick, hardly ever giving us better bodies but costing many lives.
Discovering and creating artificial antibiotics was a good step in human history but much better was when they made our cells impenetrable to microbes. Enough was enough. And too much plenty. Nature’s experiment with our cells was over.
Next Stages Leading up to Physical Immortality
Then we should find out how to stop and prevent all cancers and autoimmune disease. It would be worth all the time, effort, and money.
Next will be the campaign against wear and tear and aging. We stopped it. And then we would learn to reverse it.
Then we’d employ emergency stations all over the planet. As soon as someone would get hurt, an enormous apparatus would come into action to get them back to health. The number of ingenious tricks will be sheer limitless and to repair almost any hurt. That will cut back on death too.
The next challenge would be to help everyone so that we wouldn’t hurt ourselves anymore. Real nutrition and rest and an alternative to any addiction that would solve the underlying unhappiness. People learned to clean up their brains better than any baby ever was allowed to. We cried and laughed, shivered and perspired, stretched and yawned until we had no distress in our memories left. We got out of it so much happiness, energy, unity, and wisdom.
Sophisticated lab work might make us able to biosynthesize all vitamins and other essential molecules. Chlorophyll in our skin cells could make it unnecessary to eat. Like trees, we’d only need water and minerals.
The Last Stage was the Toughest
And then would come the fight against the greatest killer of all times: inter-human aggression. That won’t be so simple to stop. Millennia of hatred and negativity need to be cornered and ended — even just to enable healing.
The whole fallacy of “it’s us or them” must be replaced by “what is really good for anyone is good for everyone.” We’d need to clean up the planet to make it hospitable again. It’ll take time; and many lives.
Important is to stop hurting children, to stop hurting each other and to stop hurting ourselves. Discovering a simple therapy to heal all emotional hurt should help, when applied constantly by more and more people.
If the End is Well, All is Well
But we’ll get there. Especially those who always thought so. The best peace on earth that we could have wanted will be. Not just quietness and friendliness; we’ll become physically immortal. We’ll earn all the time to get to know everyone and everything that we wanted. The religious will feel good because they always had predicted a return to paradise; and the humanists felt good because they always had put their trust in people.
True, after some global discussion, we all decided not to have children anymore. To past generations that would have sounded like a tremendous loss. What they didn’t know is that in a way, we all had become like children again: easy and lovely to connect to and love. We lost nothing but death and aging itself.
Looking Back to the Future
What had been crucial was the early recognition that death itself was the enemy. That whatever stopped our fight for physical immortality had to be defeated. And that is the message I give us all today. Let us fight for paradise on earth for all. That will give us direction: to stop hatred and war, egotism and jealousy, exploitation and bossing people around, addictions and self-neglect, arrogance and servility, us-vs-them thinking, etc.
What also will help not to give up is to understand that the road to paradise would alternate between uphill and downhill tracks. For some reason, sometimes things will really progress and sometimes will standstill or even regress. Anyway, it’s important to persist because the end will be well.
There was a time that most people had died by 30, then 40, then 50, then 70, then 90, then 110 and who knows if we live already in a time in which there people alive today who will never die!
Hope to see you in the world where no one dies anymore! Let’s work for it.
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The above is greatly inspired by the pamphlet Is Death Necessary? from Harvey Jackins. He dared to question what most take for granted. (Though not me ever.) Not to flee a fear of death but rather to confront hopelessness that seems overblown and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He made a clear distinction between the apparent uselessness of human death and our inability to reach physical immortality yet. Fifty years on, physicians of renown are working on ending all illness. A next step is clearly to stop and reverse aging. (I’m preparing a big book about it.)
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This is the last of three blog posts in honor of the 20th anniversary, July 12, of the death of the greatest person I ever met, Harvey Jackins.
I gladly refer you to three inspirational websites that talk about his work:
The official website: https://www.rc.org/
An official site for beginners/outsiders: http://reevaluationcounseling.org/
An alternative critical website: https://dearestharvey.wordpress.com/