Four ways to achieve immortality

Herodotus

As I have explained in previous posts in this blog, some people believe that we are about to achieve immortality. Of course, depending on the way to do it, it might not be applicable to everyone, because it would be very expensive. Perhaps it would just be feasible for a few enormously wealthy people. Or maybe it could be done in a more democratic way, so that everybody would be immortal. Many journalists, politicians, tycoons, philosophers, futurologists, and even ordinary people are convinced that sooner or later all of us, or at least some of us, will be immortal.

This is not a new hope; it comes from deep in the past. One of the oldest known masterpieces of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written 4,000 to 4,500 years ago, deals with the quest for immortality. We also have the legend of the fountain of youth, which would give immortality to those who drink from its waters. According to Herodotus, it would be located in Ethiopia, although some say that Ponce de León searched for it in vain in Florida.

Predictions by Arthur C. Clarke until 2020 (and beyond)

Arthur C. Clarke

In a previous post I pointed out that short-term predictions are dangerous, because the expected date does not take long to arrive, and the "prophet" runs the risk that someone (like me) takes a note of the predictions and checks if they really took place.

In this post I am going to apply the same principle to long-term forecasts, where the effect is even more dramatic. Of course, it is more difficult that those predictions are remembered, but there is always someone (like me) who keeps press clippings from 1963 and can check if they were fulfilled.

In praise of the Trivium

Dorothy L. Sayers

I have often said that education in Spain has worsened over the last fifty years. Almost whenever the government has changed, a new education law has been promulgated that, without exception, has always been worse than the previous one. The duration of learning has been lengthened. In 1963, I entered the university when I had just turned 17. Today nobody arrives there without having turned 18. Sometimes it is argued that children must learn more and need more time. It may be true, but do they really know more when they get to the university?

The answer to this question is undoubtedly negative. When they get to the university, the level of the students is low, they are not able to reason and sometimes they don’t even understand what they read. They are getting easier to manipulate. Perhaps this is what is intended.

Is there life in the solar system beyond Earth?

At the end of 1981, Editorial Mezquita (a subsidiary of Editorial Alhambra) published my book entitled La Vida en Otros Mundos (Life in Other Worlds), one of whose chapters addressed the question in the title of this post. When the book was discontinued, it was again published in 1992 by MacGraw Hill of Spain, in an updated version, in a collection dedicated to science popularization, which kept my book in its catalog for around a decade. It is currently out of print.

Since then, things haven't changed much. Subsequent research has added a couple of satellites that weren’t considered in the 80s and the 90s to the list of bodies where it might be possible to find microscopic life. Of course, nobody expects to find intelligent life, or multicellular animals and plants, in any body in the solar system outside the Earth, although in science-fiction literature those things happen.

Quantum Teleportation

Anton Zeilinger

This year the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, for their pioneering work in quantum communications.

• Clauser (with Stuart Freedman, who died in 2012) carried out the first experiment with entangled photons in 1972, which proved that the direction of Bell's inequality favors the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, thus solving the EPR paradox (acronym for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen), which tried to contradict this interpretation. This experiment was not complete, so others were carried out later, under increasingly strict conditions.