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| Pieter van Lint - Allegory of immortality |
Immortality
is in fashion. Every few weeks, the media publish news or interviews related to
this matter. In addition to the one I mentioned in
an earlier article, let's look at two others, quite recent:
•
We
will live 1000 years (Aubrey de Gray, May 1, 2016).
•
Man
is about to attain immortality and artificial intelligence, which will turn him
into Homo
Deus (Yuval Harari, September 11, 2016).
But first
we must define what we mean by immortality;
otherwise, we will hardly know what we are talking about. As one reader pointed
out in my previous article, living 1000 years is not the same as being
immortal. If you live 1000 years and then die, you are not immortal, you have just
lived longer. This applies, whatever the duration of life. Living 1000 million
years and then dying would not be the same as being immortal.
Those who
believe that someday we will be immortal do not put all the eggs in the same
basket. In recent years, three different ways have been proposed to achieve immortality:
