2008 Woodie Awards
View From Mars
Eternal Life?
Alan Nordstrom
Issue date: 11/19/04 Section: Opinions
- Page 1 of 1
I have been hearing and reading President Duncan's predictions of human immortality, and I find this notion that we won't have to die deeply disturbing.
Death, after all, is a venerable tradition; in fact, one could truly say that our very lives are based on it. What would we do without it?
We are designed by nature to die; it would be unnatural not to die. So much of the meaning of our lives derives from our foreknowledge of our deaths, and the unpredictability but certainty of death's coming, soon or late, though within 100 years at best.
As soon as we pass beyond childhood, we begin coming to terms with termination, for we recognize that everything organic around us passes away in due time: plants, pets, grandparents, parents.
We enter adolescence understanding that we have a life sentence to serve on Earth, long or short, but terminal, and that we might make the best or the worst of it, but it's more or less ours to shape and take responsibility for.
Some view it as a sacred duty to discover and employ their special gifts and play their hand the best they can throughout their time. Others take little command of their lives and just wear them out till doom descends, though knowing all the while that doom will come.
After so many eons of mortality, can we adapt to immortality in a generation or two, or will the prospect of continuous life prove as tedious and debilitating as sleeplessness?
Where's the fun in a game that never ends, where no one wins or loses? What if a symphony or a novel never finished? Things must be finite to finish, and most things we know are finite; they have beginnings, middles, and ends that give them shape, meaning, and preciousness.
Will not the new immortality foreseen by science seem worse than an endless life sentence and worse even than the notion of eternal harping in heaven?
Are we not made and have we not evolved to say goodbye at last to all this, to play out our run on the stage and then exit right or left, but finally?
The shape and meaning of human life as we know it demands the finale of death. Not too soon, we hope, but eventually, in good time.
Death, after all, is a venerable tradition; in fact, one could truly say that our very lives are based on it. What would we do without it?
We are designed by nature to die; it would be unnatural not to die. So much of the meaning of our lives derives from our foreknowledge of our deaths, and the unpredictability but certainty of death's coming, soon or late, though within 100 years at best.
As soon as we pass beyond childhood, we begin coming to terms with termination, for we recognize that everything organic around us passes away in due time: plants, pets, grandparents, parents.
We enter adolescence understanding that we have a life sentence to serve on Earth, long or short, but terminal, and that we might make the best or the worst of it, but it's more or less ours to shape and take responsibility for.
Some view it as a sacred duty to discover and employ their special gifts and play their hand the best they can throughout their time. Others take little command of their lives and just wear them out till doom descends, though knowing all the while that doom will come.
After so many eons of mortality, can we adapt to immortality in a generation or two, or will the prospect of continuous life prove as tedious and debilitating as sleeplessness?
Where's the fun in a game that never ends, where no one wins or loses? What if a symphony or a novel never finished? Things must be finite to finish, and most things we know are finite; they have beginnings, middles, and ends that give them shape, meaning, and preciousness.
Will not the new immortality foreseen by science seem worse than an endless life sentence and worse even than the notion of eternal harping in heaven?
Are we not made and have we not evolved to say goodbye at last to all this, to play out our run on the stage and then exit right or left, but finally?
The shape and meaning of human life as we know it demands the finale of death. Not too soon, we hope, but eventually, in good time.