For some, there is Heaven. Of course, Heaven means different things to people, as, for example, to Fred Astaire singing Cheek to Cheek in Top Hat, it's dancing with Ginger Rogers. This version finished #15 on AFR's 100 Years of 100 Songs, and Rotten Tomatoes reviewers gave the movie a 100% rating.
Then there was that promise of 72 virgins in heaven for Muslim martyrs, but you had to be a male to take advantage of this reward. Then again, maybe not. However, more recently, it was determined that there was a mistranslation of the Quran, and the truth was that it was raisins, not virgins. Some have even pinpointed white raisins.
To most, though, Heaven is an ultimate place where you live in harmony and comfort forever. Yes, an eternal afterlife. Yet, maybe this is only for Christians and Muslims. Although Buddhists can attain Nirvana and Hindus can become one with the Brahman, which sounds like a kind of heaven. Don't have time for all 4,000 religions, but most of them promise some form of Heaven and Hell.
And, did you know that the USA has the most number of Christians in the world? 253 million. However, Islam is the fastest growing, and will increase from 1.8 billion in 2015 to 3 billion in 2060. Indonesia will continue to have the largest Muslim population.
Supposedly, 84% of the world's population identifies with a religious group. One reason why this is not higher is China, where 77% are not religious. But this is more due to the influence of the central government.
I've made many mistakes in my life, but a serious one was when I gave a talk in Nanjing. This was to a class of engineering students, and the subject was renewable energy, but I got diverted and asked the group how many were religious. A very few hands went up. I was later told that these students would be reported to the government.
The potential for immortality dates back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. God offered eternal life through the tree of life (Genesis 3:22). Death would be the penalty for partaking of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan's first lie to mankind was that man would not die but would gain knowledge by taking of the forbidden tree (Genesis 3:1-5). He managed to convince Eve. Adam went along with his wife, and the course of history was set. Ever since, man has sought eternal life by means of the tree of knowledge, reaping a mixture of good and evil results. The latest advances in scientific knowledge are no exception. Can man avoid death forever?
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We have always searched for eternal life. Remember Spanish explorer Ponce de León and Bimini? He did not quite find the Fountain of Youth, but there previously were Herodotus (5th century BC) and many others after him. To the left a painting 1546 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder of The Fountain of Youth.
More recently, science and has stepped in to at least prolong life.
- Did you know that the life expectancies in 1900 for men and women in the USA were only 48.3 and 51.1, respectively. So from about 50 to nearly 79 in 2019.
- Well, the Covid Pandemic did have an effect, as our life expectancy actually dropped to 76.1 in 2022.
- Japan also dropped during this period, with women now down to 87.09 years and men to 81.05 years.
- So you ask, why do Japanese live longer than Americans? Diet/nutrition. Simple as that. Body Mass Index:
- Japan: 3.6% have a BMI over 30, the the international standard for obesity.
- USA: 32% are obese.
- BMI over 25, making you overweight: Japan 24.7% and USA 66.5%.
But this progress has not affected maximum age:
- Oldest person, Jeanne Calment of France passed away in 1997 at the age of 122 years.
- Second oldest, Kane Tanaka of Japan died in 2022 at the age of 119.
#3, Sarah Knauss of the USA, died in 1999 at 119.- That graphic is wrong. Tanaka is a little older than Knauss. But hey, they were once really good looking.
- Finally, the oldest 24 people that ever lived were female. Coming in at #25 was Jiroemon Kimura of Japan, who passed away in 2013 at the age of 116 years, 54 days.
- Monaco has the highest life expectancy: 93.5 years for females and 85.6 years for men. Why? Mediterraneann diet, lot of outdoor time, family-oriented and religious, offering stress-free moments.
- 36% of Monaco's population are over than 65. #2 is Japan with 29%. The USA is not on the long list. We are at 17%.
But, aha, the U.S has more centenarians than any other, with 97,000. But this is only around 0.029% of our population.- Japan is highest with 0.062% and Uruguay has 0.061%. Monaco did not make this list because it has less than 1000 100-years and older citizens.
- Actually some islands like Guadeloupe, Barbados and Martinique have a slightly higher rate than Japan. If Puerto Rico could be added, they would be in 6th place, with the U.S. at #11. Hawaii is 60% higher than the rest of the country.
All that background to lead you to my 2013 Huffington Post article, Science and the Future of Cloning: Is Immortality Possible? After all these years, I noticed a misspelling in the first sentence.
What is "eternal life?" In one sense, all living creatures today are essentially already immortal. We should be able to, someday, trace ourselves back through 50 billion DNA copyings over 4 billion years to determine our LUCA. Our DNA has, thus, had everlasting life. While our species almost became extinct in that Great Toba Supervolcano Eruption of 73,000 BC, where Homo sapiens dropped to perhaps a thousand breeding pairs, we have recovered well, survived the potential nuclear winter of the Cold War, and have no obvious doomsday event on the horizon, except, maybe, for The Venus Syndrome.- Of course, we will also live through our children and their children. Plus, the products of our life, such as letters, books, digital photos and statues, will be around long after we expire.
However, Woody Allen has expressed a sense that he was not satisfied with immortality through his works, for he wanted to live forever by not dying. Conscious eternal life, if not rejuvenation and reversal, then, is an ultimate goal on the level of world peace and universal happiness. Sounds a bit like Heaven
- I went on to say that there are two "scientific" pathways to continue your presence. But you can read that article for the details.
What has happened is that in the 13 years since I wrote that article, nothing much else has happened to cloning, and a lot has developed in artificial intelligence (AI). Let's face it, humans, or us, are limited. Our biological form is weak and limited.
The Universe is only 13.8 billion years old.- The Universe has a probable life of a hundred trillion years.
- From the Big Bang until today took a long time. We have 72,464 times that length of time yet in our future.
So I've adjusted my sense of immortality.
- Living forever in your present body makes no long-term sense.
- There will come a time when it will be possible to transfer what is in your mind into the "cloud".
In other words, if we find some kind of peace with AI and live together forever, we can exist essentially for eternity.
Say you exist in computer memory form. Should you want to visit Mount Kilimanjaro, that link can be made. While it will also be possible to feed your mind into some kind of walking or flying robotics, that can also be arranged, but that is awfully energy intensive, and there will someday be a limit to how much energy is available on Planet Earth for the billions, maybe hundreds of billions, on minds to store.
Of course, our Sun will swallow up Planet Earth in 5 billion years or so, so we will need to find other worlds to exist.- Imagine some form of Star Trek ship being sent to what is determined at that time to be the most promising Earth II. All those minds, duplicated, can be the lifeforms in suspended animation through the trip, which could take millions of years, or immediately, if there is a way to travel through wormholes and those other science fiction options.
But how can any device be sent many light years away requiring all that energy? Not sure, yet, but hopefully there will be a way found to send things without using any energy. Like wormholes.
The field of physics will need to build what amounts to an efficient time machine.- Here is a list of 20 films worthy of considering. The highest rated ones are Back to Future I (1985, Rotten Tomatoes 93/94) and II (1989, RT 63/85). Oh well, it's a start.
Optimism is crucial for all this to work, so if other worlds are found, your mind could well be transferred to a whole number of planets throughout the universe over the next 99+ trillion years.
When will this happen?- Not now.
- Not for another century, probably.
- Perhaps in a millennium. The year 1023 saw an epidemic in Kyoto. That was a long time ago. Then, of course, two millennia ago was the time of Jesus Christ.
- So unless there is a Heaven, we all today on Planet Earth will end up in eternal black gloom.
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