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Do We Really Want Immortality?

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Do We Really Want Immortality?

By: David Brin
Narrated by: David Brin
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About this listen

We moderns take for granted many traits that were those of gods. Like flying through the air. We fill dark rooms with sudden lavish light, with the twitch of a finger. Average folks send messages or observe events across the globe through crystal tubes we command like genies. And yet the one trait of mortality that clings to us is...mortality.

Today, a fresh crop of true believers, including brilliant scientists, view death itself as a problem to be solved. Are they fantasizing? What are the prospects and problems and unforeseen side effects of longer life spans?

©1999 David Brin (P)2016 Audible, Inc. Social Sciences
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As everyone who isn't pathologically obsessed with the subject has long since figured out, it's not death that we fear, but the end of life; of returning to the non-state of non-existence which we occupied before we were born.

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
~ Mark Twain.

But as this audiobook explores in an incredibly short amount of time, even if humans 'Could' extend, not only our lives, but more importantly, our health and cognitive faculties beyond the apparent biological wall of "3 Score Years & Ten," why on Earth would we ever want to live for 10,000 years, let alone forever?... Who on Earth (aside from the pathological narcissists who actively destroy the lives of countless billions and threaten to make the planet uninhabitable by hoarding more wealth than anyone could ever conceive of) would actually want to live beyond the point when everyone and everything they'd ever grown up with has long since turned to dust? Least of all in a computer! Because exactly like the dream of 'Living On Mars,' it sounds like a cool idea until you realise just how much you'd have to sacrifice in order to achieve it; meaning that only Narcissistic losers with no soul, human connections or humanity ever would... Elon.


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