Does medical science offer us the ultimate temptation – eternal life?
Not according to Future Timeline, http://futuretimeline.net/blog/2016/10/6-2.htm#.WFloAIXXL4g, which predicts that the upper limit of the human lifespan is just 125 years.
Boring! Who are they kidding?
The view from a century hence…
We asked Hannah Cohen, Chief Medical Officer of the Prometheus mission* to develop human civilisation on Exoplanets.
“Ah, well” she said, “you can’t really expect me to comment on the absurdity of predictions made at the beginning of a scientific cycle. Genomics Applications Technology was in its infancy back in 2017. Most people didn’t even know their genomic profiles and genome specific medicines weren’t yet available. Can you imagine our undertaking to visit an alien planet without the capacity to diagnose and treat a health issue with a medicine synthesised automatically for the specific individual affected?”
Science is clever, delivery is rubbish
We agreed, but we wondered about incidents out there in the field – surprise attacks by giant spitting spiders*, for instance.
“Yes, delivery is always the rubbish end of the business” she said with disgust. “We get the biochemical profile of the pathogen almost instantaneously from the victim’s brain by CTT*, and then we have all the data to produce the antidote, but sometimes the drones just don’t get there fast enough.” She sighed.
Modify the testosterone response
And where are we on eternal life, we wondered.
“How much do you want us to re-engineer your DNA?” she countered with an impish grin. “Number of hands, extra-sensory perception, size of genitalia?”
That jogged our memory. “Is it true that you had sex with an 8 foot alien lizard?” we asked.
“I never comment on scientific experiments” she said demurely, “and certainly not on a rumour from Omnipotence Book II, which isn’t published yet.”
We backed off, fretting about where all this scientific research will ultimately take us.
Hannah grinned again. “The trick is to modify the testosterone response, eliminate the unproductive aggression and retain the fun bit” she said.
What? Suppress the primordial drive that took us out of the swamp? Is that then the Great Filter that determines whether a civilisation survives? It hardly sounds worth living for…
*See Omnipotence: Book I –Odyssey
Prometheus
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Scientists and Philosophers have been wondering for a long time now why we haven’t detected any evidence of extra-terrestrial civilisations. After all, there are probably 30 billion rocky planets like ours in our Milky Way galaxy alone, many formed a long time before Earth, and on those with a similar water-born, oxygen-driven environments, life forms similar to ours have almost certainly developed.
One explanation is that advanced civilisations that have reached the threshold of radio communications tend to last only a few centuries before their technology advances to the point where self-extinction becomes inevitable.
A few centuries is a very short time given the 100,000 years required for light to cross our galaxy, so arguably an effective dialogue is impossible before internecine conflict eliminates one or other of the participants.
Looking at the accelerating pace of technology and the parlous state of international relations on our planet, together with probable climate deterioration, over-population and resultant murderous competition for resources, can we expect to make a successful transition to a united and harmonious global society?
I think that the our ruthlessly competitive evolutionary origins probably preclude it. We are just instinctively aggressive by nature.
Our great grandchildren will be the ones to solve this, or succumb to mutual extinction. We need to recognize this now to give them any kind of chance. Prometheus