( Seven minute read)

The mystery of death is so profound that, despite the millennia of religious doctrine, mythology, scientific research, and the many theories and explanations that exist on the subject, people today are more confused than ever about it.

On the other hand, death is also a topic that few of us like to talk about. We may, on a subconscious level, understand that we are mortal. But, we continue to live our lives as if we will be here forever.

Saying that dying matters, seems so obvious that it’s not worth mentioning. After all, what could be more important than our mortality? We are here on this amazing planet for such a short period of time. Death is the ultimate destination that, in many ways, gives our lives meaning.

We have medicalized every aspect of the dying process. Is it a disease that will be cured in the future?

• No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Steve Jobs
• Once quantum computers become mainstream, the cost to sequence an individual genome could be cheaper than flushing the toilet! This could lead to mass customized medicines, further decreasing human mortality rate. The introduction of CRISPr allows scientists to cut out and replace living DNA; effectively eradicating almost all diseases and rewriting the genetic code that governs life expectancy.
• AI to determine genetic diffusions, R&D into reversing aging, 3D printing organs, or human augmentation to the point of ‘the singularity’.

In fact, one of the reasons there are so many opinions about death is the diverse array of religious doctrines on the subject. So how do we know which text, if any, will guide our search correctly?

The concept of death is a key to humans understanding the phenomenon of all life its nearly as old as life itself.  An irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. From Wikipedia.

Death is inevitable to whatever is born. Wherever there is birth there is death.

What is God’s vision about death? Why did God permit Satan to live when the rest of us must die.

In God’s vision, no one ever dies. If God were to give you this vision, some day, then no number of deaths would affect you in this world. This is because of this right vision (Gnan)

Throughout history, different mythologies and theologies have explained the nature of death in countless ways, ranging from total annihilation to immediate life after death in the presence of God … or in torment.

Regardless of a person’s particular belief system, however, the fact remains that death is the end of life … or at least life as we know it. Human beings are totally powerless to prevent or overcome death.

Any study of the nature of death begs an important foundational question:

Why must things die in the first place?

To |make way for others. Like the Cambrian explosion which made way for major changes in the dominant sorts of living creatures, like us to flourish. But death is an unnatural part of life on a cellular level, because it does not automatically include a self-destruct mechanism for death.

So the question of the nature of death also brings profound implications about the nature of God.

Maybe, some reason, God is not as powerful as He says, since the problem of death remains.

Those who do not believe in reincarnation, Moslems, Christians believe that it does not return.

The rest of Indians, the Hindus, it does return. This is the result of the grace of your God that you believe in reincarnation. The moment you die, the Soul immediately enters another womb.

In reality, there is only one collection of texts in existence that makes the bold claim to contain direct communications from God: the collection we call the Bible. Over and over again, it records God speaking directly to mankind;

In my opinion, becoming an organ donor is one of the best decisions that you can ever make. Most people aren’t against being an organ donor.

Some people seemed to find the right moment to die,  to hold off dying until some particular event of importance to them had come to pass. Links between mind and body are little understood.

What if Queen Elizabeth 11 was an organ donor.  Don’t worry the chances of inheriting the crown is at the moment around 8 billion to one and in 31 years from now 2050 is estimated is expected to rise to 37.9 billion to one.

Since time immemorial, humans have tried to find out ways to achieve immortality.

As the search continues to date but how far are we willing to go to achieve it.

Bezos has invested in a company called Altos Labs which is trying to find a way to make humans immortal. The company aims to do this through ‘cellular reprogramming’ which means reprogramming human cells to make them new again. A human body is made up of 724 trillion cells.

This dream of making humans immortal is not just based on cell reprogramming.

A certain kind of nanorobots will be invented which can be released in the human body along with the bloodstream. These nanorobots would be able to eliminate viruses, bacteria, clean the blood, prevent clotting, and even kill tumours in the body, and repair your cells if needed.

Some scientists want to upload the feelings and thoughts present in the human brain to a computer so that even after the death of the person, their feelings and thoughts can be kept alive.

The Israeli writer, Yuval Noah Harari, wrote in his famous book Homo Deus that for religious people, death may be a decision made by God. But for scientists, death is merely a technical glitch in the body. He says that scientists can correct this technical glitch in labs and death can be avoided.

At this point, it is hard to predict if and when science will conquer death. But if one really wants to be immortal, they can make their life so memorable that even after they are gone, the things and memories related to them will endure.

Demographers estimate that before our generation roughly 100 billion people lived and died, and not one of them has returned to confirm the existence of an afterlife, at least not to the high evidentiary standards of science.

I’m sceptical that death will ever be conquered or understood as it is abstract a conceptual metaphor in the term of something else that determines the expansiveness of our reality.

As humanity confronts the present global challenges this reality is that we have evolved into a killing species, detached from the very thing that gives us life the Earth.  Our limits are self-imposed – ignorance, inertia –  greed – fear – fanaticism and fatalism.

Up to now the natural world has always been humanity’s main source of metaphors, but with science our natural world now includes the nuclear bomb, the black hole of profit seeking learning algorithms.

If we not wiped out by climate change we have ever change of being wiped out by an Asteroid – a burst of Gama rays or a Nuclear explosion, a Pandemic, if not, we have 6 odd billion years to go before the sun fry us all.

Advances in technology will definitely drive the upward age of longevity toward the 200 mark. However, there are a number of considerations – both moral and social – that we have not begun to think about, as a species. Ultimately, the question is no longer if death (like taxes) is inevitable, but rather: even if we can conquer death – should we?

Even if I could live thousands of years, I would want a better world than this one. So, is there any hope?

All alive human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

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