To Live and Die and Live Again in Silicon Valley

by Rev. Peter E. Bauer

The two perennial realities of life that people experience are taxes and death. Most of us have recently handled the first challenge this year. Some of us maybe currently facing the latter challenge or we know of someone who is facing their ending point here on earth.

Face it, not very many people look forward to death. It’s not a great topic of conversation at a cocktail reception or a Spring garden party. Yet, like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s film, “The Seventh Seal,” death is always lurching nearby, always letting its presence to be known in some way.

Recently, we have seen the development of people who have resources and want to invest them in seeing if death can be made obsolete. One hundred and fifty thousand people die every day, reports Tad Friend of the New Yorker in the article, “The God Pill: Silicon Valley’s quest for eternal life.” Most check out well before what is considered the maximum age of 115, and some of them could afford to keep going far longer, if only science would allow it.

The urge to combat aging — especially among the affluent — is an old one, but new technological breakthroughs can make the prospect seem tantalizingly close.

Friend joins Nobel Prize-winning scientists, icons of the entertainment industry such as Goldie Hawn and Moby, and tech billionaires like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, for the launch of the National Academy of Medicine’s Grand Challenge in Health Longevity which will distribute $25 million as part of its endeavors to, as one doctor puts it, “end aging forever.” Source: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/31/google-co-founders-and-silicon-valley-billionaires-try-to-live-forever.html

So let’s say we do end death. Rather than being bed-bound in a nursing home, you could instead find yourself lounging on a beach chair at Malibu, South Padre Island or Southampton. It does sound like a better alternative, doesn’t it ? It gives new dimensional meaning to the Pauline quote, “ Death, where is thy sting?” (I Corinthians 15:55.)0

But living forever would also bring a whole new set of challenges. What would we do about getting the replacement organs — i.e., heart, lungs etc. — that people would need to keep alive indefinitely ? Would there be cellular energy packs that could be surgically installed that would work like a digital mother board to promote longevity?

What will the consequences be regarding infrastructure — i.e., will there be enough housing, enough transportation, enough food, water and energy resources if people will live forever ? The funeral directors also will not be thrilled with the idea of the end of death.

Of course, there is the most important question:

“Where are all of these people going to park?”

Can death have an upside? One of the things that a limited amount of time gives you is the challenge to determine how well you will utilize the remaining time you have left to live. There will be people who upon receiving the news that they may soon die, will make the decision to do something that they have always wanted to do, like travel to Paris, write a book or reconcile with a family member or a friend.

Technology can generate holograms, three-dimensional images formed by the interference of light beams from a laser or other coherent light source, a photograph of an interference pattern that, when suitably illuminated, produces a three-dimensional image. There have been examples of holograms popping up after famous people have died.

But holograms are merely hollow, shallow vestiges of the person. They can by no means replace the real person alive and in the flesh.

Beliefs regarding eternal life have embraced physical resuscitation of a deceased body or a resuscitation of life in the spiritual realm beyond the dead body.

Easter is a time where affirmation of life triumphing over death is proclaimed again and again. The power of the Easter story lies in the message that it doesn’t end with death. Rather life, transfigured and transformed, continues, in a new dimension, in continued memory and hope.

May our wish to live forever be rooted in the knowledge that our life is beyond our body, that our soul is the ultimate expression of our sense of self and that the soul is eternal.

May we live richly and fully this Holy Season and always.

May it be so.