• So You Want to Live Forever | The Weekly Standard
    http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/so-you-want-live-forever_788982.html?nopager=1

    The current fascination with achieving immortality via science seems to track the general loss of religious faith in the modern West. Since the New Testament phrase “death hath no more dominion” no longer resonates with many people as a promise of heavenly survival, scientific life extension can be explained as an effort to achieve transcendence and eternal life by other means. Aldous Huxley explored those themes satirically in his 1939 novel, After Many a Summer, whose most entertaining character, the cynical Dr. Obispo, during the day experiments with carp, fish that were reputed to live for centuries, so as to distill a longevity drug for a tycoon who is terrified of dying, and at night fornicates with the tycoon’s youthful mistress. Dr. Obispo’s ideological counterpoint is Mr. Propter, an eccentric who lives the ostentatiously simple life, making wooden furniture and philosophizing about his own route to transcendence by rising above earthly concerns. Huxley took the title of his novel from a line in Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” a poem that explores the classical myth.

    #transhumanisme #posthumanisme
    #immortalité #futurisme #tranhsum