For the first time, human immortality seems to move away from the terrain of religion, utopia and science fiction and enter within the possibilities of science. If we now know that a hydra or a jellyfish can regenerate and even become eternal, why aren't humans going to try it. Especially with billions of Silicon Valley geniuses on the table. Ironically, humans are seeking to live forever in a world that many deeply dislike. A paradox that was exposed yesterday and even ended up being solved on the last day of '42, the Barcelona Fantastic Genre Festival, which these days has achieved great success with the public, attracting more than 7,000 attendees to the Fabra i Coats venue. A meeting that closed in a festive manner with a concert by the band Malalletra, made up of writers and cultural journalists such as Marta Carnicero, Elisenda Roca, Lluís Llort and Francesc Bombí-Vilaseca, and which was played yesterday by Dire Straits' Money for nothing , to an anthem for the 42nd festival: David Bowie's Starman.
Also in the band was the scientist and popularizer Salvador Macip, one of the protagonists of the round table dedicated to immortality and its challenges in reality and fiction. And he recalled that dying “is something normal and important for the species,” because “from an evolutionary point of view what is convenient is not to have individuals who live forever, but rather constant genetic variations.” But he assumed that the concern for immortality is already found in the first literary text that has come down to us, the poem of Gilgamesh. And today that we know that there are organisms that are almost eternal like the jellyfish or very long-lived – the hydra's 1,400 years – a new paradigm is opening up in which aging is a disease that many see as curable. And they are going to try to cure it with checkbook signings from biotech startups like Altos Labs, financed by tycoons like Jeff Bezos.
Because, yes, the speakers ruled out the possibility of our mind being scanned and living in a computer. The physicist and biologist Ricard Solé, author of All Deaths (Criticism), pointed out that not even with an exact copy could we demonstrate that the personal subjective experience would be the same, and Macip stated that “we are our brain; dead, it's over." And he considered that perhaps with sufficient knowledge the human life barrier could be raised from 120 to 200 or 300 years, although the retirement age would have to be changed.
In a neighboring room, paradoxically, the boom in the fantasy genre was analyzed under the title: “Could it be that young people don't like reality?” And although the speakers – Maite Carranza, Giovanni Nucci and Jay Kristoff – pointed out that the fantasy genre, more than an escape, is a place from which to understand reality, just as the first mythology was, with which it is so connected, and of seeing how the person makes a difference and the hero overcomes the scary world and creates a better one, everyone agreed that they don't like the current world too much either. “There is nothing wrong with using gender to escape for a while, if you spend a lot of time on social networks, you think the world is ending,” the Australian ironically said.
Another speaker at the immortality table, the essayist Francisco Martorell, author of Dreaming in another way. The Reinvention of Utopia (La Caja Books), offered an explanation to the apparent paradox between the search for immortality and a world that does not excite: “Utopian thinking is that which does not resign itself to what exists. Before there was a social utopia against economic injustice. Now an individual utopia against physiological injustice. With neoliberalism and a society focused on the desires of the self, we no longer have collective hope. Those in Silicon Valley who want to go to Mars and clone minds have utopias, the common people have dystopias. We will be immortal in a world of rich and poor. It seems easier to be immortal than to change the system,” he concluded.
