Designer Laura Boffi envisions a future in which human instincts will leap behind on technological progress. For example, once the 'disease called mortality' is cured with regenerative medicine, man may start to see death not as a biological event in his life, but as something that may occur to the 'unlucky on call'. What would be the implications for our instincts for death?
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2 comments:
Whenever I read articles like this it sends a panicked chill down my spine. Not because of mans "tampering" with nature but rather because we are so incredibly primitive. We could achieve so much if we could overcome our shelf-life by a few hundred or even thousands of years.
I really do believe we are living in a dark age. A time when the only coping mechanisms for death are brainwashing, morbid acceptance and mass delusion.
Far too many of us were born too early :(
-Denny
Mac, I'm prone to various kinds of visions, (your guess is as good as mine as to their source).
Anyway, I was always filled with mortal horror at reports about, say, children witnessing their parents being dismembered by explosions, or vice versa, (something all too common in some parts of the world).
Then, as if in response to my concern, I was subjected to a series of visions about 'future' developments which'd allow, say, martial arts to reach a stage where opponents loppping off each others limbs'd not only become the norm, but'd no longer be viewed as even visually distasteful, simply because people'd be able to reattach their limbs at will.
The lesson I seemed to be required to learn from all this seemed to be that all my ideas about what constituted beauty or horror were simply conditioned by my various preconceptions about what was possible and impossible for human beings to achieve.
At some stage I began to wonder if what I was being shown was a result of future developments in, say, nanotechnology crossed with genetics, but further 'revelations' seemed intended to convince me that the only reason this capacity to physically put ourselves back together in this way wasn't available to us now was simply because we'd been conditioned to believe it was impossible.
My next line of thought, much like that of your other commenter, was how much we "could achieve...if we could overcome our shelf-life by a few hundred or even thousands of years."
But in answer to this I was now shown an endless series of what seemed to be possible futures available to us, in most of which the longer our lives grew the lazier we became, until the only efforts we seemed capable of making for ourselves were related to the matter of pursuing fleshly pleasures.
Instead of beholding a human race dedicated to achieving, I was shown people viewing it as perfectly normal to undergo plastic surgery to have their entire bodies covered in endless vaginas, anuses and penises simply for the purpose of being able to have simultaneous sex with as many people as possible.
I was even shown a 'case history' of one particularly rich individual who could afford to have his entire head turned into a giant penis, (which apparently involved the removal of his brain!), and the rest of his sexually modified body put out on permanent 'immortal' display for use by anybody as a sex object.
His 'boosters' seemed to view him as some kind of hero dedicated to 'absolute' sexual freedom, but I couldn't shake the notion all he'd really done was commit a bizarre form of suicide.
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