Eternal life through advanced technology

WSJ Essay: Looking Forward to the End of Humanity: Covid-19 has spotlighted the promise and peril of ‘transhumanism,’ the idea of using technology to overcome sickness, aging and death.

Eternal life through advanced technology seems like a pipe dream for a society that, until recently, had trouble manufacturing enough masks to save doctors’ and nurses’ lives. Yet Covid-19 may turn out to be just the kind of crisis needed to turbocharge efforts to create what its advocates call a “transhuman” future. With our biological fragility more obvious than ever, many people will be ready to embrace the message of the Transhumanist Declaration, an eight-point program first issued in 1998: “We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering and our confinement to planet Earth.” Transhumanists, many of them associated with nonprofits and think tanks like Humanity Plus and the Extropy Institute, have long been driven by the fear that our entire species could be wiped out by nuclear war, asteroid collision, technological accident—or a pandemic. In March, as the coronavirus was spreading around the world, the science writer Tom Chivers observed that it proves the need for technological protection against such existential threats: “Humans could be around for a billion years, or more, if we don’t screw it up. Coronavirus won’t be the thing that kills us all, but it’s a bloody good illustration of how something could,” he wrote in the online magazine UnHerd.