These Are the Guys Who Want to Live Forever

Via Kathy Shaidle, an article about trans-humanists:

The apparent paradox, then, is that so many transhumanists, while bent on defeating or ‘solving’ death, also seem rather, well, misanthropic. To be transhumanist is on some level also to be anti-humanist: people tell O’Connell what contemptible ‘monkeys’ current humans are, how disgusting it is that they are doing all this breeding, and how they’d rather be machine-based consciousnesses exploring the vastness of space. But when it comes down to it, you might think there is not all that much to distinguish this, as a consummation devoutly to be wished, from good old-fashioned death.

Creeps. You know whose like that? The sociopathic, Asperger ridden Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang theory. Anyone want to live with that? Or how about the evil doctor from Forbidden Planet? These guys are from another world.

For that matter, who wants to live forever? We're going to break our prohibition against Steve Guttenberg films [you blogged The Day After-ed] and recall watching Cocoon. Here a gaggle of geezers was being swept away by benevolent aliens to live forever. At ten years old I didn't like the idea.

Does anyone really want to be like that Eye-talian woman who just died at 117? She outlived her kids and grand kids.

Fifteen years ago we watched a dear old aunt die because she had a bad fall and the doctors wanted to amputate her leg. She refused. My uncle was eight years gone and she was alone in a big house and decided that at 87 it was time to go.

Of course my grandfather is 94. He has his brains and can get around. But want to talk about being from another world? He remembers people who fought in the Civil War, he watched both the Lincoln Tunnel and GWB get built. And he just buried his second wife.

No thanks.