Perhaps because the presentations of the new smartphones are now usually as exciting as when the TV was in black and white and the image of the interval appeared on the screen, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona they invited a futurist to talk about the “end of death” . Its elimination through technology. It’s nothing new. Immortality is a fixation of billionaires, especially those of Silicon Valley, who invest large sums in scientific research hoping to be able to live forever.
The Death of Death: How Technology Will Make Us Live Forever
by our correspondent Bruno Ruffilli
Let’s clarify: trying to defeat diseases is what human beings have always done and always with greater success and it is thanks to the progress of science that life expectancy has grown a lot; moreover, delaying the aging of cells and staying young is a debatable but understandable aspiration; but imagining transferring the brain to a microchip or conquering death until it becomes “optional” means not having understood the meaning of life.
When I hear these speeches I think back to the most beautiful speech ever made in Silicon Valley, that of Steve Jobs, to the Stanford University graduates, on June 12, 2005, which went down in history for the final exhortation, Stay Hungry Stay Foolish! Nobody wants to die, Steve Jobs said that day, not even those who believe in heaven, yet death is inevitable and rightly so because death is life’s best invention. Not only because it is the greatest factor of change, the engine that allows new ideas to make their way and change the world. But because it makes it special, unique, unrepeatable. And it requires us not to waste it, to make it a masterpiece. The goal of our generation cannot be to make the super rich immortal, but to finally make the lives of the billion people living in extreme poverty worthwhile and try to leave the planet in better conditions so that our grandchildren can also live there without having to emigrate due to climate change. In short, as always, it is a question of adding life – understood as emotions, passions, dreams – to our days; and not days in our life.