 "Photo: Christine Garvey")
When I was young, I thought every human being's life should be measured by a standard called the "delete key of history." I thought that after you died, if the world looked as though you had never lived, your life was without meaning. For the longest time, this meant my only priority was getting in a history book. A few years ago, my priorities changed. Instead of focusing on leaving behind a legacy, I decided I would never die. You can call me crazy, but I'll call you ignorant. I really have every intention of living forever - or I should say - had every intention until yesterday, but I'll get to that later.
Of course it's difficult to distinguish my rationalization for my potential for immortality from the "Superman Complex" that psychologists say most teenagers suffer from. If you haven't heard the term, the gist is that kids these days drink like they've got two livers, drive like they're blindfolded and generally think they are incapable of being harmed by anything other than glowing green asteroids.
I do not subscribe to this view, but I am convinced that if I can make it just a few decades without getting hit by a bus, sick with a bad case of bird flu or nuked by North Korea, I have an okay shot at living to see the sort of technological breakthrough that means there need never be a tombstone with my name on it. You see, futurists have been predicting immortality as a few decades away for many times many few decades. This time though - there's actually the early signals that they could be right. Whereas previous futurists simply mused vaguely about "panacea" pills or maybe the occasional radiation-induced youth (neither of which had any science to back it up), modern futurists can point to a number of infant technologies that really do have anti-aging potential. Nanotechnology, for instance, might allow for infinitesimal robots to do repairs on an intracellular level, fixing the failing DNA responsible for many of the symptoms of old age. If that doesn't work, I might simply download my brain onto a hard drive, and I'll live forever as a cyborg. Like I said, in the past, most of these suggestions would have landed me in a loony bin, but very recently they don't look so crazy. Nanomachines already exist that are capable of using ATP (the energy source of human cells) as fuel, which lends credence to their potential use as DNA repairmen. It is also now relatively easy to plug human nerves into robot appendages; it's not crazy to wonder how long it might take before we can plug our minds in directly.
All that stuff means I could live forever on one condition - that I always have a place to live. Unfortunately, Isaac Asimov's short story, "The Last Question," ruined my Tuesday by explaining that I definitely won't. It all comes down to the laws of thermodynamics, which state that, when it comes to energy, you can't have more and you can't have what you had earlier. The entropy of the universe is ever increasing. Woody Allen said it best, "It's the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Sooner or later everything turns to sh-t."
Start thinking in really huge timeframes. Were I to live four billion years (not long enough), I would have to somehow escape to another star because that's when the sun burns out. But after about a trillion years of star hopping there'll be no energy to form new stars with. Still, even that time period (about 70 times the current age of the universe) isn't forever, and that means it isn't long enough for me. Even if I were okay with living only a measly trillion years, the time after that gets really scary. After a few undecillion years (that's a 10 with 36 zeros after it, and it's still not long enough), all the protons in all the atoms of the universe will have undergone radioactive decay and cease to exist. If trillion-year-old me finally does get a tombstone, after long enough even God won't be able to read it because it'll only be a homogenous blob of subatomic goo. It's called the Heat Death of the Universe, and it kind of sucks.
Some people might call it pretentious to be complaining that I don't get to live forever, but that's not the point. Nobody gets to live forever. Nobody's legacy even gets to last forever. No matter how long you work, no matter how many people you help, no matter how much you love, you're going to die. You're going to die and every hint that you might have ever existed is going to disintegrate into an equal distribution of cold heat. The delete key of history says you don't, didn't, and can't matter.
Bummer, huh?
Greg is a freshman in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at gcallen@wustl.edu.
