The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever

The epic story of Gilgamesh and the pursuit of immortality has been repeated in history and in science fiction sagas, leading to the cryonics practice of hopefully preserving bodies until science advances will cure maladies and restore functioning bodies as suggested in the industry’s commercial slogan of freeze-wait-reanimate. Business and technology journalist Peter Ward details the personalities and bizarre characteristics energizing this passion to increase the lifespan.

Beginning with the clumsy start of the cryonics movement and its associated con artists, the quest for eternal life led to the religious founding of the Church to Perpetuate Life. As time progressed, financial tycoons backed means to increase life by stifling the aging process. Again scams abounded, with announcements of miracle drugs, blood transfusions, stem cell infusions, supplements along with fasting episodes, all of which proved ineffectual. From these trials and past history, the transhumanism movement emerged, which looks at digital immortality and how life after death could exist in the digital dimension.

Read through this engrossingly incredible and wordy whirlwind expose of human attempts to retain life and defy nature’s demand for death. One can only wonder at the worth of each of our lives.