QUO VADIS?

 Aesthetics and vanity aside, there is a more practical, and compelling,

reason for becoming immortal: to effect prolonged space travel when Earth

becomes uninhabitable and we have to abandon our solar system. Human

beings will ultimately have to escape from Earth for any of a number of

reasons, including those that have caused the mass extinctions of living forms

in the past, namely “death from the sky” or “death from the mantle.”4 In our

case, a still more likely scenario would seem to be death from ourselves.5 I

might also mention that the Sun will prove the ultimate and irresistible foe

to life on Earth. If all goes according to schedule, the Sun will expand and

swallow up Earth in a few billion years, but before that, it will “wipe out the

entire biosphere,”6 and, long before that, the Sun’s increased luminosity will

end human life.

No matter where the disaster comes from, if we are to preserve human

life, we will have to send representatives of humanity to solar systems capable

of sustaining human life. That such a solar system exists somewhere in

our galaxy is reasonably certain. Where it is, is yet to be discovered. The trip

through space to reach this solar system will undoubtedly take hundreds if

not thousands of years, even at a maximally feasible velocity. The human

beings flying the spaceship will have to be sterile, because reproduction would

be disastrous on a space ship with limited resources, and immortal, because

accumulated wisdom would permit flight in the face of contingency and

monitoring a cargo of mortal human beings in suspended animation. The

logistical problems will be enormous, but immortality is nonnegotiable.

Here then is the choice for humanity: Become immortal or accept the inevitable

end of humanity. My preference is to make the effort to create immortal

human beings in time to move a sizable part of humanity to safe ground.