How To Live Forever Or Die Trying: On The New Immortality

by Bryan Appleyard

I want to live for ever sang the Kids from Fame, and they are not the search for immortality has been a constant human refrain throughout history. But medical science has improved at an exponential rate in recent decades and there are those who believe that the ability to cheat death will soon be within our the first person to live to be 1,000 years old has, they say, already been born. What has happened to get people so excited about the prospect of eternal life? And if they are right, what would it mean for us as human beings? If death became negotiable, would we still fall in love or have children? Would we still, in fact, be human? HOW TO LIVE FOREVER OR DIE TRYING tackles these and myriad other questions with dazzling skill. Funny, thought-provoking and often profound, it manages to grapple with the big issues of existence without blinding the reader with science, and sheds new light on why we are the way we are.

Genres: Science

Paperback

First published January 22, 2007

Reviews

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Critical account of transhumanism. He focuses on the sensational bits, morbidness, cryonics, and the inveterate pill-munching. (Not sure why attempting to resist death is more morbid than totally submitting to it.)

Bit of a mishmash, with an extended middle section on Ultimate Meaning and Medieval funeral habits not totally meshing - and his grasp of the science is, as he admits, insufficient.

Not as unbalanced as e.g. Wieseltier or Kass.

[Vicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so full of information, so intense that it made my head spin just digesting some of its ideas. The topics of immortality, life extensions and moral consequences involved are too big for us to envisage, to predict or even to imagine. At the end it is a depressing endeavour to make people live forever in some distant future, while to sop them having normal lives in a current present.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

ok

[Kk Tan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty boring. Struggled to finish it.