Back to Methusaleh? by Lawrence Auster

"After a quick survey of all the reasons Americans have to be pessimistic about the future, Randall Parker continues:

But the future holds out some amazing promises. Most notably, the youngsters need to know--failing a total breakdown of civilization--that by the time they get old full body rejuvenation will become possible. 20 year olds today will turn 70 in the year 2057. Their life expectancies at that point might be measured in the thousands of years.

I once took a course with F.M. Esfandiary at the New School. Esfandiary, an Iranian immigrant and New Age guy, was a believer that science could change everything about human life, even mortality itself. But in order to believe this, one must believe that the structure of existence can be changed by man. A basic aspect of the structure of existence is that living things come into being, and then, after an allotted time, they go out of being. Whether we are speaking of a fly, or a dog, or a human, or an elephant, the life-span of a species is a function of the nature of that species. A species does not create its own nature, its nature is given to it by something beyond itself, by that from which all being comes, with some species given a larger portion of being, some less. The notion that human life could be extended, not merely by a few tens of years, but by thousands of years, is a fantasy born of the rejection of transcendence, and the resulting desire to make man into his own god. "

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