Forever young?

by Greg McDonald

If you’re planning on doing anything risky before 2028 you might want to reconsider, because those of us still here in twenty years are going to live forever.

Yes, according to American scientist Ray Kurzweil, technology is accelerating at such a rate that we’re just two decades away from immortality as nanobots first halt and then reverse the ageing process.

And if you imagine Kurzweil is a crack-pot whose mum still irons his Star-Trek pyjamas, beam this up: twenty years into our mortal past the world laughed at some of the professor’s other crazy predictions: mobile phones, the collapse of the USSR, and the internet you’re reading this blog on.

It doesn’t stop there either: Kurzweil’s immortal cyber-men run fifteen minute Olympic sprints without drawing breath and dash off novels in minutes.

And if talk of modified super-beings sounds crazy, look around you – from Madonna to dear old Anne Robinson, technologically modified eternally youthful immortals already walk amongst us.

And it’s not just celebrities: at the UN rumours abound that Gordon Brown’s Youtube smile was actually a programming error in early nanobot technology, while leading members of the EU fear Peter Mandelson has already drunk the blood of eternal undeath.

So there it is. Start saving ready to put your nano-feet up on Jupiter as we enter the immortal age. Just whatever you do, don’t get hit by a bus in December 2028.

All hail Darwin, the Shakespeare of science

By Greg McDonald

On his 200th birthday, and 150 years after On the Origin of Species told us for the first time where we come from, we should recognise Charles Darwin not only as the most influential scientist of all time, but as one of a small handful of Brits who could lay serious claim to being our country’s greatest achievement.

While the work of Isaac Newton may be more brilliant, it’s precisely the simplicity of Darwin’s “natural selection” theory that makes it, in his representative on earth Richard Dawkins’ phrase, “arguably the most powerful idea ever”.

In the centuries that have followed, work on genetics and DNA has confirmed Darwin’s rightness, but nothing since has so turned reality on its head. Yet all these years later Darwin’s simple idea remains socially, if not scientifically controversial, as schools in his homeland continue to teach religious myths as a viable alternative to science.

With recent polls showing a shocking number of us don’t believe in natural selection at all, what would a man of Darwin’s courage have made of our society’s failure to face down the flat-earthers? Perhaps, with his remarkable insight into the enormity of time, Darwin would have accepted that our culture simply needs a little longer to adapt to the truth.

Two centuries after his birth, Darwin’s work stands besides Shakespeare’s as the greatest British achievement. And like Shakespeare, Darwin’s greatness ultimately rests on the fact that he told us who we are.