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Each story takes place in the current or near future directly after a person dies or in many cases, moves on to their next existence. While the majority of the stories take place in their own form of heaven, some move the reader to space, inside the earth, or into a computer program.

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Dylan Thomas, the author of this poem takes a stance against the willingness of many to die. Death of often seen as necessary and the duty of the current generation so the next generation can take over. He writes that “Though wise men at their end know dark is right” they still don't go willingly and fight against death. This poem connects strongly to many themes in Sum such as questioning if death is natural? In one story death has been eliminated through medical advances and the book explores the consequences of infinite life. Do we need deadlines to get things done? Accepting death has some of the same problems as ignoring it. To fight death is to constantly work to make so much out of the time you have that you are striving for just a little but more

I also enjoy the dark irony of the poem in how Thomas is asking his readers to “Rage, Rage against the dying of the light” yet he died at 39 and so obviously didn't Rage enough.

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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission.

About Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas, born October 27, 1914, in South Wales, was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination

About Dylan Thomas

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Because I could not stop for Death-
He kindly stopped for me-
The Carriage held but just Ourselves-
And Immortality.

We slowly drove-He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility-

It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintery sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughtér,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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Do not go gentle into that good night - Discover the meaning of Dylan Thomas's famous villanelle about death, with an audio recording of the poet reading his classic poem. This poem was featured in the 2014 movie Interstellar.

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How can you live a more fulfilling life?

Is the goal of life to look back from the end with affinity and pleasure or should one live in the moment and maximize their current happiness and purpose?

Do we need death to incite urgency?

The first question is what I originally came up with which morphed into a more focused topic. I connect many of the sources to the second question but I have sources that I feel are important but connect to the original question much more directly. The third question is one that I realized many of my sources were pointing to too late. I wish I could have gone back and focused more of the project on that third question.

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This Ted Talk explains the concept of having infinite things that can be done while being a finite person. The speaker wants those listening to recognize their busyness is not a good thing and that finishing tasks only invites more from the infinite list of possibilities. The Ted Talk joins with many of the book's lessons that reflect on the brevity of life. There really isn't that much time and we have to choose each action wisely to take advantage of what little we have left.  His advice is to pick a few things that we find truly important and meaningful and make time for them.  This allows one to look back fondly on them and to be in the moment of actually working on these ideas.

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How to stop fighting against time. | Oliver Burkeman | TEDxUniversityofNicosia

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I love this piece of art for many reasons but I think importantly It only has the meaning that the viewer takes from it. This art is AI generated and was created for the purpose of displaying emotion. For me, this image displays many people who have just passed over to the afterlife and are reflecting on their lives. Although the background and colors appear vibrant and joyful there is a sense of mourning and sadness from the characters. Some of these souls may have past regrets they are holding onto and may not overcome.

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Familiar souls in the afterlife waiting for their friend to pass over into the most brilliant colored dream AI Generated Artwork created using NightCafe Creator AI Generated Style Transfer Art 2021-10-05T19:08:10.000Z https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/kvpsT3fn2oKm9kUdiYL0 https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/kvpsT3fn2oKm9kUdiYL0/kvpsT3fn2oKm9kUdiYL0.jpg?tr=w-9999,c-at_max

NightCafe https://creator.nightcafe.studio https://images.nightcafe.studio//assets/night-cafe-logo-tagline.png?tr=w-9999,c-at_max AI Art Generator - create beautiful artworks with the help of AI

NightCafe https://creator.nightcafe.studio https://images.nightcafe.studio//assets/night-cafe-logo-tagline.png?tr=w-9999,c-at_max AI Art Generator - create beautiful artworks with the help of AI

Created 7 months ago · 1 comment

I'm trying to recreate the most intense dream I've had.

This artwork was created with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Create your own AI-generated artworks using NightCafe Creator.

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Familiar souls in the afterlife waiting for their friend to pass over into the most brilliant colored dream - AI Generated Artwork

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Familiar souls in the afterlife waiting for their friend to pass over into the most brilliant colored dream AI Generated Artwork created using NightCafe Creator AI Generated Style Transfer Art 2021-10-05T19:08:10.000Z https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/kvpsT3fn2oKm9kUdiYL0 https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/kvpsT3fn2oKm9kUdiYL0/kvpsT3fn2oKm9kUdiYL0.jpg?tr=w-9999,c-at_max NightCafe https://creator.nightcafe.studio https://images.nightcafe.studio//assets/night-cafe-logo-tagline.png?tr=w-9999,c-at_max AI Art Generator - create beautiful artworks with the help of AI NightCafe https://creator.nightcafe.studio https://images.nightcafe.studio//assets/night-cafe-logo-tagline.png?tr=w-9999,c-at_max AI Art Generator - create beautiful artworks with the help of AI Created 7 months ago · 1 comment I'm trying to recreate the most intense dream I've had.

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This story uses a dragon to symbolize death. This dragon demands humans as a sacrifice the same way death takes people's lives every day. As humanity grows with this dragon, their society develops and they eventually realize it is possible to kill the dragon. Groups in the story argue whether or not the killing of the dragon gives the people purpose. This story argues that we do not deed death to incite urgency. Everyone eventually agrees to stop the dragon because such a ghastly toll like death is not warranted by anything. Everyone already rarely thinks that they will die until old age and do not take that into calculation when doing their present activities. Death is not a motivator for action.

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Calorie restriction (a diet low in calories but high in nutrients) extends maximal lifespan and delays the onset of age-related illnesses in all species that have been tested. Preliminary results from an ongoing study on rhesus and squirrel monkeys show similar effects. It seems quite likely that calorie restriction would work for our species too. Few humans, however, would be willing to put themselves through a lifelong hunger-diet. Some researchers are searching for calorie-restriction mimetics - compounds that elicit the desirable effects of lowered caloric intake without us having to go hungry. (See e.g. Lane, M. et al. (1999) "Nutritional modulation of aging in nonhuman primates,"
Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil-smelling yellowish-green slime. It demanded from humankind a blood-curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon-tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed.

The misery inflicted by the dragon-tyrant was incalculable. In addition to the ten thousand who were gruesomely slaughtered each day, there were the mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and friends that were left behind to grieve the loss of their departed loved ones.

Some people tried to fight the dragon, but whether they were brave or foolish was difficult to say. Priests and magicians called down curses, to no avail. Warriors, armed with roaring courage and the best weapons the smiths could produce, attacked it, but were incinerated by its fire before coming close enough to strike. Chemists concocted toxic brews and tricked the dragon into swallowing them, but the only apparent effect was to further stimulate its appetite. The dragon's claws, jaws, and fire were so effective, its scaly armor so impregnable, and its whole nature so robust, as to make it invincible to any human assault.

Seeing that defeating the tyrant was impossible, humans had no choice but to obey its commands and pay the grisly tribute. The fatalities selected were always elders. Although senior people were as vigorous and healthy as the young, and sometimes wiser, the thinking was that they had at least already enjoyed a few decades of life. The wealthy might gain a brief reprieve by bribing the press gangs that came to fetch them; but, by constitutional law, nobody, not even the king himself, could put off their turn indefinitely.

Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would be free from the dragon-scourge. Other orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the dragon's stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the human species because it kept the population size down. To what extent these arguments convinced the worried souls is not known. Most people tried to cope by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them.

For many centuries this desperate state of affairs continued. Nobody kept count any longer of the cumulative death toll, nor of the number of tears shed by the bereft. Expectations had gradually adjusted and the dragon-tyrant had become a fact of life. In view of the evident futility of resistance, attempts to kill the dragon had ceased. Instead, efforts now focused on placating it. While the dragon would occasionally raid the cities, it was found that the punctual delivery to the mountain of its quota of life reduced the frequency of these incursions.

Knowing that their turn to become dragon-fodder was always impending, people began having children earlier and more often. It was not uncommon for a girl to be pregnant by her sixteenth birthday. Couples often spawned a dozen children. The human population was thus kept from shrinking, and the dragon was kept from going hungry.

Over the course of these centuries, the dragon, being well fed, slowly but steadily grew bigger. It had become almost as large as the mountain on which it lived. And its appetite had increased proportionately. Ten thousand human bodies were no longer enough to fill its belly. It now demanded eighty thousand, to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every evening at the onset of dark.

What occupied the king's mind more than the deaths and the dragon itself was the logistics of collecting and transporting so many people to the mountain every day. This was not an easy task.

To facilitate the process, the king had a railway track constructed: two straight lines of glistening steel leading up to the dragon's abode. Every twenty minutes, a train would arrive at the mountain terminal crammed with people, and would return empty. On moonlit nights, the passengers traveling on this train, if there had been windows for them to stick their heads out of, would have been able to see in front of them the double silhouette of the dragon and the mountain, and two glowing red eyes, like the beams from a pair of giant lighthouses, pointing the way to annihilation.

Servants were employed by the king in large numbers to administer the tribute. There were registrars who kept track of whose turn it was to be sent. There were people-collectors who would be dispatched in special carts to fetch the designated people. Often traveling at breakneck speed, they would rush their cargo either to a railway station or directly to the mountain. There were clerks who administered the pensions paid to the decimated families who were no longer able to support themselves. There were comforters who would travel with the doomed on their way to the dragon, trying to ease their anguish with spirits and drugs.

There was, moreover, a cadre of dragonologists who studied how these logistic processes could be made more efficient. Some dragonologists also conducted studies of the dragon's physiology and behavior, and collected samples - its shed scales, the slime that drooled from its jaws, its lost teeth, and its excrements, which were specked with fragments of human bone. All these items were painstakingly annotated and archived. The more the beast was understood, the more the general perception of its invincibility was confirmed. Its black scales, in particular, were harder than any material known to man, and there seemed no way to make as much as a scratch in its armor.

To finance all these activities, the king levied heavy taxes on his people. Dragon-related expenditures, already accounting for one seventh of the economy, were growing even faster than the dragon itself.

Humanity is a curious species. Every once in a while, somebody gets a good idea. Others copy the idea, adding to it their own improvements. Over time, many wondrous tools and systems are developed. Some of these devices - calculators, thermometers, microscopes, and the glass vials that the chemists use to boil and distil liquids - serve to make it easier to generate and try out new ideas, including ideas that expedite the process of idea-generation.

Thus the great wheel of invention, which had turned at an almost imperceptibly slow pace in the older ages, gradually began to accelerate.

Sages predicted that a day would come when technology would enable humans to fly and do many other astonishing things. One of the sages, who was held in high esteem by some of the other sages but whose eccentric manners had made him a social outcast and recluse, went so far as to predict that technology would eventually make it possible to build a contraption that could kill the dragon-tyrant.

The king's scholars, however, dismissed these ideas. They said that humans were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers. And as for the impossible notion that the dragon-tyrant could be killed, history books recounted hundreds of attempts to do just that, not one of which had been successful. "We all know that this man had some irresponsible ideas," a scholar of letters later wrote in his obituary of the reclusive sage who had by then been sent off to be devoured by the beast whose demise he had foretold, "but his writings were quite entertaining and perhaps we should be grateful to the dragon for making possible the interesting genre of dragon-bashing literature which reveals so much about the culture of angst!"

Meanwhile, the wheel of invention kept turning. Mere decades later, humans did fly and accomplished many other astonishing things.

A few iconoclastic dragonologists began arguing for a new attack on the dragon-tyrant. Killing the dragon would not be easy, they said, but if some material could be invented that was harder than the dragon's armor, and if this material could be fashioned into some kind of projectile, then maybe the feat would be possible. At first, the iconoclasts' ideas were rejected by their dragonologist peers on grounds that no known material was harder than dragon scales. But after working on the problem for many years, one of the iconoclasts succeeded in demonstrating that a dragon scale could be pierced by an object made of a certain composite material. Many dragonologists who had previously been skeptical now joined the iconoclasts. Engineers calculated that a huge projectile could be made of this material and launched with sufficient force to penetrate the dragon's armor. However, the manufacture of the needed quantity of the composite material would be expensive.

A group of several eminent engineers and dragonologists sent a petition to the king asking for funding to build the anti-dragon projectile. At time when the petition was sent, the king was preoccupied with leading his army into war against a tiger. The tiger had killed a farmer and subsequently disappeared into the jungle. There was widespread fear in the countryside that the tiger might come out and strike again. The king had the jungle surrounded and ordered his troops to begin slashing their way through it. At the conclusion of the campaign, the king could announce that all 163 tigers in the jungle, including presumably the murderous one, had been hunted down and killed. During the tumult of the war, however, the petition had been lost or forgotten.

The petitioners therefore sent another appeal. This time they received a reply from one of the king's secretaries saying that the king would consider their request after he was done reviewing the annual dragon-administration budget. This year's budget was the largest to date and included funding for a new railway track to the mountain. A second track was deemed necessary, as the original track could no longer support the increasing traffic. (The tribute demanded by the dragon-tyrant had increased to one hundred thousand human beings, to be delivered to the foot of the mountain every evening at the onset of dark.) When the budget was finally approved, however, reports were coming from a remote part of the country that a village was suffering from a rattlesnake infestation. The king had to leave urgently to mobilize his army and ride off to defeat this new threat. The anti-dragonists' appeal was filed away in a dusty cabinet in the castle basement.

The anti-dragonists met again to decide what was to be done. The debate was animated and continued long into the night. It was almost daybreak when they finally resolved to take the matter to the people. Over the following weeks, they traveled around the country, gave public lectures, and explained their proposal to anyone who would listen. At first, people were skeptical. They had been taught in school that the dragon-tyrant was invincible and that the sacrifices it demanded had to be accepted as a fact of life. Yet when they learnt about the new composite material and about the designs for the projectile, many became intrigued. In increasing numbers, citizens flocked to the anti-dragonist lectures. Activists started organizing public rallies in support of the proposal.

When the king read about these meetings in the newspaper, he summoned his advisors and asked them what they thought about it. They informed him about the petitions that had been sent but told him that the anti-dragonists were troublemakers whose teachings were causing public unrest. It was much better for the social order, they said, that the people accepted the inevitability of the dragon-tyrant tribute. The dragon-administration provided many jobs that would be lost if the dragon was slaughtered. There was no known social good coming from the conquest of the dragon. In any case, the king's coffers were currently nearly empty after the two military campaigns and the funding set aside for the second railway line. The king, who was at the time enjoying great popularity for having vanquished the rattlesnake infestation, listened to his advisors' arguments but worried that he might lose some of his popular support if was seen to ignore the anti-dragonist petition. He therefore decided to hold an open hearing. Leading dragonologists, ministers of the state, and interested members of the public were invited to attend.

The meeting took place on the darkest day of the year, just before the Christmas holidays, in the largest hall of the royal castle. The hall was packed to the last seat and people were crowding in the aisles. The mood was charged with an earnest intensity normally reserved for pivotal wartime sessions.

After the king had welcomed everyone, he gave the floor to the leading scientist behind the anti-dragonist proposal, a woman with a serious, almost stern expression on her face. She proceeded to explain in clear language how the proposed device would work and how the requisite amount of the composite material could be manufactured. Given the requested amount of funding, it should be possible to complete the work in fifteen to twenty years. With an even greater amount of funding, it might be possible to do it in as little as twelve years. However, there could be no absolute guarantee that it would work. The crowd followed her presentation intently.

Next to speak was the king's chief advisor for morality, a man with a booming voice that easily filled the auditorium:

"Let us grant that this woman is correct about the science and that the project is technologically possible, although I don't think that has actually been proven. Now she desires that we get rid of the dragon. Presumably, she thinks she's got the right not to be chewed up by the dragon. How willful and presumptuous. The finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not. Getting rid of the dragon, which might seem like such a convenient thing to do, would undermine our human dignity. The preoccupation with killing the dragon will deflect us from realizing more fully the aspirations to which our lives naturally point, from living well rather than merely staying alive. It is debasing, yes debasing, for a person to want to continue his or her mediocre life for as long as possible without worrying about some of the higher questions about what life is to be used for. But I tell you, the nature of the dragon is to eat humans, and our own species-specified nature is truly and nobly fulfilled only by getting eaten by it..."

The audience listened respectfully to this highly decorated speaker. The phrases were so eloquent that it was hard to resist the feeling that some deep thoughts must lurk behind them, although nobody could quite grasp what they were. Surely, words coming from such a distinguished appointee of the king must have profound substance.

The speaker next in line was a spiritual sage who was widely respected for his kindness and gentleness as well as for his devotion. As he strode to the podium, a small boy yelled out from the audience: "The dragon is bad!"

The boy's parents turned bright red and began hushing and scolding the child. But the sage said, "Let the boy speak. He is probably wiser than an old fool like me."

At first, the boy was too scared and confused to move. But when he saw the genuinely friendly smile on the sage's face and the outreached hand, he obediently took it and followed the sage up to the podium. "Now, there's a brave little man," said the sage. "Are you afraid of the dragon?"

"I want my granny back," said the boy.

"Did the dragon take your granny away?"

"Yes," the boy said, tears welling up in his large frightened eyes. "Granny promised that she would teach me how to bake gingerbread cookies for Christmas. She said that we would make a little house out of gingerbread and little gingerbread men that would live in it. Then those people in white clothes came and took Granny away to the dragon... The dragon is bad and it eats people... I want my Granny back!"

At this point the child was crying so hard that the sage had to return him to his parents.

There were several other speakers that evening, but the child's simple testimony had punctured the rhetorical balloon that the king's ministers had tried to inflate. The people were backing the anti-dragonists, and by the end of the evening even the king had come to recognize the reason and the humanity of their cause. In his closing statement, he simply said: "Let's do it!"

As the news spread, celebrations erupted in the streets. Those who had been campaigning for the anti-dragonists toasted each other and drank to the future of humanity.

The next morning, a billion people woke up and realized that their turn to be sent to the dragon would come before the projectile would be completed. A tipping point was reached. Whereas before, active support for the anti-dragonist cause had been limited to a small group of visionaries, it now became the number one priority and concern on everybody's mind. The abstract notion of "the general will" took on an almost tangible intensity and concreteness. Mass rallies raised money for the projectile project and urged the king to increase the level of state support. The king responded to these appeals. In his New Year address, he announced that he would pass an extra appropriations bill to support the project at a high level of funding; additionally, he would sell off his summer castle and some of his land and make a large personal donation. "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of freeing the world from the ancient scourge of the dragon-tyrant."

Thus started a great technological race against time. The concept of an anti-dragon projectile was simple, but to make it a reality required solutions to a thousand smaller technical problems, each of which required dozens of time-consuming steps and missteps. Test-missiles were fired but fell dead to the ground or flew off in the wrong direction. In one tragic accident, a wayward missile landed on a hospital and killed several hundred patients and staff. But there was now a real seriousness of purpose, and the tests continued even as the corpses were being dug out from the debris.

Despite almost unlimited funding and round-the-clock work by the technicians, the king's deadline could not be met. The decade concluded and the dragon was still alive and well. But the effort was getting closer. A prototype missile had been successfully test fired. Production of the core, made of the expensive composite material, was on schedule for its completion to coincide with the finishing of the fully tested and debugged missile shell into which it was to be loaded. The launch date was set to the following year's New Year's Eve, exactly twelve years after the project's official inauguration. The best-selling Christmas gift that year was a calendar that counted down the days to time zero, the proceeds going to the projectile project.

The king had undergone a personal transformation from his earlier frivolous and thoughtless self. He now spent as much time as he could in the laboratories and the manufacturing plants, encouraging the workers and praising their toil. Sometimes he would bring a sleeping bag and spend the night on a noisy machine floor. He even studied and tried to understand the technical aspects of their work. Yet he confined himself to giving moral support and refrained from meddling in technical and managerial matters.

Seven days before New Year, the woman who had made the case for the project almost twelve years earlier, and was now its chief executive, came to the royal castle and requested an urgent audience with the king. When the king got her note, he excused himself to the foreign dignitaries whom he was reluctantly entertaining at the annual Christmas dinner and hurried off to the private room where the scientist was waiting. As always of late, she looked pale and worn from her long working hours. This evening, however, the king also thought he could detect a ray of relief and satisfaction in her eyes.

She told him that the missile had been deployed, the core had been loaded, everything had been triple-checked, they were ready to launch, and would the king give his final go-ahead. The king sank down in an armchair and closed his eyes. He was thinking hard. By launching the projectile tonight, one week early, seven hundred thousand people would be saved. Yet if something went wrong, if it missed its target and hit the mountain instead, it would be a disaster. A new core would have to be constructed from scratch and the project would be set back by some four years. He sat there, silently, for almost an hour. Just as the scientist had become convinced that he had fallen asleep, he opened his eyes and said in a firm voice: "No. I want you to go right back to the lab. I want you to check and then re-check everything again." The scientist could not help a sigh escaping her; but she nodded and left.

The last day of the year was cold and overcast, but there was no wind, which meant good launch conditions. The sun was setting. Technicians were scuttling around making the final adjustments and giving everything one last check. The king and his closest advisors were observing from a platform close to the launch pad. Further away, behind a fence, large numbers of the public had assembled to witness the great event. A large clock was showing the countdown: fifty minutes to go.

An advisor tapped the king on the shoulder and drew his attention to the fence. There was some tumult. Somebody had apparently jumped the fence and was running towards the platform where the king sat. Security quickly caught up with him. He was handcuffed and taken away. The king turned his attention back to the launch pad, and to the mountain in the background. In front of it, he could see the dark slumped profile of the dragon. It was eating.

Some twenty minutes later, the king was surprised to see the handcuffed man reappearing a short distance from the platform. His nose was bleeding and he was accompanied by two security guards. The man appeared to be in a frenzied state. When he spotted the king, he began shouting at the top of his lungs: "The last train! The last train! Stop the last train!"

"Who is this young man?" said the king. "His face seems familiar, but I cannot quite place him. What does he want? Let him come up."

The young man was a junior clerk in the ministry of transportation, and the reason for his frenzy was that he had discovered that his father was on the last train to the mountain. The king had ordered the train traffic to continue, fearing that any disruption might cause the dragon to stir and leave the open field in front of the mountain where it now spent most of its time. The young man begged the king to issue a recall-order for the last train, which was due to arrive at the mountain terminal five minutes before time zero.

"I cannot do it," said the king, "I cannot take the risk."

"But the trains frequently run five minutes late. The dragon won't notice! Please!"

The young man was kneeling before the king, imploring him to save his father's life and the lives of the other thousand passengers onboard that last train.

The king looked down at the pleading, bloodied face of the young man. But he bit his lip, and shook his head. The young man continued to wail even as the guards carried him off the platform: "Please! Stop the last train! Please!"

The king stood silent and motionless, until, after while, the wailing suddenly ceased. The king looked up and glanced over at the countdown clock: five minutes remaining.

Four minutes. Three minutes. Two minutes.

The last technician left the launch pad.

30 seconds. 20 seconds. Ten, nine, eight...

As a ball of fire enveloped the launch pad and the missile shot out, the spectators instinctively rose to the tips of their toes, and all eyes fixated at the front end of the white flame from the rocket's afterburners heading towards the distant mountain. The masses, the king, the low and the high, the young and the old, it was as if at this moment they shared a single awareness, a single conscious experience: that white flame, shooting into the dark, embodying the human spirit, its fear and its hope... striking at the heart of evil. The silhouette on the horizon tumbled, and fell. Thousand voices of pure joy rose from the assembled masses, joined seconds later by a deafening drawn-out thud from the collapsing monster as if the Earth itself was drawing a sigh of relief. After centuries of oppression, humanity at last was free from the cruel tyranny of the dragon.

The joy cry resolved into a jubilating chant: "Long live the king! Long live us all!" The king's advisors, like everybody that night, were as happy as children; they embraced each other and congratulated the king: "We did it! We did it!"

But the king answered in a broken voice: "Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn't have had to die."

The king stepped off the platform and walked up to the young man in handcuffs, who was sitting on the ground. There he fell down on his knees. "Forgive me! Oh my God, please forgive me!"

The rain started falling, in large, heavy drops, turning the ground into mud, drenching the king's purple robes, and dissolving the blood on the young man's face. "I am so very sorry about your father," said the king.

"It's not your fault," replied the young man. "Do you remember twelve years ago in the castle? That crying little boy who wanted you to bring back his grandmother - that was me. I didn't realize then that you couldn't possibly do what I asked for. Today I wanted you to save my father. Yet it was impossible to do that now, without jeopardizing the launch. But you have saved my life, and my mother and my sister. How can we ever thank you enough for that?"

"Listen to them," said the king, gesturing towards the crowds. "They are cheering me for what happened tonight. But the hero is you. You cried out. You rallied us against evil." The king signaled a guard to come and unlock the handcuffs. "Now, go to your mother and sister. You and your family shall always be welcome at the court, and anything you wish for - if it be within my power - shall be granted."

The young man left, and the royal entourage, huddling in the downpour, accumulated around their monarch who was still kneeling in the mud. Amongst the fancy couture, which was being increasingly ruined by the rain, a bunch of powdered faces expressed a superposition of joy, relief, and discombobulation. So much had changed in the last hour: the right to an open future had been regained, a primordial fear had been abolished, and many a long-held assumption had been overturned. Unsure now about what was required of them in this unfamiliar situation, they stood there tentatively, as if probing whether the ground would still hold, exchanging glances, and waiting for some kind of indication.

Finally, the king rose, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.

"Your majesty, what do we do now?" ventured the most senior courtier.

"My dear friends," said the king, "we have come a long way... yet our journey has only just begun. Our species is young on this planet. Today we are like children again. The future lies open before us. We shall go into this future and try to do better than we have done in the past. We have time now - time to get things right, time to grow up, time to learn from our mistakes, time for the slow process of building a better world, and time to get settled in it. Tonight, let all the bells in the kingdom ring until midnight, in remembrance of our dead forbears, and then after midnight let us celebrate till the sun comes up. And in the coming days... I believe we have some reorganization to do!"

Stories about aging have traditionally focused on the need for graceful accommodation. The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and impending death was resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and personal relationships. Given that nothing could be done to prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense. Rather than fretting about the inevitable, one could aim for peace of mind.

Today we face a different situation. While we still lack effective and acceptable means for slowing the aging process, we can identify research directions that might lead to the development of such means in the foreseeable future. "Deathist" stories and ideologies, which counsel passive acceptance, are no longer harmless sources of consolation. They are fatal barriers to urgently needed action.

Many distinguished technologists and scientists tell us that it will become possible to retard, and eventually to halt and reverse, human senescence. At present, there is little agreement about the time-scale or the specific means, nor is there a consensus that the goal is even achievable in principle. In relation to the fable (where aging is, of course, represented by the dragon), we are therefore at a stage somewhere between that at which the lone sage predicted the dragon's eventual demise and that at which the iconoclast dragonologists convinced their peers by demonstrating a composite material that was harder than dragon scales.

The ethical argument that the fable presents is simple: There are obvious and compelling moral reasons for the people in the fable to get rid of the dragon. Our situation with regard to human senescence is closely analogous and ethically isomorphic to the situation of the people in the fable with regard to the dragon. Therefore, we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence.

The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process, the healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be able to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which they would otherwise be dead.

In addition to this general moral, there are a number of more specific lessons:

(1)A recurrent tragedy became a fact of life, a statistic. In the fable, people's expectations adapted to the existence of the dragon, to the extent that many became unable to perceive its badness. Aging, too, has become a mere "fact of life" - despite being the principal cause of an unfathomable amount of human suffering and death.

(2)A static view of technology. People reasoned that it would never become possible to kill the dragon because all attempts had failed in the past. They failed to take into account accelerated technological progress. Is a similar mistake leading us to underestimate the chances of a cure for aging?

(3)Administration became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the U.S. spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation became such an exclusive focus that it made people neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.

(4)The social good became detached from the good for people. The king's advisors worried about the possible social problems that could be caused by the anti-dragonists. They said that no known social good would come from the demise of the dragon. Ultimately, however, social orders exist for the benefit of people, and it is generally good for people if their lives are saved.

(5)The lack of a sense of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba of rattlesnakes plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and the rattlesnakes, and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at fault, because he got his priorities wrong.

(6)Fine phrases and hollow rhetoric. The king's morality advisor spoke eloquently about human dignity and our species-specified nature, in phrases lifted, mostly verbatim, from the advisor's contemporary equivalents. Yet the rhetoric was a smoke screen that hid rather than revealed moral reality. The boy's inarticulate but honest testimony, by contrast, points to the central fact of the case: the dragon is bad; it destroys people. This is also the basic truth about human senescence.

(7)Failure to appreciate the urgency. Until very late in the story, nobody fully realized what was at stake. Only as the king was staring into the bloodied face of the young pleading man does the extent of the tragedy sink in. Searching for a cure for aging is not just a nice thing that we should perhaps one day get around to. It is an urgent, screaming moral imperative. The sooner we start a focused research program, the sooner we will get results. It matters if we get the cure in 25 years rather than in 24 years: a population greater than that of Canada would die as a result. In this matter, time equals life, at a rate of approximately 70 lives per minute. With the meter ticking at such a furious rate, we should stop faffing about.

(8)"And in the coming days... I believe we have some reorganization to do!" The king and his people will face some major challenges when they recover from their celebration. Their society has been so conditioned and deformed by the presence of the dragon that a frightening void now exists. They will have to work creatively, on both an individual and a societal level, to develop conditions that will keep lives flourishingly dynamic and meaningful beyond the accustomed three-score-years-and-ten. Luckily, the human spirit is good at adapting. Another issue that they may eventually confront is overpopulation. Maybe people will have to learn to have children later and less frequently. Maybe they can find ways to sustain a larger population by using more efficient technology. Maybe they will one day develop spaceships and begin to colonize the cosmos. We can leave, for now, the long-lived fable people to grapple with these new challenges, while we try to make some progress in our own adventure.
J. Nutr. Health & Aging, 3(2): 69-76.)
A recent straw poll at the 10 th Congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology revealed that the majority of the participants thought it either probable or "not improbable" that comprehensive functional rejuvenation of middle-aged mice would be possible within 10-20 years (de Grey, A. (2004), "Report of open discussion on the future of life extension research," (Annals NY Acad. Sci., 1019, in press)). See also e.g. de Grey, A., B. Ames, et al. (2002) "Time to talk SENS: critiquing the immutability of human aging," Increasing Healthy Life Span: Conventional Measures and Slowing the Innate Aging Process: Ninth Congress of the International Association of Biomedical Gerontology, ed. D. Harman (Annals NY Acad. Sci. 959: 452-462); and Freitas Jr., R. A., Nanomedicine, Vol. 1 (Landes Bioscience: Georgetown, TX, 1999).

See, e.g. Kass, L. (2003) "Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Perfection," The New Atlantis, 1.

I'm grateful to many people for comments on earlier drafts, including especially Heather Bradshaw, Roger Crisp, Aubrey de Grey, Katrien Devolder, Joel Garreau, John Harris, Andrea Landfried, Toby Ord, Susan Rogers, Julian Savulescu, Ian Watson, and Kip Werking. I am also very grateful to Adi Berman, Pierino Forno, Didier Coeurnelle, and others who have translated the fable into other languages, and everybody who has helped spread the word or who have given encouragement. Thank you!

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Calorie restriction (a diet low in calories but high in nutrients) extends maximal lifespan and delays the onset of age-related illnesses in all species that have been tested. Preliminary results from an ongoing study on rhesus and squirrel monkeys show similar effects. It seems quite likely that calorie restriction would work for our species too.

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This source argues that death is not necessary. CGP Grey believes that death is simply the degenerative disease that affects every member of the population. His video strongly argues that death does not give purpose and so maximum life is optimal to give the most amount of time for life. It doesn't matter the accomplishments because “you live in the now”. Because you live now your goals are always in the present and you optimize what's best for you right now.

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https://deagle.people.stanford.edu/

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This article is basically an excuse to talk about the ramifications of living for infinite life. Because there is no end at which you look back, as seen in the guiding question, having an infinite life allows you to live much more in the moment than otherwise. When our lives are constrained we have urgency and are not able to put things off. This can make people feel overwhelmed and stressed but also provides a reason to start today rather than next week. If we are to ignore death and live life without thought of it, there will be far less urgency and drive.

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(Image credit: Peter Cade via Getty Images)

If you are human, you are going to die. This isn't the most comforting thought, but death is the inevitable price we must pay for being alive. Humans are, however, getting better at pushing back our expiration date, as our medicines and technologies advance.

If the human life span continues to stretch, could we one day become immortal? The answer depends on what you think it means to be an immortal human.

"I don't think when people are even asking about immortality they really mean true immortality, unless they believe in something like a soul," Susan Schneider, a philosopher and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, told Live Science. "If someone was, say, to upgrade their brain and body to live a really long time, they would still not be able to live beyond the end of the universe."

Scientists expect the universe will end, which puts an immediate dampener on a mystery about the potential for human immortality. Some scientists have speculated about surviving the death of the universe, as science journalist John Horgan reported for Scientific American, but it's unlikely that any humans alive today will experience the universe's demise anyway.

Many humans grow old and die. To live indefinitely, we would need to stop the body from aging. A group of animals that may have already solved this problem, so it isn't as far-fetched as it sounds.

Hydra are small, jellyfish-like invertebrates with a remarkable approach to aging. They are largely made up of that constantly divide to make new cells, as their older cells are discarded. The constant influx of new cells allows hydra to rejuvenate themselves and stay forever young, Live Science previously reported.

"They don't seem to age, so, potentially they are immortal," Daniel Martínez, a biology professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who discovered the hydra's lack of aging, told Live Science. Hydra show that animals do not have to grow old, but that doesn't mean humans could replicate their rejuvenating habits. At 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) long, hydra are small and don't have organs. "It's impossible for us because our bodies are super complex," Martínez said.

Humans have stem cells that can repair and even regrow parts of the body, such as in the , but the human body is not made almost entirely of these cells, like hydra are. That's because humans need cells to do things other than just divide and make new cells. For example, our red blood cells transport around the body. "We make cells commit to a function, and in doing that, they have to lose the ability to divide," Martínez said. As the cells age, so do we.

We can't simply discard our old cells like hydra do, because we need them. For example, the neurons in the brain transmit information. "We don't want those to be replaced," Martínez said. "Because otherwise, we won't remember anything." Hydra could inspire research that allows humans to live healthier lives, for example, by finding ways for our cells to function better as they age, according to Martínez. However, his gut feeling is that humans will never achieve such biological immortality.

(Image credit: Choksawatdikorn/Shutterstock.com)

Though Martínez personally doesn't want to live forever, he thinks humans are already capable of a form of immortality. "I always say, 'I think we are immortal,'" he said. "Poets to me are immortal because they're still with us after so many years and they still influence us. And so I think that people survive through their legacy."

The oldest-living human on record is Jeanne Calment from France, who died at the age of 122 in 1997, according to Guinness World Records. In a 2021 study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers reported that humans may be able to live up to a maximum of between 120 and 150 years, after which, the researchers anticipate a complete loss of resilience - the body's ability to recover from things like illness or injury. To live beyond this limit, humans would need to stop cells from aging and prevent disease.
Related: What's the oldest living thing alive today?
Humans may be able to live beyond their biological limits with future technological advancements involving nanotechnology. This is the manipulation of materials on a nanoscale, less than 100 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter or 400-billionths of an inch). Machines this small could travel in the blood and possibly prevent aging by repairing the damage cells experience over time. Nanotech could also cure certain diseases, including some types of cancer, by removing cancerous cells from the body, according to the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Preventing the from aging still isn't enough to achieve immortality; just ask the hydra. Even though hydra don't show signs of aging, the creatures still die. They are eaten by predators, such as fish, and perish if their environment changes too much, such as if their ponds freeze in winter, Martínez said.

Humans don't have many predators to contend with, but we are prone to fatal accidents and vulnerable to extreme environmental events, such as those intensified by climate change. We'll need a sturdier vessel than our current bodies to ensure our survival long into the future. Technology may provide the solution for this, too.

Long live technology

As technology advances, futurists anticipate two defining milestones. The first is the singularity, in which we will design artificial intelligence (A.I.) smart enough to redesign itself, and it will get progressively smarter until it is vastly superior to our own intelligence, Live Science previously reported. The second milestone is virtual immortality, where we will be able to scan our brains and transfer ourselves to a non-biological medium, like a computer.

(Image credit: MR.Cole_Photographer via Getty Images)

Researchers have already mapped the neural connections of a roundworm ( Caenorhabditis elegans). As part of the so-called OpenWorm project, they then simulated the roundworm's brain in software replicating the neural connections, and programmed that software to direct a Lego robot, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The robot then appeared to start behaving like a roundworm. Scientists aren't close to mapping the connections between the 86 billion neurons of the human brain (roundworms have only 302 neurons), but advances in artificial intelligence may help us get there.

Once the human mind is in a computer and can be uploaded to the internet, we won't have to worry about the human body perishing. Moving the human mind out of the body would be a significant step on the road to immortality but, according to Schneider, there's a catch. "I don't think that will achieve immortality for you, and that's because I think you'd be creating a digital double," she said.

Schneider, who is also the author of "Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind" (Princeton University Press, 2019), describes a thought experiment in which the brain either does or doesn't survive the upload process. If the brain does survive, then the digital copy can't be you as you're still alive; conversely, the digital copy also can't be you if your brain doesn't survive the upload process, because it wouldn't be if you did - the copy can only be your digital double.

According to Schneider, a better route to extreme longevity, while also preserving the person, would be through biological enhancements compatible with the survival of the human brain. Another, more controversial route would be through brain chips.

"There's been a lot of talk about gradually replacing parts of the brain with chips. So, eventually, one becomes like an artificial intelligence," Schneider said. In other words, slowly transitioning into a cyborg and thinking in chips rather than neurons. But if the human brain is intimately connected to you, then replacing it could mean suicide, she added.

The human body appears to have an expiration date, regardless of how it is upgraded or uploaded. Whether humans are still human without their bodies is an open question.

"To me, it's not even really an issue about whether you're technically a human being or not," Schneider said. "The real issue is whether you're the same self of a person. So, what really matters here is, what is it to be a conscious being? And when is it that changes in the brain change which conscious being you are?" - In other words, at what point does changing what we can do with our brains change who we are?
Originally published on Live Science.
Schneider is excited by the potential brain and body enhancements of the future and likes the idea of ridding ourselves of death by old age, despite some of her reservations. "I would love that, absolutely, she said. "And I would love to see science and technology cure ailments, make us smarter. I would love to see people have the option of upgrading their brains with chips. I just want them to understand what's at stake."

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(Image credit: Peter Cade via Getty Images) If you are human, you are going to die. This isn't the most comforting thought, but death is the inevitable price we must pay for being alive. Humans are, however, getting better at pushing back our expiration date, as our medicines and technologies advance.