By Jack Uldrich
Cross-posted from www.unlearning101.com
In 1899,
just a few years before the Wright brothers
achieved their historic accomplishment, Lord
Kelvin – then one of the world’s brightest men and most
accomplished scientists – declared heavier than air machines to be
"impossible."
He was wrong. To add insult to injury, Lord Kelvin was proved
wrong by a pair of bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio.
A few years ago, a relatively unknown computer scientist,
Aubrey de
Grey, declared that aging should not be viewed as something
which will necessarily ultimately result in death. Rather, he
theorized that aging is a disease and should be treated as
such.
The outcry from the scientific community was similar to Lord
Kelvin’s reaction to human flight. One group of scientists even
declared that de Grey’s idea was "so far from plausible that it
commands no respect at all within the informed scientific
community."
Well, according to this article
in Wired, the idea is now beginning to gain some acceptance within
scientific circles. (cont.)
To be sure, society is still a long way from de Grey’s goal of
ending again but, as I have written
before, I’d encourage people to not dismiss the idea entirely.
For if he is right, it will require society to unlearn a great many
ideas which it now holds as dear.
In fact, the scale of unlearning our current paradigm of "death
as an inevitability" could make other past historic paradigm shifts
– such as the idea that the earth is not at the center of the
universe (an idea for which Aristarchus
was run out of Alexandria and Galileo was
forced to recant under edict of the Catholic Church) or Darwin’s
theory of evolution – look like child’s play.
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