Myth or Reality: Man Will Be Immortal

 Science is meant to conquer death，then, there will be no person dying in future. Condorcet said this long ago.

 The beautiful Chang’e (goddess in the moon) was the wife of the hero Yi, who shot down nine suns, and because she had eaten the drug for eternal life, she flew into the Palace on the Moon.

 Today，the fairy tale of “Chang’e Flying to the Moon” has already become a vivid reality: mankind has not only already landed on the moon，but is also marching into the Mars!

 There is such a cartoon in a magazine of USA:

 A downpour is going on outside, and the priest in the room cried madly: “My God! It is not a rain from God! It is a rain from us! “

 It turns out to be an artificial rainfall to relieve the drought. God’s summoning wind and rain has been realized by mankind now.

 Lots and lots of beautiful myths, in China or elsewhere, in modern or ancient times, have already become or are becoming true. In Pilgrimage to the West, Sun Wukong plucked a vellus，gave a puff to it and it changed into uncountable small Sun Wukongs at once. Is the clone technology not so miraculous? Sun Wukong changed himself into an insect to get into Iron-Fan Princess’ belly; the nanometer robot will be smaller than an insect, so small that it can travel freely in the blood capillary of a person…

 “Schigg, transport me back into the ship of ‘Adventure’“, — that is a dialogue often appearing in the American science fiction telefilm “Adventures in the Starry Sky”. The persons in the film can be transported from one place to another place in the flick of an eye. Such a scenario in science fiction has been regarded by scientists as a would-be reality! You see, after three years’ efforts, the Australian research group headed by Lin Bingxi, on overseas Chinese scientist, has succeeded for the first time in diverting a laser bean carrying encrypted radio signals to a place 1 meter away, which marked the first step of remote transportation for mankind. According to the fiction conception of “Adventures in the Starry Sky”, “transport” means a process to convert an object at point A to energy，send it to point B，and then reconvert the energy to the object. “Transporting” can not only enable an object to penetrate a barrier，but also carry a living  organism and restructure the organism. A human body is composed of trillions of atoms, thus, it can also be transported，and even can be conveyed from one star to another in a moment.

 A decade ago，no one believed remote and instant transportation of a person can be turned to reality, but now we have taken the crucial first step in this direction.

 From ancient times，many people dreamed, if there was a drug that could enable us to keep awake, then, we would have more hours for work or play in a day. How good it would be! If we say such an idea was unpractical in the past, now, those who hope to eradicate sleep have seen the possibility of turning it into reality. A new drug called MODAFINIL will shock the whole world soon, and its impact will be far greater than that of “Weige”(brand of an afrodyn). For it has such an effect: if a healthy person takes one tablet of it, he can work continually for 40 hours energetically, without getting sleepy. Then, after a sleep of 8 hours，he may take another tablet, and he can work continually for another 40 hours. This medicine got the attention of Department of High-level National Defense Research Projects of US Defence Department. The department has always been trying to bring up “fighters with controllable metabolism”, aiming to cultivate soldiers who can fight 24 hours everyday and continuously for 7 days. US Office of Defence-related Science and Technology said in its web site，these “soldiers who have no need for sleep but still can keep a high recognition capability and a strong physical performance will change the war by the root”. The medicine has just appeared for a short time, and it has not been sold widely in the market yet, but its sales amount of one year alone has reached 0.15 billion U.S. dollars.

 All those facts show us such a truth：Science is just the god, science has boundless divine power, and can turn the most absurd myth into vivid reality.

 Science and technology have turned many myths into reality，such as “clairvoyance”, “clairaudient”, “going up to Heaven”, “going down into earth” and so on; man’s landing on the moon, test-tube babies, clone technology and so on would have been regarded as totally impossible in the past. Science enables mankind to play a greater and greater role, close to that of God. Before science, all sorts of “impossibility” will be defeated and flee，and all kinds of great wonders will come out.

 In China’s myths, the principal protagonist is a god. The most essential characteristic of the god in a myth is longevity. “The god lives forever.”(Shuo Wen Jie Zi, an ancient Chinese dictionary). “Those who age but not die are called ‘gods’“(Shi Ming).  Ge Hong, a famous ancient medical scientist, also stressed in his book Bao Pu Zi, “Gods sometimes go to Heaven, sometimes live on the earth, and never die”. Besides eternal life，limitless freedom and limitless happiness are also great characteristics of gods. In fairy tales，gods “are worry-free”，live in the wonderland full of treasures, play romantically, and enjoy an absolute freedom. All the fabulous gods or fairies are characterized by an extraordinary beauty with “tender skin like ice or snow and youthful look like a child”, have “a kind heart like a Buddha”, and have extreme abilities such as “riding the clouds, driving the flying dragon, and roaming the whole world”.

 If we use modern language to describe them, “gods” or supernatural beings are the most ideal super-humans, without aging or death, omniscient and omnipotent, extremely benevolent and beautiful, living an extremely happy life all day long. Becoming “gods” means becoming the most ideal super-humans，which is the greatest aspiration of our nation.

 Just as the Taiwan scholar Gao Dapeng said: “If we must use one word to sum up our responsibility and dream，the best word may be ‘aspiration’! As the old saying goes, ‘Poetry expresses aspiration’. Are the poetic fairy tales not the best expression of Chinese people’s aspiration? The meaning of ‘god’ should be understood and appreciated just from this “aspiration”…It expresses Chinese people’s aspiration or ideal；It shows the most profound and highest aspiration of the Chinese nation. “Since it is the Chinese nation’s most profound and supreme aspiration, our mission is just to realize it. Is it possible for us to turn this most profound and highest aspiration from the ancient myth into a reality of our time?

 Yes!

 So long as we gather all the technological power of the world into the pursuit of eternal life, of omniscience, of supreme benevolence and beauty, and of a paradise, the myth will become true! The present technological progress alone has shaken the “natural law” of life and death of mankind, declaring we can make great breakthroughs in natural limit of life span in the near future! We have already possessed miraculous technologies that are enough to make Qin Shihuang (First Emperor of Qin Dynasty), Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty and countless monarchs and brilliant scholars envy to death if they could come to life again: gene technology, clone technology, stem cell technology, refrigeration technology, nanometer technology, information technology and so on and so forth. These technologies have already offered us concrete approaches to become immortal through science. For instance，by the gene technology, we can do all kinds of gene forecast, gene diagnosis, gene therapy and gene reconstruction；By stem cell technology, we can make organ transplantation become very simple and easy, anyone may change all kinds of bad parts in his(her) body, any organ can be repaired or replaced；The discovery of cell telomere has given the power to control the “life clock”. Using all kinds of high and new technologies，we can take the straight way to become “gods” through birth improvement, health improvement and education improvement technologies, or take the curved way to become “gods” through the “body preserving technology” and the “soul preserving technology”… All these are opening up an extremely bright prospect for living forever and becoming gods.

 The present-day miracles created by science and technology are already incredible to many people, it goes without saying the future prospect of science and technology. Who could imagine the extremely bulky and costly computer a few decades ago should have suddenly become a day-to-day commodity filling every nook and corner of our society? Who could imagine the Internet technology and information technology have changed the whole world so profoundly? Especially the present gene science and life sciences have already undergone quantum jumps，which will surely bring the revolution of mankind’s own fate into an unprecedented era. Just as the futurist Naisbitt said，the Internet only enables us to do our past work more conveniently, but has not produced anything new; on the other hand, the gene engineering may change the human and its evolutionary process…

 What is more important，if we cause scientific research to transform from the past way of working alone to international large-scale cooperation, unite all the natural scientists and social scientists in the world, transcend the national boundary，and invest huge amounts of money to carry out unprecedented grand-scale research globally, then, the breakthroughs we shall make in all kinds of high and new technology may be thousands of or even millions of times more than the present! Do we need to worry we cannot realize the dream “to become immortal” very soon?

 If we say the fabulous dream of “becoming immortal” is a “wishful thinking”, then, by relying on science, the dream has become a “thinkful wishing”! The former was bound to come to nought, but the latter is sure to come true.