"The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic"
-Joseph Stalin

One-hundred-and-sixty-thousand bodies are irrevocably broken every single day, and I am not phased by it, but let die one misfit classmate, who I didn't particularly care for in the first place, and I am suddenly shocked and crippled over the fear of my own mortality and by sentiments of sympathy that I cannot articulate. How can I or we be so unphased by the tragedies of the great many and yet be debilitated with mourning over a single man, simply because we knew his name and can recollect his face and voice? How is that fair? How is that rational? It must be a primal emotional response.

The impact it has had upon me is that of a severe reminder. It's easy to be lulled into thinking of death as patient pursuer, as something lurking in the far distance that, with the right tools and knowledge, might be chased back, temporarily if not indefinitely. Yet happenings like these are frightening because they remind of the frailty of the human body and of how simple, brief or trivial a folly might rend it.

Death needn't wait patiently for me over some distant hill, allotting me the time to gather my weapons against it. It might come for me suddenly and decisively in the night. It might be a lapse in judgment on the interstate, or a careless crossing of the street, or a stray lump of lead shot at me without regard, or a meaningless verbal confrontation, or a prick of the finger, or a wisp of something in the air, an abrupt malfunction in any critical organ. After instances like this, all I see around me are opportunities to die.

That young man and his friend didn't die of old age or because of gradual accumulations of health related defects. They died abruptly and without warning because they stopped to lend aid to a motorist and were struck down by another vehicle. He was alive and well one moment and dead the next. Death didn't wait for him. How do I know how long it will wait for me?

I am so afraid.

I often describe myself as a misanthrope, an individual cell of the societal body, violently independent from the whole. I am hostile to the ideologies of my neighbors. I do not appropriate much of my time to their petty and over dramatized social games. I have no regard for their useless sentiments and ill conceived ideals. Alliances of convenience have me posted in the trenches of their culture wars. My enemy in such is alien to me, and I can in many cases claim to abhor everything that he stands for. With a slip of the tongue, I may call him villainous and evil. He is the great Satan to me and I to him.

This separation is not unique to me. Human civilization has defined itself since its conception by the ways it can find to divide itself. Even putting aside the obvious divisions between large scale factions in religion and philosophy, each individual one of us is an island unto his or her self, separated if not by ideals then by experience, interpretation, imagination, communication; the very air between each of us has us divided. We will never know the same cosmos as our neighbor. That is why we fight each other.

We spend the entirety of our lives listening to no one else's thoughts but our own. That is what it means to be lonely. The naive realists don't see it as such. They live for an instant, spend that instant locked in an empty chamber; they hear a voice and feel they have company, but the voice is their own, a rough translation of sounds reverberating from beyond the walls; they mutter the sounds back to themselves, applying their own internally conceived context to it. They think there's someone there to talk to, but they're only speaking to themselves.

So is it foolish of me to suspect, even hope, that despite all of these dividing elements there is a common thread that runs through us all? Are we not all fragile creatures, born of the same stuff and aware of our tininess, our own helplessness, our own isolation, our own impermanence? Can't a humanist atheist look into the eyes of a devout Christian and with all the sincerity in the world say to her, "I understand."

Can't we derive some comfort from knowing, that no matter our frailty, no matter our isolation, we are all in this miserable mess? Can't we relate on at least that much?

We are all mortal, and it hurts, but at least we're not alone in that. I wonder how many see this as I do.



All we wonder,
No-one ever denies,
If once given life we must die.

So bow down with me,
Where summer fades into fall,
And leave your hatchets of hate.
Bow down with me,
And sing the saddest of all,
The song we all serenade.

Over the last year, I have been following the rapidly growing and astoundingly optimistic transhumanist movement. I’ve been reading Grossman, Kurzweil, de Grey. It’s a broad ideology, and its principles are what I believe attracted me to become a biology student. It pivots on the idea that science and technology can be applied to radically enhance the longevity and quality of human life, such as to the point of reversing the aging process and extending the boundaries of human performance with genetic and nanotech augmentation.

Progress relevant to these goals accelerates at a rate that I don’t think a layman can appreciate. The quantifiable efficiency of genetic decoding has increased exponentially since 1990, and is now doing so at a yearly rate. New models and applications for nanites are in the process of development . Critical knowledge regarding the aspects of cancer, aging, gene therapy, nutrition and various diseases are becoming understood at a level never imagined. Rapamycin was unveiled six months ago as the first drug to significantly increase the lifespan of mice, and it’s already approved by the FDA for suppressing the rejection of transplanted organs. “If” is not a relevant question regarding the coming revolutions in genetics, biotechnology and medicine; the only questions left are “how” and “when.”

There will be designer genetics. There will be profiling for diseases at birth. There will be cures for all of them. There will be a merging of nanotechnology with biology, augmentation to memory and cognition, enhancements to bodily functions. An end to viral infections will happen. The fundamental cause of all cancers will be cured.

Many of our boundaries will be erased, and in my pursuit of biological sciences, I aim to be a part of that. It must have been Nietzsche who put that fire in me. His reoccurring theme of self-creation has impassioned me, and set me on a quest to recreate myself in my own image, to become what I will myself to become. It is why I am so mindful of my diet, of every acid or sugar that I ingest. It is why I exercise daily. It is why I take a handful of supplements and vitamins daily. It’s all so that I may bring my body into alignment with what I want it to be.

The most beautiful notion is that we needn’t be confined behind the bars of circumstance, that we may shrug off millions of years of the past, be unphased by the eons, break the shackles of our biology, and become reflections of our own will, as are omnipotent gods. The notions soothe the fear of existential loneliness, of biological weakness, of mortality, replaces them with vigor, as a crisp air in the lungs. My attraction to transhumanism and the life sciences is a manifestation of my own “will to power,” and I am entranced by the coming of a time when the line between what we are and what we want to become is blurred to the point of transparency, where our biology is no longer dictated by countless generations and an obedience to them, but by conscious decisions. I want very much to live the art of self-creation, even if in a pathetically small way. I am humbled by it, desperate for it, as a mortal groveling before the cosmos, begging for his own godhood. Maybe Mephistopheles will pay me a visit.

Given time, nature always caters to the will of man, for we know her secrets, and they are our currency.