With all the problems facing the world today — hunger, war and the environment, to name just a few — why should we waste our time thinking about living forever?
I agree that having a forever kind of future is unimportant if we can’t have the quality of life that we want today. Oddly enough, though, being serious about living forever turns out to have a lot to do with the quality of human life today, for the following reason. If we are really serious about the value of human life, and the right of every person to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” then aging and death will seem like intolerable intrusions on those rights, and we will want to do all that we can to prevent those things. On the other hand, if we believe that aging and death are right and natural, then we will necessarily find that we have diluted and compromised our basic belief in the value of human life, and in our inalienable right to keep it. If we look closely at many of the problems we see in the world today, we find that a lack of respect for human life is the root cause of many of them. Hunger is often caused by devaluing the lives of people in other social and
