We are not immortal. “We” absolute.
No universal multiplication of “I”
All of us, here now and to come. Not one by one our extinction, but in the end, all, all. Even–should we evolve to something that survives past the death of the sun, our solar system, past the the universe recalled to its origin or dissipated to the logical version of entropic “forever;” we will have become something else–as radically other as we are from the replicating chains of RNA before they made room for the generations of the double helix, of which we, in our expanded consciousness, are the descendants and heirs.
No longer: “I am going to die,” but we… Ivan’s question demythologized.
This comes to mind when I hear fantasies of lifeboats to other galaxies… the need to populate the stars lest “we” (a version of “we” that has not overcome the most primitive version of imagined survival at the expense of everyone “other”… nevermind all those left behind… that is, there is no “we” there…
If there is to be any survival worth imagining, this would be its antithesis.
To conjure values suited for a new age, the starting point is imagining… as it always has… our mortality… our common mortality, and our solidarity in the face of it–human solidarity against the idea of the sacrifice of the many for the sake of the few.
How little has changed.
from December, 2008, Barking Dog
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 