Is it possible to be more shortsighted?
This comes from the Philadelphia Inquirer, remember, so the answer is actually, yes. :-)
The article, by the way, ran in the sports section.
Is it possible that clandestine research and political activity is being conducted by the elite to obtain and secure the genetic means of life extension from use by the general public?
If true, then is this containment reflected in the prohibition and regulation of stem cell research?
As far as I can discern, there seems to be a media blackout on the whole subject of life extension technology. We are at a point in history where immortality may very well be possible for people now in their teens and twenties due to the expotential growth of bio-tech and the incremental extension of their lives that would enable them to sustain life long enough to enter the vertical part of the curve.
Given the breathtaking impact of this potential on society and the planet, something seems a bit fishy about the lack of public dialog in this area.
[Pats head and discovers no metallic chapeau]
The solutions, though, when they come, would be as hard for many of us alive today to understand as the solution to the problem of witchcraft and demonic possession would have been for, say, witch-hunting minister Cotton Mather. Imagine old Cotton, fresh from the Salem trails of the 1790s, asking today's New York lawyer: "How did you finally solve the problem of witchcraft and demonic possession?"Our present-day lawyer scratches his head: "Well, finally we realized there weren't any such things as witches and demons. They were just misperceptions and personal projections—often about real estate, so history tells us—egged on by superstition." Cotton would rack him and the entire postmodern world up as nut cases.
I think, to an extent, the modern-day equivilent of demonic possession is the label of "paranoid" or "conspiracy theorist" or even "technophobe" or "anti-government". Faced with terrifying realities of technical or "systemic" (bureaucratic) advances, the majority of people are not capable of mentally grasping the immensity of the whole and its dynamics, and/or it presents problems and implications that are too terrifying and complex to be assessed.
We slip into a philosophical catatonic mentality, a bizarre negation of conciousness.
Do you see this?