Can Death Be Conquered?

What Gilgamesh sought

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu’s death drives the king to seek immortality. Even the plant of renewed youth slips away to a serpent.

One of the oldest literary works leaves less a victory over death than a question about how a mortal who knows death should live.

• The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI

  A translation containing the search for immortality and the lost plant.

What aging research studies

Biology studies aging through interacting processes such as genomic instability, cellular senescence, and mitochondrial change. Some interventions alter lifespan or healthspan in model organisms.

Longer lives in models do not establish human conquest of aging. Which changes drive aging and which follow it remain under investigation.

• Keshavarz et al., Targeting the hallmarks of aging

  An open scholarly review of evidence and limits in hallmark-based aging research.

A longer self and a copied self

Mind uploading assumes that sufficiently reproducing brain structure and function could continue a mind elsewhere. Even a perfect copy would leave open whether it continues me or begins another subject.

Conquering death mixes distinct goals: delaying disease, extending healthy life, preserving personal information, and sustaining first-person continuity.