Some Thoughts on Life and Technology

The future holds interesting questions on life, death and religion.

On a recent run, I passed by a cemetery and it got me thinking about death. Not in a morbid or even sad way, but more in a factual, such is life kind of way. It made me wonder about death and the role it might have in the future.

I believe that ‘life’ after death truly does exist, just far different from traditional religions view of life after death. It exists in the sense that once we die, our bodies decompose under ground, or get burned up, and the atoms that make us up: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. go back into the world and are apart of something. The atoms might make up grass, or dirt, or even single cell organisms but there is no doubt they go into something. We might be done with the world but the world is not done with us.

Expanding on this further, I began thinking about teleportation. Yeah, I know kinda jumping around here but stick with me. I have always held the belief that teleportation is theoretically possible. The way I think that it could be possible would be to break down our bodies into atoms at one point and send them at the speed of light to another point where we reassemble them into ourselves again.

Of course I am aware there are a lot of things about this that are not possible right now but for the sake of this thought experiment, let’s just assume we could do this.

Now onto the philosophical part. If we could do teleportation using this method, where does that leave us with the above thought on death? It actually makes death non existent. If we could theoretically break our bodies down into the individual atoms and reassemble them into ourselves then we could in theory skip death altogether. A body that stops breathing and loses a heart beat could be broken down into its atoms and put back together with a beating heart. We essentially would be able to ‘breathe life’ back into the dead.

I know there are a ton of hypotheticals and assumptions being made here but I really do believe that this type of teleportation, or a similar form, will one day exist, and if it does it will bring all sorts of new interesting questions on life and death with it. Though, by the time this would be possible I would assume the traditional religions will have disappeared or at the very least have different views on life and death than they currently do.