Immortality
I am a huge fan of Feynman and agree with so many of his views, and am blown away by how articulate he is and how a scientist can think like an engineer (i.e., be practical)! But these lines from one of his lectures in 1964 surprised me: “It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable.” I was surprised by Feynman’s ignorance on this topic, so to speak. Let me elaborate. Life rarely deals with individual anything (it is either about a combination of cells to form an organ, or a combination of organs to form an individual, or a combination of individuals to form a group/species). Further, pretty...