The background noise of our personal and inevitable doom. It’s like the undercurrent of our lives, always pulling at our subconscious, reminding us that we can’t escape it. We cannot live forever. Unless, of course, you hope Ray Kurzweil is right and that sometime in the next 40 to 50 years, surviving humans will inevitably survive, aided by a variety of task-designed pills, genetically reshaping us to thwart aging and defending ourselves. disease and disorder in our bodies.

It’s called “The Singularity.” A proposed time, in the not too distant future, in which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. The Singularity builds on and combines an exponentially increasing growth of technology and medicine, expanding the scope of Moore’s Law, which refers to the exponential increase in computer technology.

By then, or perhaps because of it, nanotechnology will have developed to the point where armies of microscopic robots will be cleaning our arteries and patrolling our inner workings for viral and bacterial miscreants. Our personal soldiers will take no prisoners and spare no mercy. I welcome you My own reserve arsenal to support my natural immune system? Go ahead!

Our immune system, amazing as it is and naturally evolved, identifies and reacts to a threat, then remembers that threat for future reference. But the process is a crash course. The immune system doesn’t have any real “prompts” except for vaccines, a wonderful scientific breakthrough that has proven to be immensely beneficial to humanity but sadly is now often avoided because ignorant parents listen to the likes of Jenny McCarthy.

Ignorance can endanger us all, but imagine what could be possible with such scientific advances. Our immune systems could have a backup militia to help fight disease. We could be healthier. But that’s not all, we would have new drugs at our disposal to literally stop aging or reverse it. Scientists at Harvard Medical School have already successfully reversed aging in laboratory mice. Our physical health could be managed, and in that future world, many of us could inevitably die. Of course, getting hit by a car is another story.

But for now here we are, each one of us, to quote Rush’s Neil Peart, “a cell of consciousness,” living our lives with the awareness that one day, in our future, we will stop living. That’s a hard thing to consider, and many of us do a great job of not considering it at all. But I think we rob ourselves by not reflecting on our own death.

Singularity aside, we’re all looking down the barrel of the same gun. And, not that it has the same potential as The Singularity, let’s put aside any notion of an afterlife as well. This world is the only one we will know, and our individual life is the only one we will experience. Don’t you know that life isn’t forever makes it that much more valuable? Everything we see and hear, all the people we love, are increasingly valuable because our experience with them is limited. For now…