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stephen cave, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. it s a great pleasure. you believe that our human awareness of our own mortality is absolutely central to the human story. why? well, all creatures strive to live on, to keep going. they wouldn t be around us any more if they didn t. the mouse that didn t care about surviving wouldn t pass on its genes. so we come from a long line of creatures that are determined to keep going. but we have these big brains, that s part of our survival mechanism, if you like, that allow us to see the future, to generalise. and we re conscious of ourselves as individuals, and that means we re conscious of our own deaths. and of all the billions of creatures on earth, very few creatures have to live with that terrible awareness that, one day, all of their efforts will come to nothing. and so, if we look back through human history, what we see is humanity struggling to make sense of this. some of the earliest archaeological evidenc ....
of our own mortality is absolutely central to the human story. why? well, all creatures strive to live on, to keep going. they wouldn t be around us any more if they didn t. the mouse that didn t care about surviving wouldn t pass on its genes. so we come from a long line of creatures that are determined to keep going. but we have these big brains, that s part of our survival mechanism, if you like, that allow us to see the future, to generalise. and we re conscious of ourselves as individuals, and that means we re conscious of our own deaths. and of all the billions of creatures on earth, very few creatures have to live with that terrible awareness that, one day, all of their efforts will come to nothing. and so, if we look back through human history, what we see is humanity struggling to make sense of this. some of the earliest archaeological evidence we find of human development is grave goods, for example, suggesting people very early believed in an afterlife. the o ....
stephen cave, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. it s a great pleasure. you believe that our human awareness of our own mortality is absolutely central to the human story. why? well, all creatures strive to live on, to keep going. they wouldn t be around us any more if they didn t. the mouse that didn t care about surviving wouldn t pass on its genes. so we come from a long line of creatures that are determined to keep going. but we have these big brains, that s part of our survival mechanism, if you like, that allow us to see the future, to generalise. and we re conscious of ourselves as individuals, and that means we re conscious of our own deaths. and of all the billions of creatures on earth, very few creatures have to live with that terrible awareness that, one day, all of their efforts will come to nothing. and so, if we look back through human history, what we see is humanity struggling to make sense of this. some of the earliest archaeological evidenc ....
With a us based philosopher, john martin fischer, who s extremely enthusiastic about this research and about what it could achieve for humanity. you much more sceptical. basically, his message to you is, you are a curmudgeon that, just like, for example, thomas malthus in the 18th century, who couldn t see the transformative effect that technology would have on food production, you can t see the ways in which the human spirit of sort of innovation and development will allow us to live longer and benefit from that rather than suffer from it. well, john is an excellent philosopher, based in sunny california, and he likes to contrast his sunny, californian optimism with my english melancholy. curmudgeon, he calls you. curmudgeon. exactly. and. but i think we need to be cautious and we need to look at the possible downsides. broadly speaking, i m incredibly excited by new technologies, life extension technologies and lots of others. ....
Just like, for example, thomas malthus in the 18th century, who couldn t see the transformative effect that technology would have on food production, you can t see the ways in which the human spirit of sort of innovation and development will allow us to live longer and benefit from that rather than suffer from it. well, john is an excellent philosopher, based in sunny california, and he likes to contrast his sunny, californian optimism with my english melancholy. curmudgeon, he calls you. curmudgeon. exactly. and. but i think we need to be cautious and we need to look at the possible downsides. broadly speaking, i m incredibly excited by new technologies, life extension technologies and lots of others. but my mission, and that of the new institute we founded, is to make these transformations go well. and we only do that by thinking also about how these technologies, including this one, life extension, can go wrong and what we need to do ....