Many of the ‘golden ages’ in history were actually gilded ages. And yet, there are people and leaders who are more obsessed with the ‘halcyon’ past than the present. To them, the present is the ‘always postponed future.’

The protagonists of the golden age are akin to a soldier in a cave who is carefully sharpening his bayonet for a battle that will never come or a war that was lost long ago. It is the toxic romance of regression! Way back in 1909, E. M. Forster had visualised in his book The Machine Stops the shape of things to come. The story takes place in the future.

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Humanity had migrated underground as the planet became largely uninhabitable. People were forced to live in isolated cells and their needs were provided by the Machine. To the inhabitants, the machine became god. Eventually, the Machine broke down and the people had no idea how to service and repair it. Future has the habit of coming unannounced. As Einstein said, “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.” Way back in 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler in his award-winning work Future Shock proclaimed that “the future already has begun.”

There were others who said the same thing differently like the future had already happened or emphasised the immediacy of the future. Peter Drucker, the grand old guru of corporate economics, wrote an article titled “the futures that have already happened” in 1997 for the 75th anniversary edition of the Harvard Business Review.

We certainly have begun to see the future in the present. For some, including a Latin American bard, “today is like yesterday in a world without tomorrow”, for others, a multitude of crises facing humanity and our planet has led to ‘doomerism’ of a certain kind. The billionaires and futurists are in a league of their own. They have no time for tomorrow.

They want the future today. They are putting cash on the line to conquer the galactic world while craving for eternity. The climate cataclysm is no longer an obsession of the prophets of doom. Many believe we no longer have a “fight’ or ‘flight’ option. Life without us humans is not a flight of imaginations. For the millennials and Gen-Z, climate change has already become cataclysmic.

According to a survey of people in the age group 16-25, conducted by the University of Bath and Stanford Medicine Center, 83 per cent respondents said that people have failed to care for the planet, 75 per cent called the future frightening and 39 per cent said they’re hesitant to have children. They also had widespread mistrust of governments.

We now have digital humans living in digital space. Soon digital humans will look, act and think like real humans. Are we now going to become post-human and transhuman? In the ancient world, a cross between a human and a plant, the centaur between a man and a horse and a Pegasus between a horse and a bird were considered monsters. In today’s techno-world, rather than a subject of fear and revulsion, post-human and trans-human are seen as fascinating and admirable.

The new ghosts no more provoke dark fantasies. They are prepared to become post-human zombies. Mark O Connell, author of the prize-winning book To Be a Machine, advises us “to merge with machines” , remaking ourselves in the “image of our own higher ideals.” Physicist Dennis Gabor invented holography in 1971.

Holograms enable the visual display of an object in three dimensions. Jean Paul Sartre perhaps saw it coming when he said that “human existence precedes essence.” The billionaires and believers in the mythical fountain of youth would like to leave the digital essence of their earthly existence behind. Their relatives will be too happy to buy such a holographic essence.

The holographic flesh will be created by a collection of algorithms from their GPS haunts and browsing searches. There are billionaires who want their bodies stored in liquid nitrogen and cryogenically preserved till such time medical science is able to resurrect them. Around 500 cryopreserved corpses are stored in vats around the world at minus 196C.

Einstein said after the death of his friend Bosso that “People like us … know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Have we humans reached what Jean-Pierre Jacquot of the University of Lorraine calls “the status of semi-god ~ or third of a god?” Or has immortality become a business that caters to the demands of clients? Silicon Valley has created a “techno-religion” where death is only a technological problem. Death is the inevitable price we must pay for being alive.

But as Yuval Noah Harari argues, the new techno-religions will also create new techno-moralities. Ironically, we are self-destructive towards our Planet Earth but we are interested in transforming human biology to make us post-human. We have made our planet a hell. We remain ever isolated from our neighbours. But we are exploring other planets in our galactic neighbourhood. We are heading towards extinction. An estimated 99.9 per cent of all species that ever existed on earth are already extinct. There are dangers lurking around. Given the rapid advances, biotechnology in future may design new viruses, more dangerous. Many believe that Covid-9 was the outcome of a failed experiment in a Chinese lab. Molecular nanotechnology can create weapons systems even more destructive than the nuclear bombs.

The parabiosis treatment could be possible in future. It is a technique of surgically joining two living organisms that will share the physiological system. Why do we want to live forever? Great writers, scientists, painters, musicians and leaders are immortal. The tech billionaires find death as repugnant. They are hoping to reach what is known as technological singularity when there will be a merger of people and machines.

They are hoping for a new Insurrection when it will be possible to download our minds and attain virtual immortality. A day may come when we may acquire virtual immortality. Our brains can be scanned and transferred to a non-biological medium in future to create our digital double. But today will always last. As Gandhiji said, “the future depends on what we do in the present.”

(The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi)