by: Garry Reed

Immortality is just around the corner, right up the street, behind the Curb Your Dog sign. Or maybe it's a mere 20 years away. So says American scientist Ray Kurzweil in a Telegraph.co.uk article.

Advances under Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns" in such areas as genetic engineering and computer sciences and nanotechnologies will not only help our biological bits function longer but will make it possible to replace our vital organs. It seems that life-extending goodies like artificial pancreases and neural implants are already available.

"So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs," Kurzweail is quoted as saying.  Unless, of course, the Evangelical Right grabs the reins of government and forcibly puts an end to this blatantly evil science on the basis that immortality will prevent the Apocalypse and the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of God, which means that unrighteous evildoers must be Left Behind for the good of God's Plan (and for the good of people who call themselves True Believers who will certainly not kill themselves off.)

Unless, of course, the Green Left grabs the reins of government and forcibly puts an end to this blatantly evil science on the basis that immortality will create a population explosion and prevent environmental sustainability, which means that evil earth-destroying humans must be killed off for the good of Gaia (and for the good of people who call themselves Green who will certainly not kill themselves off.)

Unless, of course, some other arrogant self-appointed rabble of world-savers grabs the reins of government with the intention of saving the world by destroying it.

Libertarians, being non-authoritarian, being live-and-let-live, being voluntaryists, being believers in free will and individual liberty and personal responsibility and life-oriented and positive and rational (at least those descended from Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism) will mostly embrace and welcome the prospect of living forever.

But libertarians won't be grasping after the reins of government. That would be counterproductive seeing as how all governments are premised on coercion and therefore fundamentally destructive. Government doesn't enhance life, it demeans life.

Libertarians understand that free people freely exchanging ideas in a free market will discover and implement the actions necessary to overcome the problems of the evangelicals and the environmentalists and all the other authoritarian ideologues.

And then, if free people equipped with brainbots and biosynthetic colons and Rearden Steel hamstrings and micro-organo elastopolymer erectile extensions can figure out how to make a non-coercive non-government institution that does nothing but protect individual's rights and property, we can all re-elect Ron Paul for non-president in 2112.

Wanna live forever? Join the optimists. Join the libertarians.