by Jim Huckabee

Created on: July 30, 2009

Forever, eternity, an endless chain of time with no beginning nor an ending. Wow! Now there is a concept to wrap your mind around. We can't do just that, wrap our mind around a small inconspicuous word as forever. Humanity thinks in minutes, hours, and years; not millenniums.

Okay I am fifty-five years old. I can rationalize fifty-five since I have lived this long. I can also rationalize ninety years old since I know individuals who are ninety. Thus, I can see the chain from beginning to the end.

The world has changed, unbelievably during my fifty-five years. Since I was born humanity has seen space exploration, heart transplants, fast food, and I have lost count of the number of wars and policing actions around the world. I couldn't begin to list all the changes let alone remember them all. Now lets look back through our history and archeology books. The amebas have become reptiles, we evolved from the great ape (humor me here please), the Roman Empire rose and fell, the new world was discovered, a great tea party was thrown, the revolutionary war, to the first African American President of the United States. My brain is tired just thinking about it in the time it took to write it.

All these events took place in only a few millenniums. Then what will the next five hundred millenniums hold? Remember those five hundred millenniums are only the cocktail before diner. Humans only live for a hundred or so years before the body is too dilapidated to continue. Yes science will give us a new body from time-to-time until the self sustaining gamma powered organic body is perfected.

All this sounds romantic and tempting at the least. But if we lived forever how could we explain to our twenty times great grand children who we are? We would bury spouse after spouse as we never aged and they would grew old in our shadow. We would see science fiction come to life in our everyday existence.

Would we be capable of keeping up with the changing world as technology rapidly sped forward? We were born now, in a world of what will be. Some of us remember laughing at Buck Rodgers and Dick Tracy. Their world came to everyday life. Who knows in a hundred years maybe the jet pack will be replaced with a button implanted in our skin dematerializing us. Even though we as a species can grasp the new and hold it as old tomorrow we would still be a stranger in our own home. Even if we assimilated every thing which would come at us faster than a political candidate talks we would still be the odd man out.

Living forever is that siren sitting on the coral reef. If for no other reason than information overload our mind would soon begin to buck and time would meld into itself. Without our minds who are we? We wouldn't be capable of shinning in the dark reaches of time and space.

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