What is Virtual Immortality?
The word virtual in virtual immortality refers to a sort of non realness, although it is not exactly the opposite of realness. Some software, for instance, is called virtual machine software. This software is not a real, physical machine like the hardware of the computer, but it can be understood as if it were the physical hardware of a computer. In reality only the idea of a machine with components working together to form a result exist; the actual software consist of a nothing but magnetic fields and electric currents, forming a row of zeroes and ones that tell the real computer what to do. In other words, by virtual things we mean things that consist of mere ideas, concepts without corresponding physical entities. What then, can virtual immortality mean?
Real, physical immortality is of course impossible. There is a continuum though, a gradient if you like, between complete mortality and complete immortality. For a fruit fly with a life that lasts a single day, a human with an average life expectancy of well over seventy years can seem pretty immortal. To us, some trees that are known to be at least twice as old as Christianity can seem pretty immortal. But the most immortal beings of our world are probably the ones that ‘reproduce’ by growth instead of replication. The plants and fungi that use this method of ‘reproduction’, keep making new roots to feed new branches, which in their turn make new roots. When one part of the plant dies of age, other parts are still young and happily alive. The oldest example that has been found has just celebrated its 43.000th birthday.
But is this really the same individual as it was four hundred and thirty centuries ago? Its shape, size and position have changed over the eons. All the cells of which the plant was made in that prehistoric time have died long ago. The only thing that has remained the same of the plant that begun its life in the last ice-age is its concept. Its general idea. Its genes.
Genes are virtually immortal. The oldest genes in your body are the ones that you share with all the other living things on this planet, and they are well over half a billion years old. At least, their structure, their form, their concept is.
Virtual immortality can best be summarized as : The ability to exist forever in conceptual form
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