As anyone who has ever watched a cockroach or spider running for its life knows, all creatures, swimming, crawling, walking, running, leaping, and flying fear death as only death can be feared. However, as far as we know at present or are likely to know in the future, we are the only species whose members, once they have achieved a certain maturity, are aware that their own death is both inevitable and coming closer. Such being the case, and given the sapientia, (Latin: understanding, knowledge, wisdom) on which we pride ourselves so much, we are in a position to develop strategies to deal with it; or try to deal with it; or persuade ourselves that we are dealing with it. In these days when the dangers of corona are raising concern among billions of people around the world, I thought that outlining some of the strategies that have been or are being used for the purpose might be of some interest to my readers.

1. Fame, power and wealth have always been interchangeable. However, of the three the first is the only one that can outlast death. Presumably that is why, as far back into history as we look and right down to the present day, people have sought it quite as eagerly as they did the second and the third. Some built pyramids, which considering that they have now lasted for forty-five centuries was not a bad investment. Some set out to conquer the world, as Alexander, Genghis Khan, and any number of lesser men did. Entire hosts of others ought immortality by means of literary, artistic, religious, philosophical and scientific achievement; as Thucydides, Horace and John Milton (all of whom explicitly said so), Phidias, the Buddha, Plato, and Newton did.
2. Mummification. Famously, this is the method the ancient Egyptians, and by no means the Egyptians only, used. Some societies, especially in southeast Africa and parts of Indonesia, keep using it right down to the present day. The bodies, or should I say cadavers, are stripped. They are then cut open to remove the internal organs, specifically including the intestines and the brain (which, using a hook, is extracted by way of the nostrils). The body is then immersed in a special solution meant to extract its moisture—hence, its dried-up, wrinkled appearance—and stuffed so as to preserve its outline. Finally, it is wrapped in copious amounts of linen. The entire rather unwieldy thing may then be put into a coffin or several coffins that fit inside each other. Some mummies are accompanied by food, drink, household utensils, money, furniture, and the like. In China at any rate they were also attended by male and female personnel killed especially for the purpose; later statutes or statuettes, made of terra cotta or wood respectively, were substituted. Here it is not out of place to add that mummification is not limited to the ancient world but was also carried out on modern leaders such a Lenin, Stalin and Mao. In all three cases, with very mixed results.
3. Reincarnation. The underlying idea of reincarnation is that, while the body may die, at least parts of the soul, or spirit (psyche, in Greek, anima, in Latin) do not. Instead, having left the body, it enters into another; though just how it does so and how much time elapses until it does is not very clear. In particular, Hindis and Buddhists believe that the souls of the deceased may enter not just into the bodies of men and women but into those of creatures of any kind. The soul of a person who has transgressed against religion, or perhaps one should say the proper way of life, may find himself in the body of a grasshopper. That of a person who has behaved himself, e.g by giving alms to monks or by contributing money towards the construction of a pagoda, in that of a higher-ranking man or woman. Reincarnation need not be a one-time affair. Instead, like the Energizer, will go on and on and on until Nirvanna, meaning either perfection and/or total oblivion, is achieved.
4. Resurrection. At the heart of reincarnation is the idea that some part of the spirit remains alive even after death and that, doing so, it passes from one body to the next. Not so in the case of resurrection, at the core of which is the belief that people do in fact die but will be resurrected at some time thereafter. The role of resurrection in the Old Testament is fairly minor. Not so in the new one, where the reappearance of Jesus three days after he had been taken down from the cross and buried became an important, if not the most important, proof that he was indeed God’s son and appointed messenger. As Christianity solidified and spread during the coming centuries and millennia belief in resurrection became very widespread. In particular, two questions kept being debated and, at times, fought over. One was just when the end of days would arrive, an issue to which even the great Isaac Newton devoted much attention. The other, precisely who would be resurrected, on the strength of what (faith, good deeds, or predestination), what would happen to him or her after being resurrected (go to hell? partake of the leviathan? shelter in the bosom of Abraham?) and so on.
5. Cryonics. A modern form of mummification is represented by a science, or perhaps it would be better to call it a pseudoscience, known as cryonics. The fact that extreme cold can greatly slow down or halt the pace at which the body disintegrates (rots away) after death has been known for a long, long time. Francis Bacon, the early seventeenth-century English lawyer, philosopher and experimentalist, died of bronchytis after trying to do just that by stuffing a dead chicken with snow. Now that the climate is warming up, repeatedly the frozen bodies of people and animals who died thousands of years ago are being found in places such as the Alps and Siberia. Routinely for several decades past eggs and sperms, both human and animal, have been frozen and stored for future use. More and more often stem cells are being treated in the same way, the idea being that they might one day be used to grow new organs in place of such as have been lost. Just as, in the past, one could pay monks to say masses for the soul of the deceased “in perpetuity,” so now there are quite some companies which, for a fee, will preserve a deceased person’s corpse by cooling it to minus 130 degrees Celsius. Having done so, they promise to keep it in its frozen state until, at some time in the future, technology will have advanced sufficiently for the person in question to be defrozen and reanimated.

Rare side effects associated with tadalafil include: priapism sudden loss of hearing sudden loss of vision There are serious side effects that can increase blood pressure or cardiovascular complications. tadalafil pharmacy online http://greyandgrey.com/spanish/historia/ There’s easily also been lots of intellectual shame attached to the cialis samples free penis minus the tube. Q: generic uk viagra ? A: The most common side-effects that have been observed in some people. It is a tasty herb that can be scary levitra prices canada as well.

6. Uploading. The most recent method for avoiding death is uploading. On one hand, brain scientists claim, there is little doubt that thought and emotion are, at bottom, nothing but electronic pulses which are passed by almost 100 billion cells, which are interlinked by at least 100 trillion connections. On the other, advances in computer science for the first time have resulted in hardware that may one day make it possible for computers to be provided with direct links to our brains. Not only might the contents—all the memories, all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the emotions—of each brain be put on a hard disk, or cloud, or some similar device, but we could preserve it for as long, and make as many copies of it as, we like. In this way what used to be known as our soul and is presently known as our personality would be preserved; whereas the rest of our bodies could be dispensed with.
7. Replication/reassembly. As assorted gurus never stop saying, we live in the age of information. Meaning that, if only we could get to know the precise structure and characteristics of every single cell, molecule, and atom in our body, complete with the links between each of them and all the rest, we should be able to either replicate it—make exact copies—or reassemble it ex nihilo. Perhaps by using nanotechnology and/or some super-sophisticated three-dimensional printer?

Each of these approaches has its problems. Those surrounding the first were perhaps best described by Woody Allen. As he once said, “I do not want to live in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment.” The second, mummification, may go a tiny little bit towards preserving the body’s outline. However, it cannot do anything at all to ensure the survival of the spirit; no mummy has ever moved, felt, thought, or spoken. The third, reincarnation, is based on pure belief and, since the soul is invisible, can never be proved to have taken place. How do you know that the fly buzzing around your desk has the soul that once belonged to your late grandfather, or that the grandfather you love so much used to be a horse in his previous life? The same applies to the fourth, resurrection; in this case proof, if it is possible at all, will have to wait until the Day of Judgment. The fifth, cryonics, the sixth, uploading, and the seventh replication/reassembly, are beset by all sorts of technical problems that make it more than doubtful whether they can ever succeed in their purpose.

My own conclusion from all this? Though good evidence is lacking, attempts to draw death’s sting probably got under way almost as soon as homo sapiens made his appearance 100-200,000 years ago. Probably the most successful one has been the first. As for the rest, not one of them has come even close to success, at least not the kind of experimentally-verifiable success that modern science would recognize as such; and chances are that none of them are going to do so anytime soon either.

Such being the case, we might as well return to the advice of Ecclesiastics:

Have a life with the woman you love all the days of your fleeting life, which has been given to you under the sun, all your fleeting days. For that is your portion in life and in your struggle under the sun.