Seniors Search For Virtual Immortality

Hugh Pickens writes "Most ancestors from the distant past are, at best, names in the family records, leaving behind a few grainy photos, a death certificate or a record from Ellis Island. But J. Peder Zane writes that retirees today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives so that 50, 100, even 500 years hence, people will be able to see how their forebears looked and moved, hear them speak, and learn about their aspirations and achievements. A growing number of gerontologists also recommend that persons in that ultimate stage should engage in the healthy and productive exercise of composing a Life Review. In response, a growing number of businesses and organizations have arisen to help people preserve and shape their legacy — a shift is helping to redefine the concept of history, as people suddenly have the tools and the desire to record the lives of almost everybody. The ancient problem that bedeviled historians — a lack of information about people's everyday lives — has been overcome. New devices and technologies are certain to further this immortality revolution as futurists are already imagining the day when people can have a virtual conversation with holograms of their ancestors that draw on digital legacies to reflect how the dead would have responded."

Comments

Nobody will care

[Kjella]

I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, all of which are less than 1% me. Even if I had the complete records of what their lives and ambitions were in the 1750s or so, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care what my mother's father's mother's mother's father's father's father was doing, I doubt I'd even get around to checking out 128 people before I was bored stiff. At best I'd print out a nice family tree where you could have about three bullet points to describe yourself and that is it. Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.

Unhealthy and egotistical

[bradley13]

A lot of people have some minor interest in their ancestry. However, with few exceptions, our ancestors were people just like any other, with lives interesting only to themselves. Those few exceptions are people who will be in the historical record, and have no need of this kind of service.

And that's the point: my life is interesting to me, but I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.

The other point to take issue with is the idea that this is "healthy". As one gets older, there is a danger of living more and more in the past. The happiest and healthiest elderly people I have known are the ones who avoid this: they live in the present and have plans for the future. Spending your time producing a "life review" would seem to be exactly the opposite of a healthy activity!