Coronavirus and the Perception of Death
Tags: Coronavirus, Perception, Future, Covid 19, Self Isolation

Illustration: Noor Us Safa Anik

People all over the world are sitting at home, avoiding the joys of social life, sacrificing the comforts of their routine and income. All this for the sake of saving human lives. I’m glad that almost everyone agrees on this: even though it’s hard, we have to overlook our personal interests in order to save lives. Humanity has come together, uniting forces to face its two ancient enemies — disease and death.

But this is only the beginning. The current situation must lead to new, radical changes in society and in people’s mentality. Changes that can really push the whole of humanity forwards. Let me explain.

1. The reputation of evidence-based medicine and of scientific knowledge will increase. When a vaccine for coronavirus appears and people see that it works, fewer and fewer across the world will be questioning the value of immunisation. There will be fewer people claiming vaccines to be evil, seeing medicine as an imprecise science only to turn to homeopathy or popular remedies.

2. Governments will have to increase health-research spending, and people will have to spend more on the development of drugs for the treatment of cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and other dangerous conditions. But scientists will also, I hope, continue their efforts to find effective treatments for the common cold, given the many ineffective drugs currently sold in pharmacies.

3. More and more people will realise that death is an evil that must be fought by all, even at the cost of impositions and limitations. Just like the current pandemic-induced quarantine, more measures should be taken to save lives “in time of peace”. For example, by introducing more stringent speed limits and heftier fines on the roads (it is proven that this leads to a decrease in deaths related to car accidents), installing crash barriers on all main roads, closing down or modernising all harmful industrial activities (every year more people die because of pollution than because of any pandemic), and so on. We must save human lives even if it means closing some factories down, bringing some harm to the economy and annoying thrill-seekers. Just like what’s happening now.

4. With time, the opinion that humanity must work on minimising the risks to its survival (its existential risks) will become mainstream. This means investing more money in nuclear safety, in the development of advanced, human-friendly AI, in the prevention of new pandemics and in the fight against global warming. In 2015, Bill Gates gave a premonitory TED talk: we are unprepared for the outbreak of new viruses, we have to preventively create a system to combat them! Back then everybody ignored him, but now people are much more responsive to such warnings. Coronavirus has made people get to grips with the thought that there are risks all around and humanity has to jointly come up with a strategy to minimise them and create a safety net.

5. Finally, with time people will become increasingly open to the ideals of transhumanism and will come to agree that man has to at least delay, if not completely eradicate death from old-age. More money will be invested in science, more talent will come to this field, and aging research will finally move forwards from its current dead end.

Alas, every year tens of millions of people die of old age, but it does not make the headlines. Everybody takes this as the natural course of things, against which there’s no point fighting. Yet, once the plague and smallpox were also considered natural, and look what happened to them!

Some say that, of course, we must fight against aging, but later. There are more urgent problems right now, we cannot allow ourselves to close an eye on them and put all our strengths into lengthening our lives. And anyhow have no idea when such research would even bear its fruits. Well no! We can and must do this, just like we’re now dedicating all our strengths in fighting against coronavirus.

Instead of passively watching all that’s bad just happening in front of our eyes (remember the “observer effect”), people have to take their destiny into their own hands. The current pandemic, with all its horrible consequences, has a side-effect: it can nudge us on to accomplishing all this.