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Gilgamesh in the 21st Century: A Personal Quest to Understand Mortality
Gilgamesh in the 21st Century A Personal Quest to Understand Mortality Author:Paul Bracken In Gilgamesh in the 21st Century, the author embarks on a personal voyage of discovery to find the answers to his childhood questions about what it means to be mortal, and what our fate may be. He reimagines the quest of Gilgamesh, a powerful and renowned hero from the earliest days of civilization. The ancient king became so distraught at the d... more »eath of his friend Enkidu, and so sickened by the knowledge that he too would die, that he rebelled against his fate and set out on a search for salvation.
"Must I die?" asked Gilgamesh.
Forty five centuries later, we're still asking the same question.
What might this ancient soul discover he were to begin his quest anew, armed with the tools of science and centuries of acquired knowledge?
At the age of eleven, Bracken wondered if there might be a way to bring his grandfather back from the dead and has been pondering this question ever since.
Filled with interesting science, and thoroughly researched, this comprehensive analysis delivers the straight talk on the human condition - without the malarkey.
"In his Gilgamesh in the 21st Century Paul Bracken mixes ancient myth, modern science, and science fiction futurism on an intellectual quest to explore the meaning of human existence by confronting and challenging the inevitability of mortality. This is both a highly personal inquiry into the uniquely human knowledge of personal finitude and its implications for human psychology and culture, and a scientifically motivated investigation into the dreams and schemes to extend life. He even unsentimentally speculates about a future without human death and how these immortals might look back on our Age of Death. In his search for physical immortality we are given glimpses of innumerable ways that people confront this destiny and how some are attempting to understand the science of its relentless clockwork in hopes of outwitting it. In the end mortality stands unmoved, but we have a renewed appreciation of how this distinctly human knowledge and our ubiquitous antipathy to its inevitability have defined our humanity."
-- Professor TERRENCE W. DEACON, Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.« less