Most of us have been taught to understand the word "historian" to refer to a specialist who writes about the past.

One of the greatest - if not the greatest - historians alive today is a 44-year-old man by the name of Yuval Harari, currently lecturing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Five years ago, Harari changed the meaning of "history" by publishing a book about the future - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

The title of this prophetic book is pregnant with meaning. It combines two beings - earthly and divine - to produce an omnipotent hybrid called "Domo Deus".

In palaeontology, the prefix "homo" refers to creatures that evolved into the human family. In classical Latin, "Deus" meant "god". Thus, Harari's book envisions a future where man can appropriate the powers of "god", and therefore become a human-god or "Homo Deus".

In the first chapter, Harari writes about the "anti-death" scientific research under way at the well-known American company Google.

In 2009, one of the leading anti-death researchers at Google, Bill Maris, fervently believed it would be possible, through genetic engineering, for a human being to live until he is 500 years old.

That idea rests on a fundamental transformation of the meaning of "death" that has taken place in the mind of man - from the understanding of death as a mysterious occurrence preordained by a deity to death understood as, according to Harari, "a technical problem that we can and should solve".

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Fear of global plagues and greed for money are as old as mankind - SowetanLIVE