Most of us have been taught to understand the word \"historian\" to refer to a specialist who writes about the past.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Five years ago, Harari changed the meaning of \"history\" by publishing a book about the future - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.<\/p>\n
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\".<\/p>\n
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\".<\/p>\n
In the first chapter, Harari writes about the \"anti-death\" scientific research under way at the well-known American company Google.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\".<\/p>\n
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\nFear of global plagues and greed for money are as old as mankind - SowetanLIVE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"