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Moving, this custom of counting great changes by centuries. Progress, the great leap forward, the before and after. One hundred years or a thousand, round figures for the ovoid-headed inhabitants of an oblate spheroid. What will the world be like in the year 2100, on the threshold of the next century? Will this current one be long or short? Short like the 20th, according to the Hobsbawmians, or long like the 19th, that of the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1760, when we went from handmade objects to manufacturing them with machines? For now, it seems that the 21st century started punctually, on a precise date and time: Tuesday, September 11, 2001, between 8:46 and 9:03 a.m. The birth of the new century occurred in those 17 minutes, between the impact of the first plane on the North Tower and the second plane crashing into the South Tower of that other neighborhood of New York City that was the old World Trade Center. It's not a metaphor: so many companies and businesses, public and private, had their headquarters there, that the WTC had its own zip code. Seventeen minutes: the time it took for the event's narrators—television commentators forced to interrupt their daily purr to comment live on the images recorded by the Empire State's surveillance cameras, to which those of other buildings in Manhattan and Jersey, and helicopter shots, were added—to pronounce the word terrorism. If the 19th century ended and the 20th began with the First World War, we must admit that we have progressed: from 4 years of slaughter and 17 million dead, to 17 minutes and 2,871 identified DNA remains. And then some complain: a shorter and less bloody birth of a century is hard to conceive.
Whether this century, which began with such good omens, will have ended before 2100 is a matter of no importance. No less than how it will end. Because nothing ever truly ends, of course, and our periodizations are fictions that serve the same function as a lullaby: to allow us to sleep each night, peacefully lulled by fantasies of well-being or trapped in a nightmare that will make us feel grateful upon waking, happy to believe ourselves masters of our destiny in a new tomorrow. The ordering of the past is sometimes indistinguishable from the prospecting of the future: barely changing, and not always, the fiction of causes. For example, climate change. Since records of climate variations exist and we know how to interpret them, we know that the Earth has experienced several episodes of glaciations and warmings. Only recently, since the 1960s of the last century, have we introduced one more variable into the narrative of causes: anthropogeny. Our dominant "doxa" wants us to be destined for a world of elevated temperatures — with its cohort of apocalyptic evils: melting glaciers, rising sea levels, catastrophic floods and droughts — for which the only responsible party is the interaction of human beings with the environment. Factors that have influenced other episodes of global warming, such as solar activity, have been erased from the narrative. The fact is that the legions of faithful believers in the thesis of anthropogenic global warming, capable of imagining a 2100 in accordance with this fashionable fiction, are not even remotely aware that they do so with the same forcefulness and the same Jeremian fervor of crusaders or jihadists as their immediate predecessors, who just four decades ago promised us an equally terminal future, for an identical cause — our disastrous and omnipotent action on the environment — but with a diametrically opposite effect: a new glaciation capable of obliterating all forms of life on the planet. If those eloquent soothsayers had been right, at this moment, in the summer of 2016, had I not already died, I would be writing this article in some basement, huddled in half a dozen blankets, with gloves on my hands and, of course, not typing on a computer, but by the uncertain light of a lamp. Even a mind as well-furnished as Bertrand Russell's projected three scenarios, in The Future of Man, two of which are apocalyptic and postulate effects comparable to those of a new glaciation, except for those due to a nuclear nightmare come true: the destruction of all forms of life on the planet, or else, in the optimistic version, a massive involution to primitive forms of life due to a catastrophic decrease in the number of human inhabitants. When Russell published this article in 1951, there were fewer than 3 billion human beings; today, we are more than 7 billion.
The key to this type of fiction is the excessive role that their authors reserve... for themselves. Anthropogeny is the truly fabulous aspect of the global warming thesis. And the shamelessly religious one: since we and only we are responsible for all our misfortunes, we have no choice but to make an act of contrition, expiate our sins, and amend our ways, if we want to reach that state of beatific perfection in which we will live reconciled with nature. Borges writes, in one of his fantastic narrative poems, that "the artifices and candor of man have no end." Candor, above all. And this also moves, truly. Those who are capable of thinking in this way and imagining that or any other apocalypse within reach are, deep down, enviable beings. The fictions they confuse with realities they owe to an unquenchable mixture of ignorance and faith, the fuel of all religions that have been, are, and will be. Another "prophet," and one, moreover, who still has many acolytes, dared to postulate, from his 19th century, a very near future in which religion as the "opium of the people" would disappear by ceasing to be necessary. "The people" would live in the resplendent truth of a classless society. Another fiction, converted over time—thanks, irony of history!—into a new religion. As pregnant with superstitions and myths, as fallacious and as bloody as the others, the true ones. This, too, some insist on calling "progress."
But it turns out that progress does exist, in fact, only it is more complex, less easily controllable, and of course, it happens independently of our value judgments. To put an end to the topic of anthropogenic warming, it is enough to argue from evolutionism, as the paleontologist—with an enviable surname—C. K. Brain does: "It is reasonable to conclude that, had it not been for the environmental temperature changes in the habitats of early hominids, we would still be safe in some warm and cozy forest, as in the Miocene, and would still be in the trees." To be astonished that there is climate change is for naive ignoramuses, in short, and from that astonishment to postulate an apocalyptic future, is to put faith in the wrong place. Perhaps the day will come when humans have wiped out all the fauna and flora on the planet, but they will have found another way to continue evolving.
Of the many projections or predictions circulating in this young 21st century, which still has a way to go before reaching the age of reason, there is one that seems absolutely superlative to me. I mean that any other, including that of catastrophic global warming for life on the planet, pales in comparison. Among other reasons, because it is the only one that admits to being interpreted as a utopia or a dystopia. It is, from this point of view, a perfect fiction.
The fiction says more or less that in the not-too-distant future—let's say, to stick with the current convention, in 2100—thanks to technological applications derived from advances in genetic engineering, neurosciences, cryogenics, and some other science and technique, humans will be able to overcome the only obstacle that has resisted our evolutionary progress. Death will cease to be the inevitable end of life, whose duration can be prolonged indefinitely. After post-colonialism, post-communism, post-democracy; after the post-gender of queer theory with its fantasy denying genetics and postulating the ultra-culturalist fiction that I decide my sex and can even change it like one dyes their hair or buys a new pair of shoes, and already installed in the post-racism of NGOs managing and also benefiting from large migrations, the master piece was missing to complete the puzzle of our artifices and candor: post-death. It is striking, however, that among the most eloquent defenders of this fiction are some evolutionists. It seems they have not noticed the fact that, if their dream were to come true and biological death could be postponed or even canceled, the two fundamental principles of Darwinism—natural selection and adaptation to the environment—would also perish, becoming inoperative. If anyone, weak or strong, adapted or not to their environment, can overcome the obstacle of death and see their life prolonged sine die, why continue reproducing, for that matter? One must admire the elegance of the paradox: that the application to its ultimate consequences of these two principles can lead to the only human condition that would not need the mechanism of reproduction to project itself into the future. It would be equivalent to "killing Darwin." Like at the end of the 19th century some "killed" God.
But let Darwinists not fear. In that fiction, it is most likely that the first aspirants to immortality will be a minority. Technology, at least in 2100, will still be extremely expensive, and only economic elites will be able to afford their cryogenic journey to immortality. In fact, that minority already exists, in Scottsdale, a town on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, where the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, established in 1972, houses the remains of 146 people in liquid nitrogen receptacles —52 bodies and 94 frozen brains, to be more precise—. According to Alcor's current president, Max More, there are currently about 300 bodies or brains in that state worldwide. More is a transhumanist. The parishioners of immortality also have their philosophy, more hopeful, as can be seen by the prefix: no posts, with their unpleasant apocalyptic connotations, but the transit towards a better life, a life without death. Among Alcor's cryopreserved tenants are a baseball champion and one of the numerous aspirants to someday be recognized as the creator of bitcoin, the post-currency. And there, on the outskirts of Phoenix, in Alcor's ultramodern facilities, with the desert landscape of Arizona in the background, lies awaiting his return to a better life the brain of what can already be considered the longest-lived human being: James Bedford, a psychology professor who died of cancer at 73, in 1967.
Let's assume that the life-cryopreserving fiction prospers and that in 2100 there are no longer 300 but a handful of thousands of its fortunate beneficiaries. How will the others, those who cannot afford a brain or a body in brine, take it? Just as it was impossible for so many others, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, to continue postulating the existence of a divine creator of the universe, it will not be easy for them either to hide the death of Darwinism. But one must never stop having faith in progress. And just as the death of God did not prevent the rise of irrationalisms of all kinds and the exacerbation of massacres in the name of revealed truths, I bet our new fiction will bring us legions of avenging warriors of King Darwin.