Living Forever - the Vaccine

Chapter 1
The Vaccine

How do you vaccinate against life. You could use a condom for starters or if you are Catholic and opposed to contraceptives then perhaps you could promote celibacy and advocate playing with little boys instead of producing them. But even if this strategy worked, I mean really worked, and all humans vaccinated themselves against life and died out (which they may anyway shortly) it would still be less than a spit in the bucket. Like fighting malaria with a slingshot.

Life is a whole lot more than human life. Go tell the mosquitoes and  bacteria to stop breeding. No. Even a repeat of the Cambrian Dying-off in which 95% of life on earth got wiped out could not stamp out this disease completely. Those remaining 5% would do again what they did then, namely fill in the vacuum with even more species, and do it faster than before.

Let’s face it. There is no vaccine against life. At least not for the next 4 billion years or so.

OK, no vaccine. How about an antidote, a cure? If you can’t prevent a disease maybe you could cure it after it happened. But how do you go about curing a disease with 100% mortality rate? You can’t just reduce it to 69%. That might work for the AIDS virus which not everybody has, but not for Life, a viral epidemic encompassing every living organism on the face of the planet. Imagine you being one of those unlucky 69%, being told that some of your friends will live forever while you are doomed to die. That could put a serious dent into your golf game.

You can’t reduce the risk factor either. You can’t be 31% dead (though many people feel that way most workdays). No, sir. Physiologically speaking, if you are infected with life your prognosis is a death warrant, no exceptions… unless… Unless… the disease is vanquished, eradicated completely, once and for all, utterly wiped out like TB or Polio, and the threat hanging over us all is gone, vanished, vamoose. You heard me (Praise the Lord). Life eternal, here and now (Hallelujah). I must quickly add that unfortunately life may for the foreseeable future still be sexually transmitted (how distasteful) until a cleaner, more Christian way can be found, but the mortality rate certainly can be brought down to 0%.

A cure. Nobody dies, not in the cosmic sense at least. God is great.

All this is of course no big news if you have been paying attention. This is pretty well what we have been told for much of our existence, in every language, in every creed. Hindus go as far as to believe that even mosquitoes live forever, and one of them, for all we know, may reincarnate as Donald Rumsfeld. It makes little difference if you are a good Christian, a devout Muslim, or pray to your Versace handbag. The itinerary may vary. You may end up not coming back but moving on to sit at the feet of the Lord (what feet!!) or come back as lettuce, or merge with the All. The salient point is that you’ve been saved. YOU DON’T DIE!   

Life = A sexually transmitted disease with 0% mortality rate, i.e. not a disease at all.

Phew! That was painless.



[a few blank pages]



And that pretty well concludes my book. Thank you for buying it.

Good bye.

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©Copyright Peter Elyakim Taussig, 2012