Ethical immortality: corpus-based analysis of questions on radical life extension practices

Background: There is a number of signs that lead to the idea that in the XXI Century humans will more than strive to become immortal. By many modern scientists, death is seen as a “technical problem” we should and could solve. In this field, life extensionists have become a fervent and increasingly vocal group, who consider death as undesirable (Keep 2017, Moshakis 2019). The recent introduction of radical life extension (RLE) measures poses, however, a series of ethical issues. Some might argue that life and death are fundamental human rights, and as such not only is radical health extension good for preserving life, it can also be seen as the foundation upon which any other human right is based (Green 2017). Aim: The purpose of this research is to shed some light on the ethical issues posed by the promotion of radical life extension (RLE) on providers’ websites compared with the direct information that come to us via the scientific publications on the matter. Methods: Two corpora were collected, one containing selected pages from such websites and the other containing all the article available on the scientific advancement of RLE (n=45) and were analysed through the means of Corpus Linguistics (McEnery and Wilson 2019), Results: This research was carried out in order to find out whether the promoted services are in line with what is being suggested by scientific research. References Green BP. 2017. “Radical Life Extension: an Ethical Analysis”. https://www.scu.edu/ethics/all-about-ethics/radical-life-extension/ (Last accessed on 28 July 2022). Keep E. 2017. “Can human mortality really be hacked?”. Smithsonian Magazine. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/human-mortality-hacked-life-extension-180963241/). McEnery T, Wilson A. 2019. Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, UK. Moshakis A. 2019. “How to live forever: meet the extreme life-extensionists”. The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/jun/23/how-to-live-forever-meet-the-extreme-life-extensionists-immortal-science).