What Is the Gilgamesh Project?

Saints, souls and science have us thinking about longevity. Can we match tortoises and whales?

Not for everyone, naturally, but for some, this will be an extended weekend, due to the Monday “Fenstertag”. In spite of my

best efforts, I have never been able to translate this unique Austrian word properly. Bridge day? Straddle day? Good grief – it all sounds extremely clumsy. After spending what I hope will be a relaxing but simultaneously enriching, crispy fall weekend (not grey, gloomy and damp as is often

the case at this time of year), we will have Monday to perhaps take care of various errands or you may travel to your hometowns. Tuesday and Wednesday will be All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. As was explained to me when I initially came to Austria, the first – aka All Hallows’ Day – is a solemn occasion to commemorate all saints; the latter is a day of remembrance and prayer for deceased loved ones. Obviously, the peculiar association between

these holy days and Halloween cannot be overlooked (as even their names reflect),

but I pretty quickly got the message that the two church holidays were NOT to be combined with scary costumes and begging for candy. Nonetheless, if one may say so,

back in the day, I actually enjoyed the 1st and 2nd of November – the cemeteries were so beautiful, the flickering candles on the graves so lovely spooky, a bit freaky.

Sounds almost shocking, right? The fact is that in those younger years, I was still “carefree“and had not yet experienced the excruciating pain of bereavement. Now I know better. Now I too know loss.

But, on a lighter note and still in keeping with the topic, have you heard the rumors about the Gilgamesh Project as of late? In order to appreciate its name, let me review

who Gilgamesh was in a nutshell. (Scholars of ancient scripts will probably want to

wring my neck here!) Gilgamesh was a mythical king and the protagonist of an epic poem written between 2000 and 1000 BCE.

When his closest friend perishes from a disease, Gilgamesh is so horrified – observing the friend’s decaying body – he sets out on a legendary journey to find the key to

immortality. Well, you can imagine how this turns out – Gilgamesh returns home and must concede that immortality is beyond his reach.

For a long time, Gilgamesh remained more or less obscure to the general population. However, more recently (relatively speaking), he has become an increasingly

prominent figure in modern culture. Which leads us to his namesake: The Gilgamesh Project. World-renowned author Yuval Harari devotes a whole chapter to it in his multi-million-copy bestseller “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” and indeed the entire book is well worth reading. The said

project is basically the quest for immortality or at least greater longevity. (After all, there are tortoises and whales that live to

be 200 years.) Harari claims that in the eyes of the scientific community, “Death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem. People do not die because the

gods decree it, but due to various technical failures – a heart attack, cancer, an infection. And every technical problem has a technical solution! If the heart flutters, it can be stimulated by a pacemaker or replaced by a new heart. If cancer rampages, it can be killed with drugs or radiation. If

bacteria proliferate, they can be subdued with antibiotics.“

What do you say to the Gilgamesh Project, dear readers? If nothing else, it will

probably serve as a topic of conversation for the rest of our days!