Spaced Out

摘要

Two thousand years age a judean carpenter changed the course of history by offering humanity a path to eternal life. About a week ago a French-born sometime journalist and race-car driver who calls himself Rael tried to do the same thing when his followers announced they had solved the mysteries of human cloning. This was the high point of Raeel's second career as a savior, which began when he was taken aboard an alien space- ship and transported to a faraway Elohim, had created all life on Earth. For most of the past three decades Rael has been on a mission to replace outmoded religious bunkum with modern, scientific bunkum. "Science is love!" he grandly proclaimed last week in an interview with NEWSWEEK at his Canadian compound―UFOland―near the Vermont border. Soon, he promises, people will be able to make exact genetic copies of themselves, grow them instantaneously to the prime of life and then download all their accumulated memories and traits into the new bodies―the ideal solution for people who want to live forever but find Christianity so... unscientific.