The Future Technologies To Become Immortal
Undoubtedly the fear of death, encoded in our DNA to improve our chances of survival,
is one of the least pleasant characteristics we are forced to live with.
The idea that our life must have an end and then there is nothingness is not at all attractive,
so it is not surprising that in the course of his history man has imagined countless
ways to circumvent death.
Immortality (or eternal life) is the concept of surviving forever or for an indefinite
period of time, without facing death or overcoming death itself.
Immortality can be intended in two main meanings, physical and spiritual.
Physical immortality is generally conceived as the endless existence of the mind from
a physical source, such as a brain or a computer.
Spiritual immortality is generally conceived as the endless existence of an individual
after physical death.
Immortality has been a source of inspiration in various science fiction movies and series.
For example, the protagonist of one of the longest-running science fiction television
sagas, Doctor Who, is an alien from the planet Gallifrey who has the ability to regenerate.
If he is fatally injured or ill he initiates a cell regeneration process which essentially
causes him to take on a new body.
The gimmick was introduced in 1966 when the first Doctor's interpreter, William Hartnell,
was no longer in a health condition to continue playing his role and had to be replaced by
another interpreter (Patrick Troughton).
However, the regeneration mechanism has become an important element of the mythology of the
series and to date we have reached the twelfth doctor.
Of course the Doctor is not immortal: besides the fact that the number of regenerations
he has available is limited, he can still be killed.
Another very interesting example of an immortal creature in the true sense of the word in
science fiction is found in the Star Trek saga.
In the first episode of The Next Generation, the race of Qs is introduced, beings who,
in addition to being immortal, are omnipotent.
As in the best Star Trek tradition, the feature of immortality is later explored in its philosophical
and moral implications in the Star Trek - Voyager episode "Right to Death".
In fact, in the episode, the crew of the Voyager accidentally frees an exiled Q who has decided
to renounce his immortality and end his life, going against the rules imposed by his society.
But would it be possible to become immortal?
In this video we will take stock of the situation on research in this area, and we will see
the technologies being studied.
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We begin our roundup of hypothetical technologies to become immortal with hibernation, present
in many science fiction films, such as James Cameron's 2009 Avatar: the protagonist and
the other human soldiers are hibernated for six years on the journey to the moon Pandora.
Cryonics is a technology that aims to extend life expectancy.
In practice, it consists in lowering the body temperature of people declared legally dead,
until the liquid nitrogen temperature is reached.
The technique must be started within half an hour of death.
At that point the decomposition stops and the hope is that, in the future, it will be
possible to bring these people back to life and eventually cure them with advanced scientific
procedures.
A person kept in such conditions is considered a "cryopreserved patient" and not really "dead".
The procedure begins in the recovery room of the hospital where the patient is dying.
After cardiac arrest occurs and legal death is declared, technicians intervene who mechanically
restore ventilation to the lungs and blood supply to the brain.
At this point the body is immersed in cold water to be transported.
When the body arrives in one of the cryogenesis centers, the «cryoprotective» solution is
injected intravenously to prevent it from freezing all the tissues.
The body is then immersed in liquid nitrogen and brought to a temperature of -125 degrees
centigrade and, after three hours, to the final temperature of -196 degrees.
The staff of the center is in charge of changing the liquid nitrogen frequently indefinitely.
It is also possible to resort to the procedure of conservation of the only head called neuro
conservation (neuropreservation) which consists in conserving only the brain, in the belief
that in the future it will be possible not only to reanimate the cryopreserved bodies,
but also to grow new bodies in which to store the brains.
hibernate.
The brain is kept in its natural place, the skull: the head is cut from the rest of the
body at the height of the seventh cervical vertebra.
Again, after a gradual lowering of the temperature, the head is placed in a small dewar container
and immersed at -196 ° for long-term storage.
The possibility of cryopreservation is based on three main hypotheses, which, however,
have never been confirmed by science at the moment:
- an individual's memory and personality remain intact within the structure of the brain even
when his activity is interrupted (after clinical death)
- cryopreservation procedures do not in any way affect the structures of the brain responsible
for memory and personality -It will be possible in the future to restore
the cerebral capacities of cryopreserved brains The technique is expensive and controversial.
To date, no one is able to predict whether it will be possible to bring hibernating bodies
back to life because the technology that allows to do so does not yet exist.
There is currently no guarantee that a cryopreserved patient can be awakened because there is still
no technique capable of doing this.
And even if we succeed in reviving him, we do not know under what conditions we could
"awaken" this person.
If you decide you want to be hibernated, you have to be quite rich.
In the United States, the figures are between 160 and 200 thousand dollars to keep a body
and 80 thousand dollars if only the head freezes.
Cheaper is Russia, where the preservation of the body costs 26 thousand dollars, while
if you opt for the head alone, the figure is around 18 thousand dollars.
Would you like to be hibernated?
Write it in the comments!
What if hibernation is not successful, thus causing damage to some parts of the body?
No problem, you could clone parts of the body and replace the "old" ones; many scientists
around the world are working on creating human organs using 3D printers loaded with living
cells, which could one day make organ donors superfluous.
Or, life could be extended by using biotechnology and medicine to continue renewing and rejuvenating
the body.
Nobody wants to live forever at 95, but if you could rejuvenate your body at 29 or 30,
many might want to.
This could be done in several ways, including genetic engineering that prevents (or reverses)
cellular aging.
But why do we get older?
There is no single explanation, but the theories of aging can be traced back to two different
strands of thought, namely that according to which aging is a genetically programmed
event, which manifests itself through changes in the functioning of the nervous, immune
and endocrine systems, and that of the progressive accumulation of damage caused by the influence
of the environment.
Currently it seems that aging depends on a series of genetic and environmental causes,
to which the various species of different longevity would respond with more or less
effective defense methods.
From an evolutionary point of view, the existence of aging could be justified by the need for
the resources consumed by an individual who has already carried out its reproductive and
care function for the offspring, whose organism may have been damaged during life, be used
by individuals of subsequent generations.
Due to aging, the cells of the human body lose their ability to renew themselves.
However, stem cells are constantly reproducing, and contain an exact, new and healthy copy
of our DNA.
Between the two daughters of the mother cell, only one inherits the problems.
If one understood how to obtain the results of perfect immortality of the other daughter,
she would never grow old.
Always studying for immortality, or in any case to age well, there is also the manipulation
of materials at the nanoscale, that is, on dimensional scales of less than 100 nanometers
(equal to about one billionth of a meter).
Some nanorobots could travel through blood and perhaps repair aging damage to cells.
Nanotechnology could also cure certain diseases, such as certain types of cancer, by removing
cancerous cells from the body.
Would you try these treatments?
Write it in the comments!
The most interesting idea, however, comes from Russia and is called "Russia-2045".
Its purpose is to "save" the mind of a human being in its entirety and then "load" it onto
a hard drive, forever saving the essence, or almost, of a human.
Everything will happen no earlier than 17 years.
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This idea was born from the Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov, who a few years ago founded
Project 2045, an organization that networked a community of experts (mainly Russians and
Americans) in the field of neuroscience and the extension of life.
The Director of Development is the Belgian scientist Philippe van Nedervelde.
His goal is not to heal the body so that it can live long but to transfer human consciousness
into a cyborg, a kind of very advanced robot, by 2045.
The technical term is "combination of brain emulation and robotics".
By transferring the mind, the memories, the consciousness into a machine that does not
deteriorate and that can be fixed and replaced, one would become not virtually but tangibly
immortal.
It seems that Dmitry Itskov has stated that the technology necessary for the transfer
of consciousness in a machine is already 65% ready today.
Moreover, experiments have already been carried out on mice whose hippocampus has been removed
(which plays an important role in the formation of memory and in the transformation of the
same from short to long term) by replacing it with a microchip, without the animals having
lost memories.
By transferring consciousness to a computer, we would become a real artificial intelligence
that should first manifest itself in a hologram capable of feeling and feeling.
The "human computer" could then remotely control a cyborg who would go around the world communicating
"at the base" what the five senses feel and creating memories.
A true humanoid artificial body that would replace our body of flesh, blood and bone.
In this way, our individual human conscience, at the command of one or more peripherals
that do not perish and can be replaced, would live forever.
The whole process envisaged by Project 2045 - born in 2011 and made public two years later
- includes a series of stages with a five-year or ten-year deadline.
2020 is the year when the first cyborgs remotely controlled by the human mind should have been
ready.
It is not known at the moment the progress of the work but it is likely that it is behind
the expected table given that the XPrize Foundation, linked to the Russian billionaire, has recently
given away 10 million dollars in a scientific competition for the one who - by 2021 - will
be able to build a robot that looks like a person in all respects and that can be controlled
and managed at a distance of at least 100 km.
The 2025 goal will be the isolation of the brain from the rest of the human body which
should be extracted at the end of a natural life to be transferred to a machine.
Within the next ten years a so-called "Avatar" will be created, that is, a perfect replica
of a physical body equipped with artificial intelligence into which a personality is transferred.
By 2045, the theoretical final date of the process, the total elimination of all "physical
support" will take place and the individual will survive only on a digital level.
One can legitimately ask whether becoming immortal will be within everyone's reach or
whether it will be an evolution reserved only for the very rich who can afford it.
The Project 2045 organization directly answers the question on the official website: «To
date, carrying out an artisanal creation, a humanoid robot of average quality similar
to man costs about 300,000 dollars.
However, when we get to the day when we can afford to mass-produce this technology on
an industrial scale, we expect the costs to be similar to those of the automobile ”.
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