Delete line of death code
The Fountain of Herodotus' youth, Ovid's Cuman Sibyl, the myth of Gilgamesh - the idea of immortality is rooted in the creative consciousness of mankind from the very beginning. Nowadays, thanks to the advancing technologies, immortal youth may soon leave the land of myth and enter reality.
The successor of this dream and myth is, among other things, Movement 2045, founded in 2011 by a Russian billionaire Dmitry Ichkov. Its goal is to make a person immortal by technical methods - in fact, by transferring consciousness and mind to an environment better than the human body.
There are four main paths along which the movement moves in an attempt to achieve immortality.
The first, which he calls Avatar A, is designed to provide remote control of the human brain by a humanoid robot through the use of brain-computer interface (BKI). It is worth remembering that it has been possible to control robots with the power of thought for many years.
Avatar B, instead of remotely controlling the body, seeks brain implantation in a new body. There is even a company Nectome that offers the collection and storage of brains in order to revive them in the future in new packaging, biological or machine, although this is already the next step, the so-called. unusualness.
Avatar C provides fully automated bodyinto which the brain (or its pre-recorded contents) could be loaded.
The 2045 movement also talks about Avatar D, but that's a vague idea.mind free of matter“Perhaps something like a hologram.
2045 (1), as the time frame for the beginning of the path to "immortality at the singularity", comes from the considerations of the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil (2), which we mentioned more than once in MT. Isn't it just fantasy? Perhaps, but this does not free us from the questions - what do we need and what does this mean for each individual and for the entire species of homo sapiens?
Cuman Sybilla, known e.g. from the works of Ovid, she asked for a long life, but not for youth, which eventually led to her cursing her eternity as she grew old and shriveled. In futuristic visions of singularity, when human-machine is integrated, it may not matter, but biotechnology-based attempts to extend life today revolve around the problem of aging and attempts to reverse this process.
Silicon Valley doesn't want to die
Silicon Valley billionaires, who lavishly fund research on methods and measures to combat aging and dying, seem to treat this purely technical problem as just another challenge that can be engineered and programmed to successfully find solutions.
However, their determination is met with much criticism. Sean Parker, the founder of the controversial Napster and then the first president of Facebook, warned two years ago that if billionaires' dreams of immortality come true, disparities in income and access to life extension methods could lead to deepening inequality and the emergence of an "immortal master class" that enjoys an advantage over the masses. who can't afford to enjoy immortality.
Co-founder of Google Sergey Brin, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Oraz Elon Mask however, they are consistently investing in projects that aim to increase the average human lifespan to 120 and sometimes XNUMX years. For them to accept that they will inevitably die is to accept defeat.
“When I hear all those who say that death is natural and just a part of life, I think nothing could be further from the truth,” the PayPal co-founder and investor said in 2012. Peter Thiel (3) on the Business Insider website.
For him and many like him, silicon rich, "death is a problem that can be solved."
In 2013, Google launched its subsidiary Calico (California Life Company) with a $XNUMX billion donation. Little is known about the activities of the company. We know that it tracks the life of laboratory mice from birth to death, trying to identify "biomarkers" of biochemicals responsible for aging. He is also trying to create drugs, incl. against Alzheimer's disease.
Some of the ideas for extending life, however, sound controversial to say the least. For example, there are already numerous companies that run study of the effects of blood transfusion from young, healthy people (especially those aged 16-25) into the bloodstream of the aging rich. The aforementioned Peter Thiel apparently became interested in these methods, having supported the startup Ambrosia (4). Shortly after the wave of interest in this particular "vampirism", the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a statement that these processes "have no proven clinical benefit" and are "potentially harmful."
However, the nomen omen idea is not dying. In 2014, a Harvard researcher Amy Wagersconcluded that factors associated with young blood, in particular protein Gdf11, give older mice a stronger grip and upgrade their brains. This met with widespread criticism, and the results presented were questioned. The company Alkahest is also known from blood tests, which was looking for protein cocktails in blood plasma for diseases of senile age, such as Alzheimer's disease.
Another area of research is the chronicle, which is associated with (not true) The Legend of the Frozen Walt Disney. In the context of contemporary research on the effects of low temperatures
Thiel's name reappears, and he is willing to fund companies that do this kind of research. And it's not just about research - there are already many companies offering freezing service, for example, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the Cryonics Institute, Suspended Animation or KrioRus. The cost of such a service of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation is almost PLN 300. PLN per head only or more 700 thousand for the whole body.
Kurzweil i Aubrey de Gray (5), a Cambridge bioinformatics scientist and biogerontologist-theorist, founder of the SENS Foundation and co-founder of the Methuselah Foundation, has the same contingency plan if the work on immortality does not move forward as quickly as desired. When they die, they will be frozen in liquid nitrogen with instructions to wake them up only when science has mastered immortality.
Eternal meat or immortality in the car
Scientists involved in life extension believe that aging is not so much the goal of the evolution of species as evolution does not address this problem at all. We're made to live long enough to pass on our genes - and what happens next doesn't really matter. From the standpoint of evolution, from the age of thirty or forty, we exist without a specific purpose.
Many so-called tokens for dogs views aging not as a biological process but a physical one, as a kind of entropy that destroys objects, such as machines. And if we are dealing with a kind of machine, wouldn't it be like a computer? Perhaps it is enough to improve it, increase the possibilities, reliability and warranty period?
The belief that it must be something like a program is hard to shake off from the algorithmically driven minds of Silicon Valley. According to their logic, it is enough to correct or supplement the code behind our lives. Achievements like the Columbia University researchers who announced in March that they had written an entire computer operating system into the DNA network only confirm this belief. If DNA is just a big folder for all the documents that support life, why can't the problem of death be solved with the methods known from computer science?
Immortals generally fall into two camps. First "meat" fractionled by the aforementioned de Gray. She believes that we can remake our biology and stay in our bodies. The second wing is the so-called Robocops, led by Kurzweil, hoping to finally connect to the machines and / or the cloud.
Immortality seems to be the great and relentless dream and aspiration of mankind. But is it really so?
Last year the geneticist Nir Barzilai presented a documentary about longevity, and then asked three hundred people in the hall:
“In nature, longevity and reproduction are alternatives,” he said. - Would you prefer to choose eternal existence, but without reproduction, childbearing, love, etc., or the option, for example, 85 years, but in constant health and the preservation of what immortality requires?
Only 10-15 people raised their hands for the first option. The rest did not want eternity without everything most human.
