Life Extension and Immortality

A Russian billionaire has decided he doesn’t want to die. I guess you can’t blame him I don’t think anybody does, but Dmitry Itskov is putting his money where his mouth is. He is the founder of what is known as the 2045 Initiative. I think the name says it all, the 2045 stands for the year Mr. Itskov wants his goal accomplished. Planning to be alive twenty-eight years into the future is ambitious and I hope he makes it, but there is certainly the possibility he may not. If he does, and he probably will, because the odds are in his favor since he is only 35 years old, he plans to do some sort of transference by mapping his brain and transferring his consciousness into a computer which will keep them alive a lot longer. He also is keeping his options open, because he might take the option to have his consciousness transplanted into some sort of humanoid robot body. This raises an important question, if I map your brain and put that map into a computer will that really be you in the computer or just a computer that thinks the way you do? It seems to me this is like asking the question, if I have a clone is that clone me?

Sometimes we find unlikely proponents of immortality which are working on the project. One of these is Google. Google believes they can begin to create immortality before 2045. What do they plan to do? They claim they will begin to accomplish this in 2029. They believe they will be able to create nanobots by then which can be used to fight disease in our bodies. Google’s director of engineering thinks we are only about a decade away from taking major steps to immortality. I realize Google is into a lot of things, but somehow, I never expected them to get into the immortality game. They believe by 2045 humans will be living forever. If humans do live forever it will change the social order and cause all sorts of problems for governments. Can there be Social Security given to somebody who never dies, will we have to work forever and not be able to retire, because what company could survive paying you a pension if you have eternal life?
Another idea has been put forward which is to connect our brains to a cloud network on the Internet. I don’t think I’d want my consciousness in the cloud and I am sure this would have other meanings. It would mean we are all connected in some way and probably couldn’t have a private thought among us. Some ideas are just too strange to be practical. If a map of our brain was connected to the cloud, I really don’t believe that would be us, just some perverted version of what we really are. It reminds me of a story I once saw on television where a scientist had his brain copied to a computer before he died. He lost all his humanity and the life and death of humans meant nothing to him. Is this something which could happen to us or should I say to the copies of us?

Companies in Silicon Valley have taken up the torch for life extension and immortality. The head of PayPal said he wanted to live to be 120 years old, which doesn’t seem like much considering the target most of these other billionaires and companies are shooting for. It has been said the quest for immortality has been going on for thousands of years and the first Emperor of China is one of the victims of this quest. He thought he could live forever by taking mercury pills. It just so happens mercury is a very deadly substance so I guess you can figure out what happened. There is actually a foundation called the Methuselah foundation. The foundation is dedicated to finding drugs that can cure many age-related diseases and some of the very rich among others give donations to it. The foundation is not very large and has a budget of only five million dollars.

Google has a project named Calico and it is said it is planning to pump billions of dollars into a partnership with pharmaceutical giant AbbVie. Rumors are flying about this and as we all know Google is not famous for talking about what they do. The rumors state the drug company is trying to create a drug to mimic foxo3. Foxo3 is a gene which is associated with very long life. There are projects and foundations which have been around for a while which deal with aging  and one of these is the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research. It has been around since 1965 and gives grants to researchers who show promise with their work on aging. There is no doubt there are a lot of people interested in a longer life. One has to question the fact however that some lab results are helpful in the study of extending human life. Just because we can extend the life of a mouse 40% does that mean we could do the same to a human?

There have always been people who want to live longer, but one thing we have to consider is the quality of our life not just the length of it. What good would it be to live to be hundreds of years old if our bodies are not up to the task? I think if we talking about immortality we have to eliminate the idea of brain mapping, because brain mapping and copying brains to a computer is not really life extension. It is nothing more than life copying. Who wants to be constantly reminded of their deceased loved one by seeing a copy of them in a machine?