When you think of the word"immortality" it is hard not to feel a tingling excitement, even if those feelingsare quickly followed by a sense of something more biblical, almost God-like, and then bysomething darker lurking in the shadow of the word.
As Western science still has not found the immortality gene, it is perhaps not surprising that inSilicon Valley and on the outskirts of Moscow the eccentricwealthy (and it always is the eccentric wealthy) are now turning their attention – andtheir money – to projects that are promising to deliver a new version of the age-old fantasy (or folly) of everlasting life: digital immortality. And thistime it may actually work.
For writer Stephen Cave, author of the new book Immortality, digital immortality does notrefer to the "legacy" we have left on our Facebook pages. Cave's book explores the quest to live for ever and how – he believes – it has been the driving force behind civilisations, coming to a climax in modern science."Digital immortality," he says, "is about there being a silicon you for when the physical you dies" as a kind of "Plan B if bioscience fails to deliver an actual biological immortality".
And of course, he adds, biological immortality would not stop you being run over by a bus.
"So your brain is scanned and your essence uploaded into a digital form ofbits and bytes, and this whole brain emulation can be saved in a computer's memory banks ready to be brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life, or even in the body of an artificially intelligentrobot that is a replica of who we were."
For Cave, though, this "is not true immortality" as "you physically die" and this new you, "even though its behaviourcould fool your mum", is then just a copy. A copy that, he admits, could carry on growing, marrying and even having children.
Currently, however, this is still "almost science fiction", as there are "three big challenges" that stand between us and digital immortality – challenges that projects such as Carbon Copies and Russia 2045 already believe they can overcome within 40 years.
"The first is that we have to be able to read all the information that makes up who you are, and this is likely to be achieved destructively by removing the humanbrain from the body and then preserving, slicing and scanning in the data it contains. Then there is the challenge to store an amount of information many millions of orders of magnitude bigger than the current computer systems. And finally we need to find a way to animate it."
In the end, Cave argues, "theoreticallythe problems of digital immortality seem solvable, but whether the solutions are practical is another story... Although when it does happenit is simply inevitablethat the rich will get there as they have the most power among us."
Others are more positive about the prospect of true digital immortality within a generation.
For Dr Stuart Armstrong, the rise of the idea of digital immortality is due tothe realisation that this time – perhaps –we actually have the key to immortality inour hands. Dr Armstrong is research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.
"Technology is now advancing faster andfaster and we understand it a lot better because we built it ourselves. So the problems that digital immortality isfacing are merely engineering problems – albeit complicated and difficult ones – that could be solved within the decade if we decided to set upa scheme on the scale of the Manhattan Project."
In particular, he feelsthat "scanning is the critical problem" andthat if you "spent stupid amounts of cash then within a decade many of the limitations of scanning, such as its resolution, could be solved".
If computer power continues to double every two years, as described by"Moore's law", then in the end that will not be an issue either.
"Or it may be that at first we just have to accept a trade-off between what we can do and not do," he suggests. And for Armstrong this represents true immortality, since, rather pragmatically,"if this avatar or robot is to all intentsand purposes you, then it is you."
Dr Randal A. Koene, though, is determined to take digital immortality from the pages of books like Cave's andturn it into reality. Koene is founder of the non-profit Carbon Copies Project in California, which is tasked with creating a networking community of scientists to advance digital immortality –"although I prefer to talk about substrate-independent minds, as digital immortality is too much about how long you live, not what you can do with it".
And for Koene it is very much "you", there being a"continuity of self" inthe same way that"the person you are today is still the same person you were when you wereage five".
"This isn't science fiction, either, this is closer to science fact," he argues. Carbon Copies "is working to create a road map to substrate independence by pulling together all the research that is going on, identify where the gaps are and then what we need to do to plug it.
"A Manhattan Projectcan easily have its funding removed by government, whereas in this network there are usually multiple projects going on in the same area, and only one needs to succeed."
Furthermore, he feels, the tide of science is moving hisway, with India expecting to have built by 2017 a supercomputer big enough to handle the one exaflop of memory required forone brain upload, and such institutionsas the Allen Institute for Brain Science spending $300 million to try to crackproblems he also needs to solve, such as how the brain encodes, stores and processes information."Ultimately we won'teven be aware that we are being scanned, uploaded and replaced," he believes.
In the end, in Stephen Cave's opinion, digital immortality may well turn out to be a curse, as it always does in mythology.
"If my child died and I replaced her with a digital avatar to helpme overcome the grieving, would I let her grow up or even have children of her own? Would I tell her she was a copy? Ican imagine just how easy it would be to tell her in a row."
The complications have more serious and wide-ranging implications if humans cannot resistthe temptation to"tweak their digital avatars", which may – as Stuart Armstrong argues – lead us closer to a world of "super-upgraded copies" and "the real game changer, multiple copies or clones".
"You could copy the best five programmers in the world a million timesor the best call centre worker and these copies would simply replace the humans, who would no longer have any economic value," Armstrong says."Humans would be left to die, face a life on welfare or live under coercive regulation to control the technology."
For Koene, human societies have faced these kinds of problems many times before. What matters more, he believes, is that digital immortality isthe next stage of human evolution as it will "allow us as a species to have the flexibility to survive the process of natural selection that every species has to face", whetheron this planet or another.
This time it won't just be the rich who benefit, either, as the technology will be made "open source" for everyone to have the choice whether to be digitally immortal or not. And that would be a curse.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/will-scientists-ever-discover-the-secret-of-immortality-7707372.html

"immortality"...big word...who would not want it?..when you can live forever..but in my opinion,we already have this gift..its by having a child..you leave a part of you into your child..and the cyle never stops...its immortality,the natures way..i wouldnt have it any other way,but again,this is my opinion..

I would not want it, for one. If you think about all the implications, there's really not much good that would come of it. Immortality is an adolescent dream. It's probably natural for us to fantasize about it, but wisdom would reject it.

A better question might be not will scientists find it, but will you?

they cant even build an electric car

They have been around for years, you drive them from remote control.

It is this level of idiocy that frightens me. Yes, engineers HAVE built electric cars, and science figured out how to do so a hundred years ago, it took tech that long to make it viable.

It is this disconnect from how things get done that create the gaps people see conspiracies within.

Get a proper education in science volant, you would only be helping yourself in the long run.

Oh, I would LOVE to be immortal... provided I could still suicide when I wanted to.

To be immortal without the option to suicide might be a living hell.

But being able to live at least a couple of centuries would be awesome.

I found it myself, and I am very proud to say so. And Its not a special club of any kind, its just very expensive and takes lots of charts and graphs to explain to the average person. The more you know about biology however, the easier it is to understand.

Please share.

Well to most people, unless I know their culture and background it takes a few charts and diagrams to explain. It has to do with a few elements of 16th century science, the practice was known many years ago as restoration, but process had to be repeated every few decades until resources ran out and said subject died. My take on this process that would actually define it as immortality would be knowing the forecast of the earth or habitable places on earth and the resources to maintain a physical form that would not deteriorate due to age (which is malnutrition of the body or mind. Basically building a body that can rapidly heal in seconds due to supercharged nutrients and following the trends of those evolving factors. Although for identity as a human (or conscious being) to not be frozen in time, one would have to help the rest of said race evolve, so that the "immortal person" would not be classified as a new species or mutant human.

The only way to explain in more detail without repeating the factors of my formula would be knowing the audience of whom I am speaking to and their knowledge of Evolution and Metaphysics.

I know what you mean. I have to adjust my explanations of some topics to the audience too. But here, I would appreciate it if you would make some assumptions and describe it. We can always ask question later. These forums are how we get to know each other.

Far more charitable than I. Thus I will hang in the wings silently.

Well personally a lot of what actually inspired my ideas on the subject would be the "Resident Evil" series, which has two major themes, a bio-weapons manufacturer and a secret organization that exists other than the manufacturer, which searches for humans (a majority of the time being warriors) to try introduce them to a adrenal-rabies, like virus that if the humans body does not accept it becomes a horrid mutant monster. If the body does accept the DNA manipulation by the virus, then they become Super-Humans (such as the character "Wesker") with increased physical aptitude and intelligence. The concept Smart2009 spoke about by this entire process happening to a being by means of divine power would be much harder to explain. The divine method of achieving this goal has to do with uttering certain words ingrained into the human psyche, hoping for attempts to be successful at the same DNA manipulation. The same idea although instead of a virus by means of a separate life form, a virus that exists in a psychedelic meme. Which almost could be classified as the same seeing as a persons breath and voice manipulate neurochemical processes in the brain as the same way virus would.

Yes, or get an electron microscope silly.

Can i ask about the emotive self? Is the ability to feel such things as anger, happiness & sadness along with everything in between that is integral to the human physche at risk of becoming de-sensitised through immortality?

Why would you reject it?

Yeh right.

You have a very sparse profile.

Reveal yourself.

To the O.P.

It was difficult to read your cut and paste in the O.P. but I managed to get through it.

The entire thing completely overlooks the idea of the human soul, which scientists, (I guess) don't believe exists.

But what if it does?

It depends on data and a digital copy of the person or body. Perhaps if we could create artificial persons or perfect clones of ourselves, we can reproduce our likenesses -- but what about our actual point of view or consciousness?

Is the copy to be considered you? (Perhaps your family might be fooled, but you are standing here and the copy is standing over there.) Unless you can see through his or her eyes and operate the mind and body of said copy, the copy is not you.

So what IS you? You are your point of view I would say. You are not the body. So can you remove your point of view (consciousness) from your present body and install it into the copy or cloned body? (Or can you transport your soul from one body to another?)

That is what is necessary in this case to have immortality, unless you can find a way for a body to stay young and support (your) life indefinitely.

Human biological immortality can be achieved also without scanning his mind and putting it in a computer software thing.

If aging can be stopped, and the person avoids environmentally dangerous situations, or potentiall lethal ones, then he can live forever.

Aging is now known why and how it happens. The ends of DNS molecules snap off with each internal regeneration cells, and the longer the broken-off pieces, the more aged the person is.

Of course lifestyle can make a difference as well, but that can be controlled. The aging process can't yet be controlled, but when time comes that humans can reliably avoid taking off end pieces of their DNA molecules, then everlasting life will become a commonplace.