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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday March 16 2016, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the ghost-in-the-machine dept.

While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn. "Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we can all live forever."

It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he says. It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? Itskov doesn't have too much time to find out.

"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," he laments. Death is inevitable - currently at least - because as we get older the cells that make up our bodies lose their ability to repair themselves, making us vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and other age-related conditions that kill about two-thirds of us.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35786771

Horizon: The Immortalist, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC 2 at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later on the BBC iPlayer

Dmitry Itskov, Founder of 2045 Initiative


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:20PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:20PM (#319142) Journal

    And we care what Einstein thought about a non-physics topic just because he was a really smart dude and we like to hang motivational posters of him and his crazy hair in schools?

    Evolution doesn't select for nigh-immortality because procreation is "easier" than keeping something alive forever with standard cellular processes. Reproduction is also as old as cell division itself, so it is an obvious path to get life forms to spread and consume more resources. That doesn't mean that there aren't nearly immortal animals [wikipedia.org] out there.

    Your car isn't a thinking being, so that's one reason why you would be less inclined to spend loads of money on its "health". And yet some people do spend a lot of money to maintain classic cars.

    Humanity already adapts to environments that we wouldn't be biologically able to using technology. We learned how to skin animals and make fire and dwellings, allowing us to spread further into colder climates. Today, we can survive spacewalks using spacesuits. Making you immortal won't change the fact that you aren't adapting automatically to new environments. Gene therapy could potentially be used to allow individuals to adapt to new environments though.

    As for nursing homes, these might be unnecessary if biological anti-aging reverses the effects of age and restores youthfulness. Certainly, it would not apply to mind uploading (which I'm more skeptical of), unless you consider the datacenter to be the nursing home for uploaded minds.

    The right to die will be enshrined in law long before biological immortality becomes feasible. In fact, California will adopt right to die [soylentnews.org] beginning June 9, 2016, which directly impacts a number of SoylentNews readers.

    Execution is probably on the way out. The issues in getting the "right" drugs have thrust execution back in the spotlight. Many of the U.S. states that have execution laws on the books haven't executed anybody in years. Finally, the Supreme Court could strike down execution, an outcome that could be highly dependent on the result of the 2016 Presidential election.

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