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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
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 16 2016, @08:51PM
Have you people given ANY thought to what kind of endless Hell immortality would be for a finite mind?!
We are not just talking about "a very long time" here; we are talking about FOREVER. A finite mind cannot comprehend or handle eternity. The best you could possibly hope for wouldn't actually be uninterrupted continuity of mind at all; it would have to be a series of different "lives" stretching into endlessness. That's not immortality; that's reincarnation under a metaphysical hypervisor.
I am personally looking forward to death. This planet has gone fucking insane, and I think I've done well enough not to need to reincarnate here or somewhere worse. But the only true mercy, the only real happy end, for a finite mind is eventual cessation of existence.
(Incidentally, this is why I say Heaven is a much, much worse problem for the Abrahamic religions than Hell is. Apologists I square off with don't like that; it catches them utterly off guard.)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:45PM
a finite mind can handle eternity very well. there's some core that doesn't change, and some non-permanent memory attached, where you can put the information relevant for the local time neighbourhood.
I have no idea whether this can work with a biological brain, but it can certainly work with a computer.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @09:55PM
If you can be happy and occupied at 100, you can do it at 1000 or 1 million. It would sure be a lot easier with a youthful body. There are certainly solutions to the problem of epoch boredom, and an entire universe that would take billions of years to explore with slower-than-light propulsion.
If you can't figure out how to handle "eternity", you have an option: suicide.
Your "series of different lives" bit is actually an interesting solution to the problem. If you are on a spaceship going from point A to point B, you could simulate different lives in cognitive virtual reality.
An overrated and mainstream opinion. But as it is yours, you are free to choose cessation if you wish.
This is about giving people a choice. Some people don't buy into your defeatism. They may even enjoy the "suffering" of life. Even if they did get terminally bored after thousands of years, they could choose to end it all, just like you. Without anti-aging or other immortality technologies, there is no choice.
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(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 16 2016, @10:08PM
This is *not* defeatism. I'm not, again, talking about 1,000 or 1,000,000,000 or even 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one googol, 10^100) years.
All of these are equally as short, which is to say, nonexistent, in the face of eternity. This isn't a question of simply getting bored: from a Shannon-information-theoretic perspective, all possible types of finite or contingent existences that could ever possibly occur in any configuration of any universe whatsoever...ALSO fade into utter nullity next to eternity. This isn't a question of boredom: it's a question, almost, of epistemology,
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @10:36PM
It's better to have the option than not. We can argue about eternity together, an eternity later.
You dismiss those numbers, but there are estimates for hard limits on the amount of time the universe can exist... most of which fall far short of a googol years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe [wikipedia.org]
So really, I've solved your objection to "immortality". All you have to do is live a duodecillion years or so. That's like a picosecond compared to eternity! That's nothing, you can do it!
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(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday March 16 2016, @11:38PM
Yeah, I was hoping someone would bring this up :) Proves my point AND yours at the same time.
Doesn't do much for the Abrahamic death cultists though!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by devlux on Friday March 18 2016, @12:52AM
Hey takyon.
On the low end you missed 22B years, which is when the Big rip is supposed to occur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip [wikipedia.org]
Look in "Definition & Overview" it's the second paragraph from the bottom of that section.
Of course the primary driver on this is a number that is a ratio of something we don't know (amount of dark energy in the universe) along with something we barely are able to define (energy density of dark energy). There obviously it's dealing with a HUGE number of unknowns, but the point is that the paper cited calls for it to be as soon as 22B from today.
Just thought I would bring that to your attention.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 18 2016, @01:26AM
I'm not sure it will happen nearly as fast as this Big Rip hypothesis. The numbers in my link are a lot larger. Also:
The big things to worry about in the near term would seem to be the Sun getting too hot or becoming a red giant (1+ billion years), collision of Milky Way and Andromeda, which could be survivable since there is so much empty space in a galaxy (4-5 billion years), and galaxies moving so far away that they become unreachable (1-X trillion years).
If there's going to be a big rip event in 22 billion years or so, I think we will have plenty of advance notice since it will be grokked out within the next few centuries. Also, I don't think it's implausible that the universe's expansion could be reversed or harnessed as a form of "perpetual energy" to keep something alive past the rip. That's science fiction territory but you can expect the state of physics to look very different in a few centuries.
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(Score: 2) by devlux on Friday March 18 2016, @02:44AM
Not so sure about it being scifi, possibly more sci than fi.
I've always felt that this is something that could be harvested soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect [wikipedia.org]
Which reminds me, is anyone aware of any studies that have looked at the casimir effect or something similar as a potential DE candidate, if not why?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday March 17 2016, @04:18AM
>I am personally looking forward to death.
I'm sure that can be arranged.
Forever is indeed a long time. I wouldn't mind being immortal in the biological sense however; aging sucks, and I'm willing to stick around to see what happens to humanity, out of curiosity.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 18 2016, @10:06PM
Have you people given ANY thought to what kind of endless Hell immortality would be for a finite mind?!
Forget stuff. Grow your mind bigger. Or you can choose suicide at some point, if you don't like what's going on. Solves the problem.
I am personally looking forward to death. This planet has gone fucking insane, and I think I've done well enough not to need to reincarnate here or somewhere worse. But the only true mercy, the only real happy end, for a finite mind is eventual cessation of existence.
Well, don't let the door hit you on the way out. I've been doing fine over here and the world seems pretty well off, so I just can't agree.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 20 2016, @02:22AM
I didn't figure you for such a passive-aggressive type. Shortsighted and evil, yes, and your comment reflects this as they all do, but this is oddly...subtle...for you. Usually you're much more up front about your "fuck you and die, I got mine and I'm right" worldview.
Got anything of substance to say, or did you just come here to drop your drawers and shit on the rug?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 20 2016, @09:45AM
Got anything of substance to say, or did you just come here to drop your drawers and shit on the rug?
Sure, I'll contribute. All the people whining about people living too long have clearly diseased viewpoints. EdIII rants about their "kill the 1%" fantasy. While you're not doing that here, you're ranting about humanity being boggled by living forever (even though we have plenty of options for making sure we aren't living forever) and the world being "insane" even though we are saner than we've ever been. Meanwhile, it's not hard to find evidence that people want to live longer than they do, for example, those goofy internet ads about removing bags under eyes and people spending vast amounts of money merely to look younger than they are and the heroic medicine common to many peoples' last years of life.
Second, you ignore a powerful improvement that longevity brings, namely, it makes people care more about the future. For example, let's consider the hypothetical example of someone who doesn't care about dangerous climate change because they won't live long enough to see it. If something bad happens to the Earth's climate in 400 years, what is it to them? They'll only live say 50 years. Nobody they know or care about will be affected (assuming their lifespans don't change significantly too). But if they could live to 100,000 years, then it just became a huge problem for them since they will personally live through these events. Also, I think increased longevity would greatly reduce the effects of the "business cycle". With people living through hundreds of such cycles, they'll be more apt to react sanely to recessions and bubbles than the constantly renewed supply of gullible people created today.
So living longer has the potential to create saner societies with greater foresight than the present or past societies have had. You seem to indicate that you care about such things.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 20 2016, @08:04PM
Living LONGER. Not immortality. You're basically making my point for me, though I don't share your optimism about the absolute sanity level of the planet.
Actual immortality, as in "your unique, continuous consciousness never ever dies, no matter what, fuck the laws of thermodynamics, a [sky] wizard did it" would be endless torture.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 21 2016, @04:57AM
Living LONGER. Not immortality.
I don't take the idea of living forever seriously either. It's impossible from the thermodynamics aspect. Instead, I consider it along the same vein as supposing exponential population growth forever.
So when such things come up, I immediately go to the far more practical idea of living longer. That's something that can be achieved.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 21 2016, @05:47AM
Aren't you one of the Abrahamic death cultists? Or am I confusing you with JMorris?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 21 2016, @01:50PM
Aren't you one of the Abrahamic death cultists?
Fraid not. I don't believe there is a point to having an opinion about things which we can't ever know about.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 21 2016, @04:10PM
I owe you an apology on that score then. It seems I did confuse you with JMorris, which is probably a deadly insult to an agnostic :(
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 22 2016, @12:53AM
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 22 2016, @01:59AM
It kind of should be. The guy's a glassy-eyed Christian Taliban.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...