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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 takyon on Thursday March 17 2016, @12:16AM
Death is not a part of life. It is the termination of life.
Am I afraid of death, sure. But the idea that we ought to accept death, and that death is natural is just false. It's not just a lie told by some philosophers and ethicists. It's peddled by the media in the form of pro-death propaganda morality tales.
I'm sure we can find plenty of old people scared to death of death. Just because some of them have accepted death doesn't mean that it's somehow the moral position. It just means that they have no choice, and they are making the best out of a bad situation.
If anti-aging and age reversal therapy becomes available and cheap, would you refuse it? It's not like it will necessarily prevent you from dying, since there are car crashes, shootings, gamma ray bursts, and the heat death of the universe. But would you refuse anti-aging treatment knowing that aging is damage and disease that can be cured?
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