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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: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 17 2016, @03:54PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 17 2016, @03:54PM (#319581) Journal

    You're the person that needs to die then. The reason this planet sucks so fucking much, is that you in particular are on it. Along with millions of worthless sacks of shit who think like you do. Flamebait? Hardly. Deathbait, and I'm serious.

    If you refuse to see yourself as part of a greater whole, then you're the problem. It's your narcisissm that refuses to see our human civilization as a group effort, and therefore, IT ISN'T.

    So just fucking die sooner please so the rest of that are still alive do live life committed to the rest of us, and that we really are all in this together. I for one, sure as fuck, don't want to be on the same planet as an asshole like yourself. After all, the only thing that matters is what affects you positively as an individual correct?

    Why should I listen to someone with such a poisonous outlook on life? First, you rant about killing the "1%" and now, someone has disagreed with you and should die. There is an obvious solution here.

    Change your beliefs, bleed yourself of this poison. If I want to kick around for 100,000 years and you don't, it's no matter to either of us. If I'm not into continuing the homo sapiens thing, what is it to you? If you believe in an afterlife and I don't, so what? My flaws are not so dire that you should be so concerned about them as to want them stamped out forever.

    The Hell within him, for within him Hell
    He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
    One step no more then from himself can fly