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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 devlux on Friday March 18 2016, @12:52AM

    by devlux (6151) on Friday March 18 2016, @12:52AM (#319821)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday March 18 2016, @01:26AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday March 18 2016, @01:26AM (#319827) Journal

    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:

    in which case the end of the universe is approximately 22 billion years from the present. This is not considered a prediction, but a hypothetical example.

    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.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2) by devlux on Friday March 18 2016, @02:44AM

      by devlux (6151) on Friday March 18 2016, @02:44AM (#319844)

      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?