The fear of disappearing without a trace has been festering people for many thousands of years. Each of us, just once in a lifetime, was thinking about what kind of epitaph would be written on the tombstone, and what good memories friends would remember at the funeral feast. I was reflecting and got scared of my own thoughts. The Village begins a week of death and rebirth in order to tell the readers about the attempts of mankind to find a route to immortality, about doctors who help hopeless patients, about the ways to get rid of the fear of death.
Cryonics
The cryonic preservation of body and brain is the most popular way to prepare yourself for the future eternal life. In the United States, 143 companies are engaged in cryogenic freezing, and the market volume is estimated at $1 billion. The hypothesis that a person can be revived after being in the freezer, appeared in the XVIII century, but since then scientists have made little progress.
To revive a cryonically preserved person is not possible yet, but the body can be stored for a long time — the standard contract is signed with the relatives of the deceased for a hundred years. Perhaps it will be a great breakthrough in the twenty-second century and the brain will be able to restore its functions after freezing. The babies conceived with the help of frozen sperm have been already born, after all, and in 1995 biologist Yuri Pichugin was able to freeze and then defrost parts of the rabbit’s brain, and they didn’t lose their biological activity.
Intelligence digitization
Another way to keep your brain and mind forever is to turn it into a combination of zeros and ones. Many researchers are working on this task. Gordon Bell, an honourable worker of Microsoft Research, for example, is working on the MyLifeBits project — he is trying to design his own digital avatar that can communicate with grandchildren and children after the death of a scientist. He has already digitized and systematized hundreds of thousands of photographs, letters and his own memories.
IBM has been working with the Swiss Polytechnic Institute for ten years to study the possibility of computer modelling of the neocortex — the main part of the human cerebral cortex responsible for conscious thinking. The end of the project is still far, but scientists have no doubt that they will be able to create artificial intelligence — a powerful and intellectual supercomputer.
Cyborg
Artificial heart valves, pacemakers, modern prostheses that work like real hands and feet which accept and process brain signals — all this already exists today. The notion of a “cyborg”, that is familiar to the audience by fantastic action movies, was invented in the 1960s by scholars Manfred Clynes and Nathaniel Klein. They studied the possibility of some animals to get recovered from damage (for example, as lizards grow a new tail after losing the old one) and suggested that a person can also replace damaged parts of the body with a certain technology.
Scientists have predicted the future very accurately — the modern technologies already allow growing artificial organs and even printing them on a 3D printer, although it’s not possible yet to make these tissues work long and reliably.
Nanorobots
Futurologists believe that by 2040 people will learn to become immortal. Nanotechnology will help to create microscopic body repair machines. Raymond Kurzweil, an inventor, explores a fantastic possibility: human-cell-size robots will travel inside the body and repair all damages, saving the host from disease and ageing.
However, this isn’t such a fantastic picture. The researchers from MIT have been already using nanotechnology to bring the cells that kill cancer to the epicentre of tumours. A similar experience is being conducted on mice at the University of London. They are successfully cured of cancer.
Genetic Engineering
You can analyze the genome even today, with a relatively small amount of money — something about twenty thousands of roubles for one couple. Another thing is that there is just a little value in it. Technology is effective when doctors know what they are looking for. For example, a young couple is planning to have a baby, but one of the parents has genetic abnormalities and there are certain tests that allow to reveal the same deviations while the fetus is in the womb yet.
Genetics is developing, doctors and scientists are identifying new genes which are responsible for certain diseases, and in the future, they hope to learn how to rebuild the genome in order to save mankind from many terrible diseases.
Rebirth
At first glance, it’s not a scientific way: to believe in the transmigration of the soul to have immortality. Many religions (from Buddhism to the beliefs of North American Indians) and doctrines convince us that the human souls acquire a new life in new bodies, sometimes migrate to their own descendants, sometimes to strangers, animals and even plants and stones.
Sociologists’ and psychologists’ point of view is in a different light. They prefer the term “collective intelligence” and since the 1980s are studying the process of accumulation and transfer of social knowledge, which leads to the fact that every next generation of schoolchildren and students learns from a more complex program, and the overall level of the IQ of mankind is still growing. Scientists suggest to perceive the community of people as a whole organism, where each individual is a certain cell. One cell can die, but the body will be living, developing and growing smart forever. So, everything is not a waste of time, after all.
Article by The Village (http://www.the-village.ru)
The translation of the article: Darya Goncharenko
