2045 by Dmitry Itskov

Are you familiar with the 2045 initiative? It was founded by businessman and billionaire Dmitry Itskov and aims to accelerate the process of achieving human immortality by 2045. In this mini-documentary of Motherboard (already a few years old) you can see an interview with Itskov where he explains the vision of the project.

There is a lot of talk in the transhumanist and futurist forums about the progress of this initiative, whether it’s going to be on time or not, whether it’s going to be delayed and whether it is even viable. The fact is that we are still two years away from its first milestone: in 2020 we should be able to have a robotic copy of our body (Avatar), being able to communicate with it (through commands) using our mind. Although there has been a lot of progress in brain-machine communication and we have interesting projects like Neuralink, I think that reaching this level of sophistication is going to be difficult in such a short time…

The second phase (Avatar B) would be achieved between 2020 and 2025, where a human brain can already be transplanted into the avatar, providing it autonomy and the ability to interact with the environment. The next phase is Avatar C, where the avatar will have an artificial brain with our consciousness, memories and knowledge (2030–2035) and finally Avatar D (2040–2045) where the avatar will be a kind of hologram. This last point is the most complex to understand and MuyInteresante asked Itskov about the meaning of this final state:

The last stage of the project, Avatar D, is a light body similar to a hologram, why seek immortality in this form?
The first scientist to propose the idea was the Russian rocket expert Konstantin. He described the definitive evolution of the human body as the transition from one biological, material state to another of energy, resulting in a radiant humanity. In my spiritual search I also found texts where it is mentioned that human beings can evolve to an entity of light. I found it surprisingly similar to Tsiolkovski’s scientific paradigm. Inspired by these two visions, we conceived Avatar D with very advanced technology, including holography and optical and photonic computing.

In the project website you can find its Manifesto. I personally find their approach very interesting and hopefully it will speed up all the research and progress towards immortality… But I think that setting in stone a so close year is too optimistic… What do you think?

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