Can Science defeat Death?
Is there a secret potion that can help us become immortal?
The Philosopher’s Stone was a legendary alchemical substance with magical properties. This ruby-red stone could be used to create the Elixir of Life, which made the drinker immortal. Bristlecone pine, which grows in the arid parts of the US can live for 5000 years, and the roundworm C species can go into a coma for four months and come back to life.
The average life span of a human being is approximated to be 79 years, although it varies greatly from race to race and region to region.
Before we deep dive into the science of immortality, let's try to understand what causes death.
According to a study, titled Intercellular Competition and Inevitability of Multicellular Aging, our body goes through two major changes which lead to death, which are:
- The function of cells shut down making them sluggish
2. Cells become increasingly cancerous with age
If we think and reflect again, we will understand the beauty of our cell programming. If we try to mute or prevent one of the two processes, it naturally enhances the other. If we try to reduce the growth of cancerous cells, it adversely affects the cells which are already turning sluggish and vice-versa.
In other words, we can say, nature has tuned us to be mortal beings, and defeating death becomes even more difficult.
In spite of this, scientists have spent years researching longevity and have developed some interesting theories and ideas.
“I think it’s reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.” — Aubrey de Grey
According to Grey, a Cambridge University researcher, it is possible to extend the lifespan of humans by 1000 years or more if human genomes can be modified to include genetic material from microorganisms that live in the soil ( having a lifespan of 40 million years ), enabling us to break down the junk proteins that our cells amass over time which they can’t digest on their own. People will have the option of looking and feeling the way they did at 20 for the rest of their lives.
A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has stated, through a mathematical equation, that it is impossible to stop ageing in multicellular organisms, which include humans, bringing the immortality debate to a possible end.
Click here to read more about it
How far have we gotten towards achieving immortality?
When we think about immortality from a scientific perspective, there are two types of it.
- Biological Immortality, which is achieving immortality by slowing the ageing process of our cells and by genetic alterations.
- Digital Immortality, which is transferring the contents of our brain to an electronic device that is similar to transferring our soul, and the process is termed as “mind uploading”. This would provide immortality to the computation of the original brain, as predicted by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, an inventor, futurist, and the director of engineering at ‘Google’.
There are two steps to achieving digital immortality, the first is archiving and digitizing people by uploading their minds and the second is to make their avatar go live.
Watch this video to understand more about mind uploading.
Two scientific concepts help us to understand the idea of mind uploading better.
- Singularity — It is a vast concept but in short, it can be stated as a hypothetical future point in time, at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.
- Moore’s law — Moore’s law states that on average, computing power, or more precisely, the number of transistors on integrated circuits, doubles approximately every two years.
“We are going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more”, explains Kurzwill.
The singularity leads us to the idea that in the near future, robots will become better than humans at performing certain tasks. In the future, we will be able to digitize our personalities, our feelings, memories, sensations, etc., and create a digital copy of ourselves, our after-death avatars, thus making the digital afterlife possible. In short, we can leave our flesh pals behind but continue living through digital utopia.
This video gives a better idea of the concept of singularity.
Moore’s law indicates that as time passes, the computing power we have at hand will be enormous.
A group of researchers and scientists have come together to form the 2045 initiative, whose main goal is to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality.
To answer the above question, we are closer to achieving immortality with every passing day. Scientists claim that they are just 17 years from bringing the idea of a cyber brain into reality. Researchers like Aubrey have stated that if we survive another 25 years we might have access to being immortal. In fact, researchers claim that the person to live for 1000 years is already born.
As we can see, immortality is still a grey area and is mostly theory than practice. So what we can do now is lay back and relax, live life to the fullest and ensure that if on any day in the near future immortality becomes achievable, we have a lot of good memories to relish.
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