Over at the Lifeboat Foundationthere is a fascinating discussion going on between the members on what constitutes immortality, who should get the opportunity, and even whether this problem has already been solved.

My own view is that immortality, or at least extreme life extension, likely already exists but because it can only be given to a few is kept very secret.  I also think it almost certain that, if there are immortals, some are in the Lifeboat Foundation because they would be the most concerned about being protected against a race-ending event. In other words, immortals would certainly take the long view. (The Lifeboat Foundations’ mission is to assure humans don’t become extinct).

Let’s talk about immortality and why you definitely won’t make the list.

Who Should Be Immortal?

This discussion is involving an impressive set of members and got started when one new member wanted to make a bet whether FTL (Faster Than Light) travel or immortality would be invented first. He then argued that 99% of the people in the world are drones and shouldn’t be provided with the opportunity. Now, as you could imagine, the outrage was immediate likely because depending on who you are, a drone would likely be most anyone else that isn’t you.  There are racial implications, sex implications (are women mostly drones?), and regional implications (would you remove major parts of Africa and Asia from the pool?).

One thing is clear, though, and that is you couldn’t give this to everyone. You wouldn’t want immortal mass murderers or pedophiles, for instance. And if folks stopped dying, you’d run out of food and water pretty quickly, near instantly in areas where there are already major shortages, and likely have a zombie or cannibal problem (starving crazy people that eat other people because that’s all there is).

So you would have to severely limit who you made immortal to 1% or less of the population. And if you made the cut using leading doctors, scientists, politicians, engineers and very wealthy people (for funding), you’d likely end up with a largely Caucasian or Asian male group. Ergo, you sure as heck would want to keep the result secret to avoid wars and race riots, and lower the risk the immortals might lose their unique franchise (creative way of saying, “might get shot.”)

As you would expect, there is no real consensus on how you would make this choice, but given the limited number of spots and the fact you’d likely have to be the top of something critical to even be considered, and then be assured you wouldn’t turn into a James Bond villain, I can be reasonably sure neither you or I will make that list. And the percentage is likely a small fraction of 1% in order to keep the whole thing secret.

What is Immortality?

Think about this: Your personality changes dramatically about every 10 to 20 years and your body automatically regenerates at an increasingly inefficient manner during your lifetime. Effectively, life is defined as near constantcellular death/regeneration.   Effectively, you are similar but not identical to your earlier selves. If you’ve had a major trauma (lost limbs, head injury, catastrophic life changing event) you are even more different and changed more quickly. So “you” as a constant is a false perception.  In fact, hormones, drugs and illnesses can also change us for short periods in ways that might make us unrecognizable even to ourselves.

While many of the methods I’m going to mention might seem to eliminate the “you,” from an observers perspective, that initial “you” may have already been gone for years even decades. So agreeing on what immortality is has been somewhat daunting, because change defines us.  Now if we accept change than the ways to immortality expand.

Let’s look at a few.

Children

Right now the mechanism for immortality is children. Your DNA, core coding, passes on with them. But this method leaves very little of what defines you as an adult in the process. Current thinking even argues that kids are more defined by their peer groups up through age 8 than by their parents or genetics, suggesting this traditional method, from our own point of view, is massively inaccurate. You could pass your memories on to your kids but by doing so you would deny them their own childhood.  Granted, I often wonder what I would have done in school if I knew then what I know now.

But this would also be like killing your kids to extend your own life in some views and getting through the ethics and guilt related to this approach would likely take longer than the technology to do it.

Uploading

Whether into another mechanical or biological body or into a virtual world, uploading (which really would likely be more like copying) would take the aspects that were determined to make you unique (mostly memories but also the biological engine that surrounds them) and put this into something that was eternal. The body wasn’t designed to be eternal, so the easiest path would be to replace it.

One issue is that from your own point of view you’d be dead, but given dead people don’t really have a point of view that might not make a difference and the new you would go on until it was destroyed. It would also likely be far more consistent, given physical and hormonal changes would no longer happen and only memories and experiences would drive behavioral/personality changes.  Still,  the you that would be around a thousand years from now would likely be very different than the one today.

Now, if you were uploaded into a virtual world that was maintained as a constant, at least the new you would maintain the greatest consistency of any of the methods because you, or someone else, would maintain that consistency.  You could even live in a loop and never know it (so loved ones could always visit you on your perfect day). Since the new you wouldn’t know a difference an eternity of perfect days where your memory of the day was purged prior to the start of a new one might seem to be a perfect life, or perfect death, as the case may be.

Whatever you are uploading to would be a blank slate but the sense that you would die in order to get the new you to continue as you would likely be a big issue.

Replacement

We should shortly be able to replace every part of your body with either mechanical or biological parts shortly. At the end of say, 200 years, you’d have a new body and you’d likely be able to replace the brain in parts since information does seem to be replicated in it (assuming the replication would continue back to the new part). But this would seem to only be a slower and more risky path than full uploading because you are still justmoving information and the risk of having a catastrophic event during surgery (particularly very invasive brain surgery) is much higher.

Even if we drove this down to nanobots doing work at a cellular level you still have to move information from the old to the new because eventually all of the old cells will be replaced. But given that happens anyway, for the most part, this process using most any method would feel the most like immortality as we currently think of it. Whether done biologically, chemically (fountain of youth), or mechanically change would, at different rates, still happen and the “you” that now exists would likely be vastly different than the you that will exist in several thousand years.

Mirror You/Hybrid

Now what if you took the original you and put it in cryostasis awakened every hundred years or so and given the memories of your mechanical or biological twin?  Your “you” would be preserved indefinitely, the new you would be immortal, and you’d likely get the benefit of the memories without the real pain of making any of the mistakes personally. But then that likely wouldn’t be considered life, in effect you’d be undead but without a vampire’s advantages. Granted, after seeing the Twilight saga, I’m convinced my new definition of hell is hanging with a pouty girl who incessantly whines.

Wrapping Up:

So, what do you think, are immortals among us already? Who would you make immortal? And would you even want to be immortal given the choices suggest that the only way that the you of this instant would survive unchanged would be if we constantly looped you through this one instant forever? Have déjà vu?

How about this: if there is a loop or virtual world and we are both in it, which one of us is the person and which one of us is just machine created replicas to make the environment look real?   I’m pretty sure I’m real, so…

Finally if immortality were offered, would it be offered to you and would you accept it knowing that it would, alone, change you into someone else?

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/robenderle/2012/08/02/immortality-is-it-here-do-you-qualify-do-you-want-to-live-forever/