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The Ruthless, Fruitless Pursuit Of Immortality
Humans have always longed for immortality. Tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals were burying their dead in fetal poses, suggesting hope for posthumous rebirth. In Neolithic times, we entombed food alongside corpses so they’d have something to snack on in the spirit realm. Cuneiform tablets from Nineveh, among the oldest written documents, shimmer with accounts of quests for eternal life. Early humans all tried to make sense of the senselessness of death. They did so through stories about outliving the end, about attaining a never-ending existence in the beyond. Those mythologies became codified into institutional religions that remain with us millennia later.
To this day, immortality is usually conceptualized as a kind of secondary life that occurs after death. The idea emerged from our fear of dying, from the knowledge that our days our numbered, from the sense that life must go on in some way. The basic premise of spiritual immortality is simple: We die, but our soul or consciousness doesn’t. An energy or force within us outlives its mortal container, ending up in an afterlife or hurled back into rebirth. Three quarters of Americans believe in some form of life after death.
But there’s another, more materialist side to the equation: Trying to live forever physically. In imperial China, numerous emperors died after consuming toxic elixirs of everlasting life. One of the main goals of alchemy was the attainment of physical immortality. Such approaches may not have succeeded in the past, but driven by recent advances in science and technology, a tricked-out version of humanity’s oldest and fondest dream is gaining followers.
Physical immortality is a seductive conceit and its allure gains in luster with each new technological breakthrough. Despite the fact that there are no documented examples of anything immortal in nature, there’s an increasing sense that science will soon figure out how to end mortality altogether.
All we need is to do, experts tell us, is lengthen telomeres, target sirtuins or activate CREB1, the brain’s latest “longevity molecule.” Nonprofit organizations like the Immortality Institute and the Methuselah Foundation have been established “to conquer the blight of involuntary death.” And every year, more conferences — with names like Humanity+ or the Global Future 2045 International Congress — pop up purporting to reveal the latest breakthroughs in attaining technologically enabled eternity.
The reality is that we have seen breakthroughs in the field of organ regeneration and molecular biologists have uncovered ways to extend the life spans of worms, fruit flies and mice. So far, however, these findings haven’t yielded any human applications. In 2009, aiming to staunch the hype, the National Institute on Aging announced that “no treatments have been proven to slow or reverse the aging process.”
That’s not stopping people from trying.
Longer Life Spans, But Still an Expiration Date
Beyond stoking the embers of our primal need to believe, how did the concept of physical immortality become so popular in recent times? Part of the answer lies in increases to life expectancy. From the dawn of the Homo genus up to the 19th century, an average life lasted approximately 25 to 40 years. Largely due to basic realizations about hygiene, life spans have increased significantly over the past century and a half. Today, anyone above the poverty threshold can anticipate living 70 to 90 years unless an accident, disease or disaster strikes — or immortality becomes real.
Will life expectancy continue climbing? Some demographers argue that we’ve reached a peak, while others suggest that 125 is a reasonable target for baby boomers. Radical life-extensionists speak of “Plastic Omega” (omega being the end of life, and plastic being malleable). No one knows for sure.
For the most part, we don’t question the idea that every problem is solvable by the rational mind, that humanity’s biggest challenge — death itself — will one day be met. But is progress an inviolable fact of history or just a story we tell ourselves? Not everything progresses. Have our emotions evolved since Shakespeare’s time?
Our ability to program computers has accelerated our faith in the possibility of overcoming death. Early software developers spoke of coding personality into electronic circuits and reanimating it at will. They hypothesized that, in combining cybernetics with DNA, they’d find the formula for immortality.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/11/19/the-ruthless-fruitless-pursuit-of-immortality/
/ About us
Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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