Why no amount of science can make humans immortal: Horizon - review /

Horizon: The Immortalist (BBC Two) was an intriguing update on science’s engagement in the ongoing quest for eternal life – its focus being the brain’s potential for providing us with the means to transcend death.

The immortalist of the title was Dmitri Itskov, a Russian billionaire funding a major research effort aiming to discover how to extract the human brain and its contents (individuality, personality, memories etc) from the body and upload it into a more durable container. All that we are, Itskov reckons, can be reduced to neural networks. His ambition is to leave behind the physical, or at least the biological, and have several alternative “bodies” which he can flit to and from at will and extend his life immeasurably.

This Russian billionaire hopes to achieve IMMORTALITY by 2045 - and here's how /

BILLIONAIRE Dmitry Itskov has said he will make it possible for humans to live forever in the next 30 years - by uploading their brains onto a computer.

Thought Economics / The End of Life and Death

Our Quest for Immortality – In this exclusive interview series, we speak to Prof. Jack Szostak (Nobel Prize winning Geneticist), Dmitry Itskov (billionaire founder of the 2045 Initiative), Aubrey de Grey (Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation), Prof. Ezekiel Emanuel (Bioethicist and Fellow at the Centre for American Progress) and Prof. George Church (Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School). We discuss the fundamental essence of life itself, why we die, research into extending lifespans, and whether we will ever overcome our mortality.

Dailymail / Disabled ‘guinea pig’ for first full HEAD transplant to meet surgeon for first time this week and insists he'll only go under knife when it is '99% possible

The man volunteering to be the guinea pig for pioneering head transplant surgery is flying to America this week to meet for the first time the doctor intending to give him a new body.

Russian Valery Spiridonov will appear at a major medical conference in Annapolis with Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who hopes to convince the medical establishment that his techniques are on the brink of viability.

Salon / 9 obscene ways the rich spend their money

Trying to live forever. It’s a myth that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen; the Cryonics Society of California claims he was very interested in the process, but his “family didn’t go for it.” Today, several super-rich types are investing heavily in cryonics, as well as other life-extending measures. Canadian electronics billionaire Robert Miller and American hotel and casino billionaire Don Laughlin have both poured tons of support money into Alcor, which bills itself as the “world leader in cryonics.” If everything works out for these two, at the point of death, their body temperatures will be lowered to somewhere below -120° C (that’s -248° F) in a process called “vitrification” until the cure for what ailed them is discovered and they can be revived, or something like that. (They’re also planning to have most of their assets frozen, because what’s the point of bothering to live if you’re poor?) Russian tech billionaire Dmitry Itskov launched the 2045 Initiative, which sounds about as bizarro as one might hope a billionaire’s plans for immortality would. 

Visao / Dmitry Itskov, o multimilionário russo que quer ser um robô

Dmitry Itskov é o jovem russo que quer ser imortal e que, para isso, desenvolveu a Iniciativa 2045. O projeto prevê a transplantação do cérebro humano, com o objetivo de criar uma cópia robótica dos indivíduos. Mas Dmitry não está sozinho: 38 mil pessoas estão envolvidas no projeto, que defende uma geração de 'neohumanos'.

Financial Times / Since you asked: The technology billionaires aiming to disrupt death

So there is nothing certain but death, taxes — and the unending capacity of the rich to try and cheat both of those things?

I take it you are not sold on the idea that death, just like the horse and cart, might one day be disrupted with the help of some innovative engineering?

No. But I have noticed that there’s been a rise in the number of modern day tech messiahs claiming they hold the secret to eternal life.

Back in my day we used to call these characters charlatans. But today I understand they are called “transhumanists”. And they come extremely well funded.

Newsweek / Silicon Valley Is Trying to Make Humans Immortal—and Finding Some Success

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, plans to live to be 120. Compared with some other tech billionaires, he doesn’t seem particularly ambitious. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000; Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible,” and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to someday “cure death.”

Newyorker / How to Live Forever

Could technology help to make our minds last forever? Consider the following parable, about a very wealthy man I’ll call Nicolas Flamel.

As he became older, Flamel became fixated on the idea that he didn’t want to die. After considering the problem for a long time, he figured that what he needed to do was move the contents of his mind into a receptacle more stable than a human head.

IEET / Making Minds Morally: the Research Ethics of Brain Emulation

This talk will outline some of the ethical considerations that will need to go into any project aiming at creating brain emulations. In the near future the main issue is the ethical treatment of virtual experimental animals under profound uncertainty about their true moral status. Applying a cautious approach suggests to use methods similar to existing animal welfare methods, but adapted to the peculiarities of software entities. In the mid-term, the case of human emulations raises a number of other ethical challenges, including informed consent, handling of flawed versions, time rate rights, vulnerability, and the change of identity and death. Finally, the long-term effects and importance of brain emulation will be discussed: are there ethical reasons that strongly speak against pursuing it at all, or equally strongly favor a push towards it?