 May 18, 2012
Will there ever discovered the secret of immortality?
As of today, work to achieve eternal life, is largely focused on finding the key to the so-called "digital immortality" writes Independent. "Digital immortality", – British writer Stephen Cave says in his book “Immortality”, "is about there being a silicon you for when the physical you dies" as a kind of "Plan B if bioscience fails to deliver an actual biological immortality". And of course, futurologist adds, biological immortality would not stop you being run over by a bus. "So your brain is scanned and your essence uploaded into a digital form of bits and bytes, and this whole brain emulation can be saved in a computer`s memory banks ready to be brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life, or even in the body of an artificially intelligent robot that is a replica of who we were."
According to Cave, today, there are three major obstacles to the implementation of this program (some persons believe that within 40 years they would be overcome).
"The first is that we have to be able to read all the information that makes up who you are, and this is likely to be achieved destructively by removing the human brain from the body and then preserving, slicing and scanning in the data it contains. Then there is the challenge to store an amount of information many millions of orders of magnitude bigger than the current computer systems. And finally we need to find a way to animate it."
Finally, Cave concludes, "theoretically the problems of digital immortality seem solvable, but whether the solutions are practical is another story... Although when it does happen it is simply inevitable that the rich will get there as they have the most power among us."
Dr. Stuart Armstrong, Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, is more positive about the prospect of true digital immortality within a generation,– "The rise of the idea of digital immortality is due to the realisation that this time – perhaps – we actually have the key to immortality in our hands. "Technology is advancing faster and faster and we understand it a lot better because we built it ourselves. So the problems that digital immortality is facing are merely engineering problems... that could be solved within the decade if we decided to set up a scheme on the scale of the Manhattan Project."
In particular, he feels that "scanning is the critical problem" and that if you "spent stupid amounts of cash then within a decade many of the limitations of scanning, such as its resolution, could be solved".
Dr. Randal A Koene,founder of the non-profit Carbon Copies Project in California, which is tasked with creating a networking community of scientists to advance digital immortality, is determined to take digital immortality from the pages of books like Cave`s and turn it into reality. – "although I prefer to talk about substrate-independent minds, as digital immortality is too much about how long you live, not what you can do with it".
He believes that digital immortality is the next stage of human evolution as it will "allow us as a species to have the flexibility to survive the process of natural selection that every species has to face", whether on this planet or another.
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