Immortality-
well it can come in many ways… in some ways we have it already. Compared to our animal and vegetable cousins, humans are able to transfer far more detailed experiences from generation to generation- some people, like Homer and Shakespeare have achieved a fairly comprehensive transfer of ideas over many centuries, and have achieved immortality that way. As the recorded data of humanity increases, more and more people will leave detailed (though often strangely edited) records of their inner thoughts. This might be the only sort of immortality that is ever achieved in the real world.
But as Woody Allen said, I want to achieve immortality by not dying.
So, there are several methods that may be attempted in the near or not so near future.
Biological immortality could increase the lifespan of the individual, probably involving manipulation of the telomeres and purging the bodycells of accumulated wastes. It would no doubt be a good idea to investigate genetic modification to emulate the extraordinary longevity of the bowhead wale and the giant tortoise… this may mean taking on some of the other characteristics of those venerable animals, but perhaps that can be avoided if so desired.
The development of nanotechnology would perhaps make it possible for cells to be constantly monitored and regulated internally, removing cells that begin to show signs of genetic or other forms of deterioration. So we could end up with a superb biological body, with even an artificial self circulating blood system to avoid strain on the heart…
But then we hit a wall, at two or three hundred years… the brain, with ~10[sup]15[/sup]individual states, cannot carry an infinite memory- people start forgetting things in their forties- what about their three hundred and forties?
Even with drastic genetic rearrangement of the brain’s memory storage, it probably wouldn’t be possible to remember more than a thousand years of life- add a tiny nanotech memory bank in every single cell of your body- you could really only remember twenty- thirty thousand years-
Such imagined immortals as Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings would be constantly struggling to access memory from deep in their storage banks… it is that or live in an eternal Now, and write everything down in notebooks, like Heinlein’s Lazarus Long. (you see many people have already struggled with these concepts.)
So then we come to the Artificial Life option. The operation of the human brain may eventually be emulated, and at ~10[sup]15[/sup]states this does not seem impossible. A passable imitation of a person may be able to be constructed even without a brain scan, just by reading all the information they leave behind on the message boards, for instance, or just by talking to that person for long enough. This sort of copy would be more like a very advanced animatronic robot, and although it could perhaps pass the Turing test and be considered human, it would hardly satisfy most people’s desire for immortality.
No, to do that the individual states of the neurones and synapses and the brain chemistry must be determined, and we are looking at nanotechnology again. The easiest way to do it would be o take the brain apart bit by bit and reassemble it in an electronic body. This is not very satisfactory as it involves the death of the original, and the copy might think it is he same person, but it may have no real continuity of consciousness.
To attempt that, the neurones and synapses could perhaps be replaced one by one by more robust nanotch copies with identical data properties- a person would gradually fade into an electronic replica of her/himself…perhaps over a period of years. Or the instantaneous states of each neuron could be read by a monitoring device as small as, or smaller than, the neuron itself, and a copy manufactured outside the body.
The copies once made, could live essentially for ever, be copied themselves, increased in processing power and in other parameters, merged and melded, or allowed to occupy robot bodies like or unlike their originals, or introduced into virtual reality worlds without number running at millions of times normal speed perhaps, including custom built universes to order. Only the heat death of the universe would be an effective limit.
Of course this means that eventually even the electronic ghosts of the far future will have to die…
Sci-fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/
