Immortality

by Nicholas

Disclaimer: this post discusses a deep topic that may be triggering or overwhelming for some. 

 

I don’t know about you, but death is very scary to me. The idea of not existing is something that is impossible for me to comprehend most days. Once in a while, often late at night as I’m lying in bed, I suddenly get an overwhelming panic attack as I realize how life is not infinite and I will not exist at some point. It’s the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced. 

 

I was baptized and grew up going to church, but I’ve strayed further and further from my faith over the years. Which is unfortunate, since there is relief in believing that there is something beyond this life. As I’ve become more and more interested in science, I simply don’t see the need for a higher being; science explains everything. I wish I could go back to my younger, happier days when I truly believed in God. It would be great if my dog, my grandparents, my relatives, my friends, and every other human (and living being) who has died is enjoying a wonderful afterlife in heaven. But it seems far-fetched and difficult to believe. Obviously, science does not disprove anything and there very well could be a higher being, but there need not be anything else from a scientific point-of-view.

 

More and more people are becoming atheist and agnostic, and that means that death is becoming an increasingly scary prospect for people. 

 

But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if we could cheat death? I believe that we’re at an inflection point in human history where death perhaps does not need to happen anymore. Our technology and understanding of the human body, especially the brain, has reached a point where we might be able to become immortal in the next few decades, or even years. Like I mentioned in our first podcast episode on neural networks and AI, I think that death could truly be an option very, very soon. 

 

As I see it, there are at least three possibilities for how this could happen:

 

One possibility, assuming a person does not experience a freak accident, is anti-aging tech. After all, aging is what leads to death. If we can stop, or even reverse aging, then we theoretically would not die. Some ways we could stop aging are therapies surrounding telomeres, which shorten as we age, and stem cells, which are cells that can create any cell in the body. If we protect or even lengthen telomeres, or if we constantly replace aging cells with new stem cells, we could theoretically stop aging. I recommend checking out the movie In Time (with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried) for an idea of what society could look like if everyone was genetically modified to stop aging at 25. 

 

Another possibility is cryopreservation. This is where we preserve our brains, or even whole bodies, after dying. The idea is that we can preserve our bodies now in the hopes that a future technology can revive us and allow us to significantly, even infinitely, expand our lifespans. One of many companies that offers cryopreservation (for a hefty price tag of $80K in life insurance for brain preservation and $200K in life insurance for whole-body preservation) is Alcor. As of 2020, Alcor has 1300+ members (who will be frozen when they die) and 180+ patients (who are already frozen). I don’t know about you, but I would love to have my brain preserved. 

 

A final possibility is uploading our brains to the cloud. I’m not a computer science person so I don’t know how this would work, but if we could somehow connect or upload our brains to a computer, then we would theoretically live virtually. That, of course, brings up the debate of consciousness and if what would be a software program in a computer can have consciousness. There would also be the problem of not having a body. Maybe we could fix that by having that computer control a robot or artificial human, and then we would be able to live forever, not just as a pure mind or consciousness, but as a whole mind and body. 

 

Death is scary, but maybe it simply doesn’t have to be a thing anymore. Perhaps science can bring resolution to the question that no one has been able to answer yet: can we be immortal? Only time will tell, but I am excited for what the future holds. As astronaut Mark Watney says in The Martian, my favorite book and movie, “Really looking forward to not dying.” [1] 

 

[1] Weir, Andy. The Martian: A Novel. First paperback classroom edition. New York: Broadway Books, 2016. Print.