Who Says You Can't Surpass The Natural Age Limit? [Digital immortality or Biological Immortality, which one is in view?]

Introduction

Over the years; and very recently; people have been viewing "death" as some kind of disease that can be cured. If this is so, how close are we to achieving this cure? The question that bothers me is: why have we been straight-jacketed; or rather pegged; to living within a specific age frame? Here, we will be looking at the possibility of breaking through this limit. Welcome to the era of an everlasting and immortal human race.

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In my last couple of posts, we saw the trend of human evolution and the concept of adaptation, and this; no doubt; is what has enabled humans to survive through the brutal trials of "time", even in the presence of threatening extinction. But in the real sense, have we really survived if we can't even determine how long we can live? The fact is; we have been made to believe that the fate of the human race is certain, and follows a particular pathway of aging (senescence), and ultimately dies. But what if we can alter this trend? - Have you ever thought of that? Okay let's consider the possibility of circumventing death. We will begin from the biological aspect, then we would dive into the technological aspect of it.

Wassup with senescence?

Before we understand how to circumvent the natural process of senescence, we need to understand how it works. What does senescence hinge upon? Some have linked the process of senescence to genetics - Okay; this, to a considerably fair extent is true. According to this survey, it has been found that the hypothalamus; which is also responsible for some of our body's functions, and which also is a relay pathway for signals; can remotely mutilate the process of senescence.

If you have followed the trend of evolution that we have been discussing lately, you would agree with me that various species of our ancestors had different age-frame. For example; during the era of the Paleolith - which was also the era of the existence of some earliest of our ancestors like the Homo heidelbergensis and the Australopithecus, the age limit was somewhat pegged at the average of 33 years _[ref], but progressing down the line to the neolithic and the medieval era, there were some observable fluctuations in the age limit, until it got to the extant modern humans; which; according to this publication has been pegged at the average of 71.5years. But even at that, how many people have been seen to surpass that in the recent times? Shouldn't that be a concern to you?

But like we know, this era has been greeted with technological advancements; even in the area of genetics; and with the invention of a powerful gene editing tool - Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat (CRISPR) by Professor George Church et al, possibilities have arisen to tweak genetic materials responsible for aging and see if the process of aging can be reversed, or at least slowed down. You'd be surprised to know that with this advancement, it is now possible to tweak genetic material even at the embryonic level. A trail has been heralded in this, which exemplifies the process of embryonic genetic editing. No wonder Professor George Church (Co-inventor of CRISPR) had this to say:

... Gene therapy is not only for curing some rare genetic conditions, but also for curing aging - George Church

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Isn't that awesome that "senescence" has now been grouped under "disease"? But the fact still remains that; the biological approach to circumvent the process of aging or reversing the process of aging is heavily unpredictable - This is because, the humans' genome is not a bunch of exercise book that you can just open and write any code you desire - for the major part of it, they are somewhat encrypted. So if biological immortality isn't fully realizable at the moment, what other options do we have left? Hey!! What if technology has a solution to this? Okay let's look at this:

Cybernetic/digital immortality

When a person is said to be confirmed dead, you would agree with me that there would be a permanent cessation of the person's brain function. That is why the term "brain dead" suffices for the description. But how about establishing a possibility where someone's brain functions (and consciousness) can be transferred posthumously? Would it count as immortality? If it would, then we are actually at the edge of a major breakthrough in this. But there are some facts we need to understand first: The human brain has been viewed in comparison to a biological machine, and that is why there has been attempts to replicate or simulate the brain functions in an unnatural way (I'm sure you've heard of the technology of Artificial Intelligence. This is one of the attempts that shows that the brain function can be simulated artificially).

However, the human brain is somewhat different because it embeds consciousness (asides from cognition), and no doubt, we have not achieved the Artificial Super Intelligence; ASI, yet - which has the potentials of mimicking the human level of consciousness in machines. But as it were, it is not impossible to create a neural pathway between the human brain and computers, which would enable the brain's data to be uploaded on a computer system at the point of demise. Maybe that's what the late Stephen Hawking meant when he made this statement:

It is theoretically possible to create a copy of the human's brain data and upload them to a computer system, and this can act as a form of immortality - Stephen hawking. Source. [Paraphrased by me]

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Backing up the brain data

Like I said earlier, the human brain is somewhat encrypted and highly complex. Not only that, it has been calculated that the brain; on average; can store a whopping 2.5petabytes of data _[ref]. To make this clearer; 2.5petabytes = 2,500,000,000,000,000bytes. In the process of reading the data from the brain, how do we expect to transfer such an amount of data in the shortest time? The regular USB has a transfer max of 60MB per second; that means, it would take over 5millenia to transfer the data from a single brain into the computer system. And the truth is; memory is constantly being formed and rearranged within the brain. That means, it would take an almost infinite amount of time to get the transfer completed; assuming other conditions like "transmission errors, loss of connection" etc, are kept at the barest minimum. But again, technology has smiled on this, and "speed" has arrived in the area of data transmission, with the invention of "Thunderbolt 2 USB", which has an effective speed of 20GB per second. But even at that, it would still take over one week of unbroken connection to get the transfer completed.

So in view of this, how would it be possible to get someone to maintain a one-week-hibernation just to read his brain data? Okay, what of in the event of demise (the brain normally dies within few minutes), wouldn't the brain be dead before the transfer is done? All these have been taken into account of, and an idea has been raise - what if the "data" is read by part? Or what if the brain is preserved cryogenically upon demise? At least, this would still buy time for some transfers to be done.

Okay, assuming the data is effectively read from the donor brain, what would be done with the data? Well, many options abound in this. This idea of a surrogate was raised - that is; uploading the data in a cybernetic organism (or even a biohybrid humanoid robot), so the person would still be preserved posthumously; but in a digital form. I'm sure you're aware of what a biohybrid humanoid robot is; but for the uninitiated; it is a type of robot that is designed with living tissues, just like is found in the human body, and they are modelled to mimic the biological humans to the minutest details. So by inference; it is just like transferring your consciousness from the "biological you" to the "digital you". Another option is this; stem cells can be harvested from the person's body (and we know that the stem cell can be fashioned to grow into any organ), and with the advances in cloning and tissue engineering; the biological body can be grown in the lab (but with a "tabula rasa" brain), and these brain data can be uploaded into this body. This is just like continuing your existence form the real "you" to "another you".

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But it is still worthy to note that this is still grouped under emerging technology, and it's still open to randomized trials for the best result, but sooner than later, the possibility in this would be made evident, and we can boldly say that "death has been cured".

Conclusion

Have you ever imagined having control over senescence and even death? Okay the truth is; advances are underway to place this into our hands. And we would decide our fate in relation to aging. But one thing should be noted: If advances are being made to extend our upper limit of age, the same advances should also keep us healthy through time - I mean, it would be awful to live so long in a vegetable state, lol.

Thanks for reading

References for further reading:

• Howstuffworks-digital immortality
• Concept of senescence
• Uploading consciousness to computer
• Digital immortality and singularity
• Transferring human consciousness
• Mutation accumulation theory of aging
• description of CRISPR

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