How to Outsmart Your Full Body and Live Forever

Immediately after reimagining existing public services with private applications, death by hacking could be the last dream of the SiliconValley elite. Death is really the final boss for anyone who thinks that enough money and lines of code can solve anything, and damn it, they attack hard. In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged $ 3 billion towards a plan to cure all diseases by the end of the century.

“By the time we get to the end of this century, it will be quite normal for people to live to be 100, ” Zuckerberg said in 2016.

And, of course, science, medicine and more information about how body functions were already working, which might seem like a miracle for someone who lived centuries ago: the average life expectancy for someone born in the United States hasdoubled in just 130 years. 39. years in 1880 to 78 years in 2011. Thus, Zuckerberg’s prediction may be easier than ridding his platform of Russian bots. Longevity – and potential immortality – is a particularly popular obsession with the tech world and Silicon Valley billionaires who seem resentful that death will ever defeat them and that somehow future generations SHOULD be able to savor their immortal wisdom. even if their bodies are simply pulsing electrical impulses in the vessel, supported by regular infusions of monkey testicles (yes, this is the real thing that humans have been trying for a while).

The ultimate problem is that human bodies, those sad, drooping, failure-prone products of evolution, are simply not made for eternal life. People throughout history have tried, but garbage has always got in the way.

“We humans, as we are now, filthy sacks of blood and bones, are not really fit for immortality,” said Stephen Cave, a Cambridge University philosopher and author of Immortality: The Pursuit of Eternal Life and how it moves. ” Civilization , it told me. “So something really big has to happen if we’re going to [change that].”

But if you’re interested in giving it a try, oligarchs, wealthy madmen, and scientists throughout history provide some kind of foundation, and there is still a lot more in development. Below is a summary of the various approaches that have been used in the never-ending quest for the infinity of life.

Kill all diseases

Zuckerberg, along with his Silicon Valley friends at Google and 23andme, launched the Breakthrough Award in 2012 to celebrate and promote scientific innovation, including disease control and longevity.

He also launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which will donate $ 3 billion over ten years to basic medical research to cure disease. Some have argued that this approach is not the most effective, and that it is better to spend money on fighting individual diseases at a time, rather than on a widespread attack. For example, it cost $ 300 million to eradicate smallpox in less than 10 years .

There is a problem with this approach, according to Brian Kennedy, director of the Center for Healthy Aging at the National University of Singapore: even if you treat disease, you still cannot cure aging itself.

“We are not in the healthcare [in the medical community], we are in the treatment of the sick,” he said, pointing out that the goal should not be simply to give rich people access to medicines for any disease, but rather in a fundamental struggle. with “aging” itself. as a threat.

“Aging is the biggest risk factor for all of these out of control diseases,” he said. “It’s not just that a few billionaires are living longer. That’s about a million people living longer. ”

According to him, aging in itself creates risks, because the organs and systems of the body inevitably fail over time. Its center is exploring ways to stop aging at the enzyme level. One of the most promising is the TOR pathway, a type of cellular signaling that tells the cell to grow and divide or squat and induce stress responses. Scientists believe that changing this pathway can slow down aging.

“It’s a really powerful effect,” Kennedy said.

Once people understand this, he hopes his cause will be as vibrant and exciting as Zuckerberg’s quest for longevity.

“The most important thing we can do right now is to validate [the idea] that we can influence aging,” he said. “Once that happens, I think the level of interest will increase significantly.”

Biohacking will also open up new opportunities – and lead to intense ethical debate – about what people can go to to change their genetic code. Scientists, for example, are still scrutinizing Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology , which acts like a homing missile that tracks a specific strand of DNA and then cuts and inserts a new strand in its place. It can be used to change almost any aspect of DNA. In August, scientists for the first time in the United States applied gene editing technology in a human embryo to erase a hereditary heart disease.

Collection of young body parts

Throughout history, people have stuck with the idea that you can essentially fix or fill the human body with parts of other bodies and cheat death, like jailbreaking your iPhone so it can accept any software.

Take Serge Voronov, a Russian scientist who, at the beginning of the 20th century, believed that the gonads of animals contained the secret of prolonging life. In 1920, he tried this out by taking a piece of a monkey’s testicle and stitching it onto a human scrotum (although, it should be noted, not his own). The idea seemed to catch on: by the mid-1920s, according to Atlas Obscura , 300 people had had his procedure; at least one woman received a monkey ovary transplant.

“The sex gland stimulates brain activity, as well as muscle energy and love passion,” Voronov wrote in his book ” Life ” in 1920 ; Researching the means of restoring vitality and prolonging life . “He infuses into the blood stream a kind of vital fluid that restores the energy of all cells and brings happiness.”

In the end, Voronov built his own aviary for monkeys on his territory and stated that he was able to return 70-year-old young people to their vitality. He claimed that some of them would live to be 140 years old. At that time, he could charge an average annual salary for the procedure.

Voronov died in 1951, apparently never rejuvenated.

Monkey testicles are out of fashion, but unlike the good Dr. Voronov, the idea of ​​extracting body parts is still alive.

Trump’s surrogate, killer of onlookers and generally too rich man Peter Thiel spoke about his interest in parabiosis , the process of blood transfusion from a young man to reverse aging.

“I am studying parabiosis, which I think is really interesting. It was here that they infused young blood into older mice and found it had tremendous anti-aging effects, ” he told Inc. “It’s one of those very weird things when people did this research in the 1950s and then gave it up altogether. I think a lot of these things have been weirdly understudied. “

Research has shown that this may just be the latest snake oil tactic, although it targets crazy rich people who can’t help but be fascinated by the idea of ​​literally feeding youngsters.

It definitely didn’t work for Alexander Bogdanov, a science fiction writer, doctor and cybernetics pioneer who tried blood transfusions in the 1920s . He thought that if he carried out a series of blood transfusions to himself, he would become functionally immortal. This lust for blood met an arrogant end: he was eventually given a blood transfusion from a malaria patient. The patient survived but did not survive.

Reimagining the soul

Cave’s book breaks down the patterns of immortality throughout history into four classifications: the first surviving in the body includes all of those life-prolonging drugs and gene therapies described above. The second involves resurrection, an idea that has fascinated people throughout history, from the 18th century experiments by Luigi Galvani of running electricity through the legs of a dead frog, to recent attempts at cryonics, the process of freezing your body in the hope that medicine or future technology can bring you back. health. Some in Silicon Valley are interested in new versions of cryonics , but so far they don’t seem to be getting as much attention.

Cave’s third path involves gaining immortality through the soul, something that has led to religious wars and controlled the population for centuries. It is considered a fact that your physical body is a humiliating mess that will one day betray you, but that doesn’t matter as the soul is the real, eternal essence of who you are. But for now it is better to leave this to religious discussions, as science cannot seem to prove that it exists.

“If pieces of your brain are damaged, then pieces of you, the fundamental and deepest idea of ​​who you are, will disappear,” Cave said. He talks about the idea that if the soul is the indestructible essence of you, able to survive for eternity, why does our essence change when we suffer from brain damage or other personality-changing diseases? If your soul allows you to live forever, which version of you will live forever?

“It makes us wonder if your soul has to support all of these things somehow, why can’t your soul do it for you? If he can do it when your whole brain is missing, why can’t he do it when part of your brain is missing? “

But some technical experts argue that the nature of these projects will completely change the definition of the soul: not so much the ghostly essence of your connection with a higher power, but a specific set of brain signatures that are unique to you, a code that can be cracked. just like any other code.

“So, consider the modern soul as a unique neuro-synaptic signature that unites the brain and body through a complex electrochemical neurotransmitter flow. Every person has one, and they are all different, ” wrote Marcelo Glaser, a theoretical physicist, writer and professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College in April for NPR . “Can all this be reduced to information, for example, for copying or uploading to other substrates? That is, can we get enough information about this map of the brain and body to reproduce it on other devices, be it machines or cloned biological copies of your body? “

Google’s Calico Life Extension Project, launched in 2013 with a mission statement, calls aging “one of life’s greatest mysteries.” It is also a big mystery what exactly Calico did: the work of the company was shrouded in secrecy , which caused a lot of curiosity and frustration among the rest of the people working in the anti-aging field. For now, according to a New Yorker article in April, all that is known is that the company is tracking 1,000 mice from birth to death to look for “biomarkers” of aging, which can be described as biochemicals whose levels predict death. The company has invested in drugs that can help fight diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

Building a lasting legacy

The technical side of things brings us to Cave’s fourth path to immortality: legacy. For ancient civilizations, this meant creating monuments, making your living relatives repeat your name after you left, or carving names on the walls of tombs.

“If your name was pronounced and your monuments were still standing, they thought,” he wrote in his book, “then at least part of you is still alive.”

Today’s legacy looks different from giant stone shrines, but the ego behind it is likely comparable. The idea of ​​uploading consciousness to the cloud has moved from science fiction to possible science: Russian internet tycoon Dmitry Itskov launched Initiative 2045 in 2011, an experiment designed to make oneself immortal over the next 30 years by creating a robot that can hold a human being. …

“Various scientists call it uploading or mind transfer. I prefer to call it personality transfer, ” Itskov told the BBC last year.

Fears of an immortal technological planet

So here’s one of the obvious major challenges with Silicon Valley innovation, as with many other technological leaps into the cutting edge future: it can be too expensive for everyone to afford. Which, in turn, could mean that we will have a class of near-immortal or cloudy minds controlling humans tied to their terrifying analog bodies. The confusion of human / computer / nanotechnology parts will also open up an entire industry of new thinking about when someone stops being a “person” in general and remains just lines of code.

Kennedy said opening these options to everyone will depend on which line of research is most effective. If aging is treated as a disease (and healthcare in general is somehow made available to all), there is hope.

“The challenge is to find ways to improve health and bring it to everyone as quickly as possible,” he said. “If it’s drugs, it’s achievable. If it is several transfusions of young blood, it is less achievable. “

If all of this irritates you at the thought of techies creating their own super-race of “destroyers” immune to the torment of time and the limitations of the flesh, that’s understandable. But Cave said you might be inspired by the whole story of people who have been chasing extended lifespans, from ancient Egypt to people clinging to their diet and exercise throughout the 21st century.

“The only thing that unites all those who aspired to immortality,” he said, “is that they are now six feet lower, lifting daisies.”