A member of the Russian Transhumanist Movement has claimed that humans could be made immortal with advanced technology sometime in the future.
Alexey Turchin, along with fellow transhumanist Maxim Chernyakov, have been developing a plan since 2014 known as "Classification of Approaches to Technological Resurrection". Their' plan C' to make humans immortal is fuelled by what is known as a Dyson Sphere.
The machine will operate by uploading every piece of information about you, including your personal and historical data, and rebuild you as a digital copy. Such digital data, along with advances in biological technology, could even see you regenerated as the same individual implanted in a much younger artificially manufactured version of your body.
Alternatively, your digital data could allow you to live your life over again, or be uploaded to a digital 'heaven', much like the famous 'San Junipero' episode of the TV series 'Black Mirror'.
Turchin has long been interested in immortality after an 11-year-old classmate of his died when he was at school.
The term 'Dyson Sphere' comes from a hypothetical megastructure proposed by the physicist Freeman Dyson in a 1960 scientific paper entitled "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation."
Dyson spheres are a huge network of satellites that encircle the Sun and use its energy for whatever needs required. It is believed by Turchin that such a sphere will be required to fuel the immortality machine as this is how much energy will be required to power a super-computer with such computational power.
Stephen Holler, an associate professor of physics at Fordham University, is one of those skeptical of the project. He said:
"I don't think you could subject somebody to the same developmental conditions they had in life, because that presupposes you know all their developmental conditions, from the guy who picked on that person that day when they were very young to what day the person received that award. There are many things we don't know that historically moulded the way a person's life turned out. Those aren't part of any record, making it a very hard thing to resurrect somebody."
Kelly Smith, professor of philosophy and biological sciences at Clemson University, also thinks any such project would face insurmountable challenges, not only from a technological perspective. She said:
"All of humanity would have to work on it for 100 years. Who's gonna want to devote their whole life to building something that will benefit neither them nor their children, nor their children's children, nor their children's children's children, but humans living 1,000 years from now?"
Transhumanists are also looking at other ways to greatly extend human-life, even indefinitely, including advances in biological science that end ageing. This is far more likely to emerge in the next few years than anything as fantastical as Turchin's machine. Already, scientists are uncovering the secrets to the aging process and developing ways in which body-parts can be regenerated. Some serious scientists even predict that life could be extended to 100 or 150 years within a few generations.
[h/t: Popular Mechanics]
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