Now this little poem does give away the end of this article.

But I will insist you read on as the body is what will open your eyes to reality and by the time you do reach the end of this article you might have changed your decision.

No body wants to die. I hope we have a consensus on this?

I hear a resounding YES!!

Except from people who have suicidal tendencies for various psychological or health reasons.

They should either rethink their life or go ahead with the one they have decided for themselves, since I am not here to discourage anyone from anything. Period.

But then they will not be reading this article anyways. So.

For as long as humans have existed they have been smitten by the supernatural powers of immortality. So much so that they have portrayed their “Gods” as someone who is immortal.

If HE/SHE had any other powers was not that important.

His/Her immortality was what made them Gods and mortality well made us Human.

The cliched statement ” One who has been born has to die” has been the center of our existence.

Adam Leith Goffner, author of The Book of Immortality says, We should see existence for what it is: composed of as many summers as winters, of both sweetness and tragedy, of beauty pageants as well as degenerative diseases. Why prolong it? We’ve all been granted a life’s time. Ephemeral though it may be, that’s all we get. It’s a brief, extraordinary moment. Let’s make the most of this séjour while it lasts.”

Well that is soon going to change.

Yes!

We are stepping into a new world where death and disease will be a thing of the past.

We will have a choice to decide our own life spans.

But why would anyone decide to live less when they can live…endlessly!

The answer is not that easy to answer.

When you will be served the fabled red pill of endless life you will have these 4 options.

1. Endless Human life with natural ageing
2. Endless Human Life with Endless youth with natural ageing
3. Transhumanism ( Human-Machine interface) with natural ageing
4. No ageing and Digital Immortality

These four options are , as we speak, subjects of fiction. and many dismiss them as unachievable.

They are those who live under a rock and have not seen autonomous driverless cars, unmanned attack airplanes, unmanned submarines and space probes reaching the edge of our Milky Way.

These things were a subject of fiction a few decades ago and now….here we are….seeing them.

So, its up to you to decide if its fiction and will remain fiction or not!

So lets begin with our choices.

 

Endless Human life with natural ageing

The current average U.S. life expectancy is 79 years and it is gradually rising. As of 2019, there were an estimated 72,000 centenarians living in the U.S.; the 2020 census officially counted 80,139, and the 2010 census had 53, 364. So people are living longer , as the numbers prove.

Much can be attributed to medical advances to address cancer and other potentially fatal conditions. It has been hypothesized that a cancer cure adds at least 3 years to the life. Such small yet meaningful treatments are fruitful in increasing the life expectancy of the general population.

Humans have  made tremendous progress in increasing life expectancy  over the past century but as a result we have a population that’s living older and older which puts them at risk for a number of different age-related diseases .

So ironically Aging in and of itself is now becoming the most important risk factor.

Some body has taken note of that and now there is immense research on how to….slow down ageing!

Slowing the pace of aging eventually also inhibit the onset of age-related diseases, delivering not only quantity but also quality of life. The longer people live healthy lives the less time they’ll spend living with illness toward the end of their lives, thus making the whole process meaningful.

“Delayed aging is about adding healthy life years rather than disabled life years,” Dana Goldman, director of the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California.

Some of the nation’s brightest minds and the deepest pockets have declared an all-out war against aging.

Google has made significant investment in Calico, the California Life Company, to advance research into new approaches for extending life. Its main focus will be on biotechnology and will focus more on life extension than disease fighting.

They are aiming at slowing the ageing process. But we will age nonetheless.

And eventually, with age will come its baggage. Disease, Senility, reduced cognition, failing muscle tone, withering memories, incontinent activity, increased dependence on kids/grand-kids/great-grand kids,  lonely years in nursing homes and eventually extended end-of-life care on ventilators with tubes pushing and pulling liquids in and out of your body, small chips implanted into the heart making it beat, neural chips keeping your brain functions going and artificial kidneys filtering your blood.

There will be robots taking care of the elderly and they will be the only ones for your emotional support (which by then robots will have in their protocols)

For those who are not at the end of their lives will have exoskeletons supporting them in their mobility and everyday chores like doing groceries and doing the gardens. Small inconspicuous robots will run and hover around the house taking care of the daily chores of cleaning and cooking. They will pills designed to take care of any deficiencies that might occur and to take care that no cancers develop.

Having all said and done , bottom line is, YOU WILL AGE!

And become weak. And even after the  best possible facilities that money can buy for you by the time you are 120 or 130 or 150 you will be reduced to a pile of flesh and bones with tubes in every orifice of your body and more chemicals/drugs in your blood than its normal ingredients.

Even at that time, death will not come to pick you up.

But is that the way you would want to stay for ever?

 

Endless Human Life with Endless youth with natural ageing

So I believe its clear that mere ageing will not lead you to a green pasture of happiness. On the contrary it will be a bigger sorrow than a shorter life.

Suddenly dying young sounds much better than dying very old!! Things will become clear , keep reading!

Somewhere somehow envisioned this possibility and knowingly or unknowingly started working on it.

And still is.

The quest for eternal youth is probably longer than the quest of eternal life.

You must have heard of a lady who used to drank small amounts of gold to stay young for ever.

Well she didn’t. But, at least she tried!

Nowadays the approach is more scientific, though it was not always the case.

Stanford researchers have shown the joining of circulatory systems (known as parabiosis) between old and young mice to be effective in rejuvenating organs, muscles and stem cells.

Can that work in humans as well?

You may ask, jumping out of your chair.

It has been tried long long back by one,  Andreas Libavius, a physician who in 1615( yes ! almost 400 years ago)  proposed connecting the arteries of an old man to those of a young man. He hoped that the fountain of youth will flow from the young to the old and all his weakness will be dispelled. The results of that experiment are not known.

But had it been good it would have been a breakthrough of a millenia and we would all be young.

But we are not!

As we speak  similar things are being done elsewhere in the world.

The secret of Youth in the Vein

A clinic in San-Fransisco conducted a trial where over 100 patients above the age of 60 years were given two and  a half liter of FFP( Fresh frozen Plasma) taken from young people. And the Scientist, Jesse Karmazin,32, trained in Stanford, who conducted it says that the results are promising.

The secret of Youth in the Air

Scientists from Tel-Aviv University say they’ve successfully reversed the aging process of elderly people through “oxygen therapy” in a first-of-its-kind study. They believe they have found the Holy Grail for staying young forever.

 

Lets assume that by a stroke of serendipity the elixir of eternal youth is found tomorrow.

And we can all have fit bodies devoid of any disease for the next 100 years starting from tomorrow( though its too farfetched to imagine that everyone will have access to that kind of treatment because only the super rich will be able to afford such things and only after a decade or so will it percolate down to general population who might again not be able to buy it. )

but for the sake of science and hypothesis lets assume that you and me can buy it tomorrow.

Now before you rejoice that we have beaten ageing and start imagining that you have escaped disease, senility, reduced cognition, failing muscle tone, withering memories, incontinent activity, increased dependence on kids/grand-kids/great-grand kids,  lonely years in nursing homes, eventually extended end-of-life care on ventilators with tubes pushing and pulling liquids in and out of your body, small chips implanted into the heart making it beat, neural chips keeping your brain functions going and artificial kidneys filtering your blood, I am sorry to burst your bubble of happiness.

Though you may be able to live young forever but there is a thing known as generation gap. Have you ever imagined why your parents cannot use the gadget that you think is the simplest one on the planet? Why cannot your grandpa use the simple tv remote when all there is to it are 5 buttons. Why cannot you accept the concepts of your grandparents when they tell you that in their times things were done in a particular way?

That’s called a Generation Gap.

As you grow old your brain grows to follow certain patterns in a  certain way. It doesn’t want to change and if new things are imposed on it may or may not be ready to accept them.

Thats why the biggest qualities that one can have today are

1. Ability to learn new things.
2. Ability to learn them fast.

If you lack either of these two qualities who are bound to become a relic yourself joining the endless ones that roam the earth these days.

Disclaimer: I do not intend to state that old people cannot learn newer things. They can. But we are talking about the majority.

The hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, shrink with age. These areas are important for learning, memory, and executive functions. As a result, older adults may have more difficulty encoding new information and updating their existing knowledge^.

With grown age human tend to have  less synaptic plasticity, which is the ability of synapses to change their strength and structure in response to new experiences.

The blood flow in the brain may decrease with age, which can affect the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the brain cells.

Now you may argue that eternal youth will grant us cure against all these things and you may be right. or wrong. Time will tell.

Brain is still one organ of the body that we know very little about.

So i will assume that brain will continue to work as it works as of now. Thus entailing that with each passing 50 years of your life you will be nothing but an outdated bag of information. Much like you learnt DOS and now everything works on Python. Get the drift?

You might argue that you can learn new things since you will have endless life to do that. But would you really want to do that? Delete your brain after every 50 years or even earlier only to fill it up with new information which might be confounding with the one already in the system?

I will leave you with that question to answer.

As your answer will decide at what point of time you choose to not update yourself and that day will become the day when you choose to take the different road into the woods. The one which ends!

 

Transhumanism ( Human-Machine interface) with natural ageing

If you have been saving your information on your cell phones and data clouds ( much like everyone of us), if you have a pacemaker implanted into your chest sending excitatory signals to your heart periodically, sport carbon-based body modifications called “tattoos,” have replaced worn out joints with ceramic alloy equivalents and as of today have a NeuraLink chip inside your brain you my friend are already a Transhuman.

Congratulations on that!

A Transhuman is any human whose any aspect of humanity can potentially be enhanced and replaced by its technological equivalent. These enhancements can be derived from nanotechnology, biotechnology,
information technology and cognitive science, via tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, genetic and stem cell engineering, and cryogenic freezing.

Transhuman is a stage of evolution of Humans to Posthumans, Human 2.0.

Nick Bostrom, the lead scientist on the subject,  defines a posthuman as a being that possesses at least one general capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human being without recourse to technological means.

You can understand the concept of a transhuman in the following examples:

• A kidney failure patient whose survival depends upon endless dialysis sessions or a transplant gets an artificial kidney which is computer controlled and put inside the body which now functions better than a biological kidney. This patient is now a transhuman.
• A patient who has been paralyzed waist down for decades is offered an exoskeleton that can be hooked up to his spinal cord remnants and he gets to walk after decades. He will be a transhuman.
• A blind man who lost his eyes in a  freak accident years ago is offered a digital eye that can help him see his daughter , his mom and his life again. He is a transhuman.
• A war veteran who has lost his legs to a mine explosion gets a pair of mechanized legs that can outperform a normal human athlete. He is a transhuman.
• A cardio-pulmonary failure patient gets a complete cardio-pulmonary apparatus that is more compact and efficient than what we have biologically becomes a transhuman.
• A paraplegic or someone with a cerebral palsy gets to walk again with mechanized prosthesis is a transhuman.
• A person who today received a Neuralink Chip is a transhuman.

 

The quest of replacing almost all body parts with machines that can outperform the naturally evolved has been there for centuries. Though it has been possible recently to find such superior alternatives to normal biological systems.

Come to think of it , such a method seems a pathway to literal immortality if we are able to replace “all” body parts with mechanized units.

But we as humans are not all blood and bones. Th brain, yes the brain again, is what makes the blood and bones a human. The genius of human evolution is the brain! one which we have not been able to find  a replacement for even after so much computing development.

How Much Computational Power Does It Take to Match the Human Brain?

Many scientists are working on this question as they believe that once we know the exact specifications then that can help us replace the human brain.

An experiment done in 2013, used a supercomputer to calculate the human brains computational ability. It took 40 minutes with the combined muscle of 82,944 processors in K computer to get just 1 second of biological brain processing time. While running, the simulation ate up about 1PB of system memory as each synapse was modeled individually.

We are , nonetheless making advancements in the right direction.

Earlier brain was thought to work on a 1/0 model. New research suggests our brains use quantum computation.

Quantum Computing could be the answer for unlocking the secrets of the brain.

Till the day it is done and we can replace the human brain with a ultracompact super-efficient computer we are still living with a biological brain.

We can replace 99% of the human body with machines and make interfaces between neurons and machines so that the unit works seamlessly but we will have that 1% biological component that will be the power station of the 99% of the mechanized body.

It will age , and will not be upgradeable.

Which will take us back to the second condition, Endless Human Life with Endless youth with natural ageing,

And its implications.

Though people might try to find a hint of immortality in being a transhuman but it is unclear that a
vastly extended lifespan would be a benefit to the enhanced.

 

No ageing and Digital Immortality

Well digital immortality is the conversion of your consciousness into a software which can then be saved, transferred, downloaded, modified and edited as a computer program.

(Remember Neo in Matrix!)

You get the idea.

Now this is what will truly make us immortal.

I cannot say it will make humans immortal because once this happens, humans as we know them will cease to exist.

Which raises the next question, about personal identity!

Once you loose your physical body and are just a program uploaded onto a computer do you still remain, you?

Yes and No!

With the advancement of stem cell technology we can now grow artificial skin to cover any mechanized endoskeleton that we want to make (if we want to make it, that is!) to make us look more human. (Remember Terminator 2!)

So physical form will not be a problem.

There are bigger concerns. I might want to look like Elon Musk much like a million other people. That will raise the problem of identity! Then there will be other who might want to keep changing their identity for some reasons. A woman today a man tomorrow!

And then there will be those who will want to stay as a software and not exist physically.  They might want to live only in programs and endless communications routes that will engulf the earth sooner than we think(think StarLink satellite systems). They will present at more than one place at once. they will travel from earth to moon in seconds. They will be the ones who will become interstellar and interplanetary in the true sense.

As an upload you will be truly immortal. You could enhance your self in any way possible by adding code to your software or might want to take off some code that gives your personality some unwanted trait.

All this sounds very fiction.

But I have always believed, ” If one man can think of an idea, the other is already working on it to make it a reality.”

Off course there will be no human body to age so you need not worry about aging. And the brain? Well the world’s best computers will be your brain and the data cloud will be your memory. You will have access to all the information in the world in seconds.

But considering all this, you will have to decide. Are you alive?

 

The Money

Well money makes the world go around!

So deeper your pockets the quicker the access to all these options when they do become available.

(Watch the Amazon Prime series Upload)

So, as we navigate the potential paths towards immortality, it’s clear that the pursuit of endless life comes with its own set of challenges, choices, and consequences. The whimsical dreams of living forever, free from the grasp of time and mortality, often fail to consider the practicalities and trade-offs involved.

One cannot help but wonder, in this quest for eternal life, who holds the power, and more importantly, who can afford it?

As advancements in science and technology open up possibilities for extending life, the reality is that these options might be reserved for the privileged few, leaving the majority to face the inevitable cycle of life and death.

The irony lies in the fact that while the wealthy may fret over the intricacies of immortality, the less fortunate find solace in the simplicity of a normal lifespan.

It becomes almost comical to imagine a world where the poor can peacefully accept the inevitability of death, while the rich grapple with the complexities of how to navigate an eternity.

As we contemplate these fantastical scenarios and the potential triumph over death, let us not lose sight of the present, where life’s brevity gives it meaning. The pursuit of endless life may be a fascinating concept, but the value of each fleeting moment, with its joys and sorrows, should not be overshadowed by the allure of an eternal existence that remains uncertain and complex.

In the end, the question lingers — is the pursuit of immortality worth sacrificing the essence of what it means to be human?

The article invites you to ponder this question, recognizing that while the desire to live forever is deeply ingrained in human nature, the journey of life, with all its imperfections, is what truly defines our existence.