Immortal Life, until now it was the talk of fantasy and science fiction. Death is something we all experience and have to come to terms with in life and this idea completely goes against nature, it completely opposes our concept of life as we all know it as it’s something that we all recognise will eventually come to an end. A lot of people have tremendous difficulty with the end of life, as they want to carry on living for as long as possible even if the means to do this appear to be mostly fiction right now, Russian billionaire Dmitri Itskov founded the 2045 Initiative with the aim of being able to transfer someone’s consciousness into a computer essentially allowing them to live on forever by the year 2045.
The main goal of the 2045 Initiative is “to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society”. (http://www.2045.com/) If the 2045 can achieve it’s main goal, it will change human life forever, but right now it’s unclear whether that could be for the worse or for the better. The 2045 initiative talks of using a multitude of different methods to achieve its goal throughout the next 20 years, for example “Avatar B: An Avatar in which a human brain is transplanted at the end of one’s life” This kind of idea has already made it into films, for example in Scarlet Johansson’s new film “Ghost In The Shell” which was based on a Japanese Manga series. The movie follows Major who is cyber enhanced to battle criminals after being saved from an accident.
If we can imagine this kind of life for ourselves and put into movies and books, perhaps it is possible to accomplish. There’s also a number of ethical issues involved, for example right now, if one dies and then gets transplanted it’s likely that they will suffer some kind of brain damage, but if we were to do it before actual death there’s also the issue of the procedure failing. If it were to fail, the subject would surely die. Would it really be right to go through with a procedure in which someone has a very serious risk of enduring a pretty gruesome death? In any case, right now this concept is merely fiction although in the coming years I’m sure some very extensive attempts will be made to try and make it fact, and I look forward to seeing how they work out.