Immortality – Take It, It’s Yours!

Immortality

Ah, immortality – the clandestine desire of the heart. If you ask somebody if they want to live forever, they will usually reply with the same prejudice they have been fed with – “We’re not supposed to live forever, everybody has to die at some point, it’s an awfully long time to be immortal and alone, yadah yadah yadah.” However, our natural instincts are wired to prioritise survival above our other needs. Hence, “yes, please.”

I’m a board member of a scientific organisation called the Lifeboat Foundation, which is dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards the Singularity.

It sounds totally cool, but actually… yeah, it’s pretty cool. However, even if I’m a board member, I’m a New Money Systems board member, which means that my contributions lie heavily on my expertise on new money systems. Despite this, being a member of this organisation has given me more insight on scientific advancements over the past decade. You’re probably wondering why I’m telling all of these to you right now.

It’s because there has been a dramatic increase of developments in the field of “anti-aging?” Am I coining it right? Anti-Aging? Anyway, it’s essentially the movement to reverse the aging process. And I’m not talking about some Fountain of Youth shit either. It’s really a scientific and academic way to Benjamin Button ourselves.

Benjamin Button

Just a few weeks ago, the Scientific American released an article stating that age reversal in human cells is possible. Why was I so surprised? Immortal creatures already live among us – lobsters, jellyfish, vampires, stuff like that. I was surprised because I know it’s not through cryogenics where you get to freeze somebody and automatically pause his or her aging process. Does that make any sense? Actually, the deal with cryogenics is this – Humans. Are. Not. Designed. To. Be. Frozen!

Yes, our DNA is not intended to be exposed to such extremely low temperatures for a predetermined amount of time. And don’t even mention the woman who survived after being frozen solid from Graveyard Shift.

Graveyard Shift

She’s just somewhat frozen, I guess. From what I heard, she had a lot of alcohol in her system. That’s why she survived the prolonged below zero temperatures. If you freeze somebody and unfreeze him or her sometime in the future, he or she will turn into mush because parts of his or her cells will crystalise and turn into goo when unfrozen. Yeap, that’s pretty gross.

In order for cryogenics to be successful, we need to accurately alter our DNA to accommodate such chemical change that would be induced by such stimuli. No doubt that with the advent of CRISPR, this is turning to be quite a rational mission. However, the repercussions in human evolution may be quite severe.

Is living forever really that bad? I’m not sure. I would love to be immortal, wouldn’t you? Albeit, the past impossibility of it didn’t hinder societies like the International Longevity Alliance to form and pursue immortality with crowdfunding projects to cure the “disease” of aging.

International Longevity Alliance

Come to think of it – now that there are scientific advancements suggesting that age can really be reversed, don’t that inspire a myriad of other possibilities? These can be our next step in evolution. Perhaps technological advancement isn’t the next step at all. Perhaps the next step is a new level of biological transcendence. Yey, immortality!

I leave you with the smooth Aubrey de Grey, an English author who aims to prolong our lives through medical technology. Grab some popcorn; here ya go: