Preserving youth seems to be a trend that never goes out of style. Advances in plastic surgery have been able to take a person back 20 or 30 years physically. In 1513 the first European explorer to come across Florida, Juan Ponce de Leon, was in search of the Fountain of Youth. And it seems like the search never quite stopped.
Yet aging is inevitable, every breathe we take is one closer to our last. Each step we take is one closer to death, but with technology ever advancing some aim to defy death.
Dmitry Itskov believes he is doing just that. The Russian billionaire entrepreneur and media mogul initialized the 2045 Initiative several years ago with a group of scientists and engineers. The initiative is planned to work in stages. By 2020, the end of the first stage, android avatars controlled by “brain-computer” interface would be available, which is not far off from robotics used today. But by 2025 the avatars will be able to be linked to a human brain whose body is no longer functional.
The third stage, between years 2030 and 2035, promises a computer model of the brain and human consciousness being transferred to an artificial carrier. Here is where true cheating death begins. But what is consciousness and how can one capture it after an individual is meant to expire? For many consciousness is the animation of the person, the soul. While science recognizes consciousness, no documented science has been able to find a way of capturing it.
The fourth and paramount stage is proposed to be reached by 2045. The goal of 2045 is substance-independent minds with bodies that vastly transcend anything remotely considered humanly possible. These bodies are described as holograms featuring controlled matter.
“... Humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species,” boosts the 2045 Initiative website.
The concept was first pitched to the richest of the rich, it was rumored that letters were being sent to the list of the Forbes 40 richest people in the world first. Yet the website boasts 41,378 members have already been enrolled.
Will this be the norm in the next three decades, or is man playing with serious fire? Since the beginning of time man’s sole means to immortality has been submission to the spiritual path, is the 2045 Initiative a way around that? or yet another example of the hubris of the human race. Only time will tell.
Erry
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