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Surprising Science

Can Billionaires Achieve Immortality by 2045?

A young Russian entrepreneur is courting the world's richest men and women to fund his plans to make humans immortal. Called the 2045 Initiative, the quicker funding is found, the better. 

What’s the Latest Development?


Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov is courting the world’s richest individuals to help him in conquering death. Itskov, a 33 year-old, can afford to wait but the billionaires he approaches have an average age of 66, meaning they may be looking for shorter-term solutions to living longer—much longer. “Itskov expects the first fruits in about a dozen years, when a human brain is to be transplanted into a robot body. The resulting ‘avatar,’ as he calls it, will ‘save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged.'” Called the 2045 Initiative, it recently held a meeting in Moscow and opened office space in San Francisco. 

What’s the Big Idea?

Preserving the brain and placing it in a host container, so that the spark of consciousness could outlive the body’s organ failure, may be “just a way station to Nirvana, which would ultimately involve downloading the brain’s contents into a computer.” The concept of melding man and machine, and thereby preserving consciousness past physical death is known as the Singularity. “A brand new body can get crushed by a 500-pound anvil that may fall on it, as anvils are wont to do. Once it’s downloaded into a computer, your mind is safe from anvils, pandemics, and even planet-destroying asteroids (as soon as its mirrored onto interplanetary networks).”

Photo credit: Shutterstock.com



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