I remember having discussed this topic several times. Intriguing
subject, sometimes poetic, sometimes scary: the pursuit of eternity! "Who
wants to live forever? What do we do with eternity? What do we do with the
infinite? I remember the Highlander theme :
At 2:38 Fred Mercury sings "touch my tears with your lips/touch my
world with your fingertips/and we can have forever/love forever/forever
(forever is our today).....A poetic ritual to obtain eternity.
I remember Dr Jekyil : something darker and shadowy yet.
Maybe dark is the vampire
eternity that communicates it and
maintains it through blood and bites
.... they infect victims with eternity!
Parallel to this artistic vision the fiction takes form of reality.Science and technology join
each other ,making fiction and speculation feasible goals. We cannot stop the
aging of our bodies, but we may transfer our lives for another container ! How?
By mapping the brain.
The question is,” what do we mean by "Life ?".The
neurosciences have accepted, with good margin of certainty, which aspects of
our personality, memory, knowledge, experiences, our consciousness, in short,
are directly linked to our brain connections established by synapses.Thus, a
comparison with something real:It would be like forging a "Google
Streetview” of the brain !
Specialized texts report that the brain mapping with unprecedented level
of details, could allow the ability to transform the synapses into data.So,
doing an "upload" of the contents of our brains it could transmit these data to other bodies,
not necessarily organic.That reminds me again of "The Bicentennial
Man".
Then "Life" is to make our mind immortal ? Those who, like me, who have had
intimate contact with Alzheimer's knows that this can be a really scary truth .
In 2009 was released in the United States the "Human Connectome
Project" , a more advanced stage
of the genome project, which aims to understand how the 100 billion neurons make
the 100 trillion possible connections between them, in which moments, how and
with what goals.This data will be available on-line for scientists from all
over the world.
At the moment, beyond the” Human Connectome Project”, “Genome” and
“Brain”, there are in the world 10,000 laboratories developing related
searches.The forecast is that we will have such mapping ready in 15 years.From
then on, further research will try to unravel how connections are made.The
forecast is that we will reach immortality (in that respect) in 2045.
Joining concepts that probably will guide the future, the next
generation of computers will be represented by the so-called "quantum computers".In addition to other
quality that we wont discuss here, the main advantage of the quantum computer
is speed. Our brain is able to Exchange signals at speed 150 m/s (meters per
second).For those who aren't familiar with these units, this equates to a speed
of 540 km/h.Compared with a computer, our brain is a turtle.
So imagine this exchange of signs made at the speed of light, i.e.,
300,000 km/s.
Another particularity of our brain's transference to another
"container" refers to the emotions.Instead of trying to describe an
emotion, or how you feel about something you may picture your mental state in
another person.In this respect the role of art as transmitting emotions would
have to be redefined .
Anyway, while in ancient times alchemists dealt with the youth elixir
and the philosopher's stone our “post modern alchemists” sublimate this elixir
in Informatics and nanotechnology.The notorious chips will form a new universe
redefining concepts of space, time, emotion and memory, confining them in a
cold database where a step or a hug or even the "Kiss of tears" sung
by Fred Mercury can be transmitted by a single laser beam.
Who wants to live forever?
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