A car is a machine made from a bunch of parts. If you could upgrade those parts bit by bit, a car could run forever.<p>You could look at the internet as a single machine made from a bunch of parts. Those parts are distributed all over the place - but still. And unlike a car, the parts of the internet do get upgraded bit by bit. The internet has been running non-stop for decades, with no end in sight.<p>You could regard dna-based life as a kind of machine - one machine, whose parts are the organisms which carry dna. These parts are distributed all over the place, and are continuously upgraded through evolution. The dna in every organism results from an unbroken chain of upgrades that goes back billions of years.<p>So by this definition, there are machines that go on without end. And if you could change your perspective, drop your identity as a human organism, and instead say "I am dna-based life", then you are already immortal. Congrats! :)
<a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2603&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+smbc-comics%2FPvLb+%28Saturday+Morning+Breakfast+Cereal+%28updated+daily%29%29" rel="nofollow">http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2603&#...</a><p>"Here lies humanity... Do not resucitate"
Ever since I read Tipler's wildly speculative book The Physics of Immortality <a href="http://amzn.to/MarYjA" rel="nofollow">http://amzn.to/MarYjA</a> (affiliate link) I've been a fan of this line of reasoning.<p>Critics say it's all pseudo-science, and they're right. but pseudo-science is not necessarily a bad thing. There's really not much difference in some smart guy thinking through what might happen in 50 years and some other smart guy speculating on how man might have lived 120K years ago based on a couple of bones and an arrowhead. Educated creative speculation is fun. It's not physics, but it's fun.<p>Having said that, my money is on 300-500 years as the time frame for consciousness transfer and the beginning of the singularity. These are just really difficult problems, and it's always very tempting to project out some great breakthrough within your own lifespan. My money is on a lot of "little" breakthroughs in both biology and information technology that take us in ways we can't predict right now, but which converge in some sort of Omega Point immortality. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point</a>
I think it's a bit premature to prognosticate consciousness transfer when we don't even have a good understanding (or even a definition) of what consciousness <i>is</i>.
"[..] by then we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots"<p>Even theoretically, how would it be possible to separate the "mind" from the body?
Future scientific predictions have an extremely high rate of over-estimating based on treands of the time, and then missing the real big things that actually will matter in the future.<p>I won't spoil my mind assuming immortality is even a distant possibility.
Sigh.<p>Not that I don't love the idea of revolutionary technology, but the very idea betrays what seems to me a fundamental misunderstanding:<p>Man, as in man<i>kind</i>, already <i>is</i> immortal. We seem to stand a decent chance of outliving our star, anyway.<p>The desire for one individual, by which we really mean the one ephemeral brain-state that happens to exist at this moment, never to cease to be seems positively juvenile. For life to be, change must happen; for change to happen, that which is must end. Demanding that thought continue to happen according to my design is a selfish idea of the mind that shouldn't make intuitive sense to anyone with a materialistic conception of consciousness.
It'll be interesting to see how many people would actually want to become immortal. For example a lot of religious people would be against it as they want to go to heaven or be reincarnated when they die. If you were trapped in poverty with no obvious way out you may not want to live forever. Even taking those factors out of your decision living forever isn't, I don't think, something a lot of people really want and it would introduce incredible challenges for mankind to overcome (population size).
2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal... unless, of course, we get hit by a solar flare, asteroid or some local disaster :-).<p>But seriously, we should create some redundancy or protection for our technological foundation before connecting to the Matrix...