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EXCERPT: A physicist trained at Caltech and Cambridge, he sees immortality as a mathematical challenge. To solve it requires first asking why we age. “The canonical answer,” Fink explained, “is that aging is inevitable and a fundamental condition of life.” Every organism degrades over time and eventually breaks down. End of story. “But the story’s much weirder than we think,” Fink said. In a recent paper, he used math to demonstrate that “aging can be favored by natural selection.” That’s a shocking insight: It means that the first forms of life, which started billions of years ago, likely didn’t die....

When it comes to regeneration, some animals are capable of amazing feats. If you cut off a salamander’s leg, it will grow back. When threatened, some geckos drop their tails to distract their predator, only to regrow them later. Other animals take the process even further. Planarian worms, jellyfish, and sea anemones can actually regenerate their bodies after being cut in half. Led by Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Mansi Srivastava, a team of researchers is shedding new light on how animals pull off the feat, along the way uncovering a number of DNA switches that appear to...

Ray Kurzweil, Google's chief futurist, laid out what he thinks the next few decades will look like in an interview with Playboy. Kurzweil is one of the biggest believers in The Singularity, the moment when humans — with the aid of technology —will supposedly live forever. He's chosen the year 2045 because, according to his calculations, "The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today." But even before 2045, Kurzweil thinks we could begin the deathless process. "I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when...

 Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil is promising that with robots in our brains, we'll be godlike.  Yes, but what tawdry gods we'd be. Okay, all I have to do is realize that I'm god, or as a technological solution to the fundamental ontological question "why?", get one of Kurzweil's gizmos implanted in my skull. But what a poor job I'm doing from my shabby Mt. Olympus. Just take a look around you, a world of repression & murder, but with no excuse, with a sufficient amount of everything for everybody to have enough of everything. Enough agriculture, manufacturing &...

Scientist claims immortality within reach A visiting American research scientist says he is close to discovering a 'cure' for ageing, that he could have a drug ready for testing by the end of next year. Molecular Biologist Dr Bill Andrews told TV ONE's SUNDAY programme that humans shouldn't have to suffer from the ravages of ageing. He says that ageing is a disease that should, and could be cured. His research centres around Telomeres - small caps at the end of our chromosomes that become shorter every time our cells divide. When they become critically short, we age and eventually...

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, plans to live to be 120. Compared with some other tech billionaires, he doesn’t seem particularly ambitious. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000; Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible,” and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to someday “cure death.” These titans of tech aren’t being ridiculous, or even vainglorious; their quests are based on real, emerging science that could fundamentally change what we know about life and about death. It’s hard to believe, though, since the...

After reading Jon Gabriel’s recent piece regarding funerals, it occurred to me that ever since I learned about mortality (at about age four), I’ve wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I’ve kept in shape and have always enjoyed lots of butter (I knew it was good for me before Time announced it!). But I still know that, in the end, death is a place where we are all equal. Science and technology will eventually find a way for people to live a very long time, if not “forever.” The first to benefit will be the very wealthy, but the...

In certain schools of Christian thought, hell is not everlasting, but a more painful form of purgatory. M any Christians presume that hell is a place where brutally painful punishments are inflicted on evildoers for an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, amount of time in the afterlife. Think of a medieval torture chamber with no exit — or fire extinguishers. But this, as I argued in a recent column, makes no theological sense. If morality is good, then doing the right thing must be its own reward and doing the wrong thing must be its own punishment. To think that a...

A pair of advocates—they do legitimate research too, but their ardor is so intense, it’s hard to call them scientists—believe that they will, within their lifetimes, make ours the first generation of humans to live forever. + Their quest is elegantly laid out in The Immortalists, a new documentary making its way around the film festival circuit. The Immortalists follows the triumphs and tragedies of three years in the lives of William H. Andrews and Aubrey de Grey, two men who prove just as interesting as the work they’re doing. The Immortalists is really a film about death, not life,...

Eight-year-old Gabby Williams weighs only 11 pounds. The tiny girl from Billings, Mont., still looks like an infant and needs to be cared for as if she is a newborn, with her mother and father changing her diapers and feeding her multiple times a day. Her mother, Mary Margret Williams, told ABCNews.com that Gabby hasn't changed much over the years. In fact, her skin still feels like a baby's and her hair is still fine-textured. "She has gotten a little longer and we have jumped into putting her in size 3-6 month clothes instead of 0-3 months for the footies,"...

How's this for a weekend conference: Some of the smartest people in the world are gathering in New York to try to figure out how to build lifelike copies of humans ... to be eventually uploaded with the contents of a real human brain. It's the brainchild of a Russian multimillionaire, Dmitry Itskov. ... And he says he's perfectly serious, and that it could be accomplished by 2035. Crazy? The New York Times gave Itskov a front-page profile on its Sunday Business page a week and a half ago. Imagine this ... a digital copy of your brain in a...

This article was posted on 04/01/2013 Russian billionaire’s plan for immortality by 2045 includes turning us into cyborgs Technology may be advancing, but it doesn’t change the fact that the human body is limited. Eventually, human beings die.  Maybe immortality sounds like science fiction, especially when thinking about cyborgs, avatars, and robots, but for one Russian man, living forever in a machine’s body is the future, and it’s not so far away. After Dmitry Itskov made a fortune as founder of a web publishing company, New Media Stars, he began thinking about the meaning of life and consciousness. Last February, Itskov gathered...

As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die? My plan is to stick around. We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy. To clarify, you’re predicting your immortality. The problem is I can’t get on the phone with you in the future and say, “Well, I’ve done it, I have lived forever,” because it’s never forever. You have described microscopic nanobots of the future that will be...

If Dmitry Itskov's 2045 initiative plays out as planned, humans will have the option of living forever with the help of machines in only 33 years. It may sound ridiculous, but the 31-year-old Russian mogul is dead serious about neuroscience, android robotics, and cybernetic immortality. He has already pulled together a team of leading Russian scientists intent on creating fully functional holographic human avatars that house artificial brains which contain a person's complete consciousness - in other words, a humanoid robot. Together, they've laid out an ambitious course of action that would see the team transplant a human brain...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is offering money to researchers looking at identifying and controlling timing mechanisms in cells, including those of the human body. The blue sky gazing loon-collective notes that no single "master switch" has been found to control genes' activities. But it hopes that the "Biochronicity" programme will find a way to understand and predict "temporal features of biological systems". The four-year programme will start by identifying "episequences and validation in experimental biological systems". After two years, DARPA hopes to move to Phase II, which aims to conduct Live Fire Tests. Should the research prove...

What happens when you die? The Bible uses the word death in different senses. Jesus said: “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28). Also in Revelation 20:6, John speaks of a “second death,” apparently distinguishing it from the first death or the usual understanding of death. It is important to note that the only way to escape the second death and Hell is through the Lord Jesus Christ (Jn 11:26). Make sure to be in on that one! Now...

Scientists claim to be a step closer to reversing the ageing process after rejuvenating worn out organs in elderly mice. The experimental treatment developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School turned weak and feeble old mice into healthy animals by regenerating their aged bodies. The surprise recovery of the animals has raised hopes among scientists that it may be possible to achieve a similar feat in humans – or at least to slow down the ageing process. An anti-ageing therapy could have a dramatic impact on public health by reducing the burden of age-related health problems, such as dementia, stroke...

Immortality! It has been “brought to light” by Jesus Christ and his gospel (2 Tim. 1:10). Eternal life — an immortal existence — is offered freely to the lowest of sinners who reach out and take hold of the Savior by faith. Christ himself said, “For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day”(John 6:40). This must be underscored in the Church today; it is a point at which multitudes stumble. The eternal life given by our Lord is...

Of all the religious traditions which stand in the way of understanding the teachings of Jesus and the apostles is the one which substitutes the Platonic concept of the soul for the truth of Scripture. Plato’s concepts began to dominate Greek culture in the fourth century BC, and are still popular today. In most any university library you will find many more books on Plato than you will on Jesus. Plato held that “souls” are a part of the invisible and permanent realm and are not affected by the change and decay of the visible world; therefore they are immortal....

Being a person who believes the words of God’s Anointed One, Jesus, and whose blessed hope is in the resurrection from the dead at the last day, I could be called a “resurrection oriented Christian. In my visits and study of the various denominations of Christendom over many years I have found that the resurrection is no longer the central and main message but is given lip-service in most church rituals of worship. The resurrection truths as spoken of by Jesus seems only to be expounded upon in some detail on the day called “Easter,” and hardly ever related to...