Health: Immortality

24 videos from the Singularity Summit 2009, includes talks by Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and other Singularity notables.

BY 2040 YOU WILL BE ABLE TO UPLOAD YOUR BRAIN... or at least that's what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we're on the brink of a new age -- the 'singularity' -- when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) -- and even live forever. Is there sense to his science -- or is the man who reasons that one day he'll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

Mr Kurzweil calls his theory the Law of Accelerating Returns. Writing in The Sun, Mr Kurzweil said: "I and many other scientists now believe that in around 20 years we will have the means to reprogramme our bodies' stone-age software so we can halt, then reverse, ageing. Then nanotechnology will let us live for ever.

Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey has famously stated, “The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today …whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.”

"In principle, if you understand the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely," says Cynthia Kenyon, biochemist at the University of California at San Francisco. In her lab she has increased the life span of tiny worms called Caenorhabditis elegans up to six times their normal lifespan by suppressing a single gene. This regulator gene, named daf-2, in combination with other genes, appears to control an entire cluster of genes that direct aging not only in worms, but in similar genetic pathways in flies, mice and, possibly humans. This is the equivalent of people living for 400 years, and the good news is that the worms stay young for most of their extended lifespans.

This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough -- a few decades perhaps -- the technology will surely catch up.

A mere two percent drop in hydration will make your short-term memory so fuzzy that you’ll be unable to remember your friends’ names, have trouble doing basic math, and forget where you put your keys. Since seventy-five percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated, it’s no wonder people are losing their minds. Yet, the solution is so simple: cool, clean water. Drink eight to ten eight-ounce glasses a day of pure distilled water, and you’ll be amazed at how many ailments disappear. Don’t worry; you’re not demented -- just dehydrated!

The amazing Peter Ragnar is a modern-day shaman, Taoist wizard, natural life scientist, and self-master par excellence. He lives in the Tennessee mountains with his wife, and he claims to be a “senior citizen” but refuses to give away his age because he “doesn't believe in it.” He does strenuous two-hour strength-training workouts seven days a week and performs record-breaking feats. He's been a martial arts practitioner for over fifty years, and he has developed his own version of Taoist energy practice called “Magnetic Qi Gong,” which he claims is the key to immortality. He has healing powers and is renowned for his clairvoyant and telepathic abilities. He lives on a strict diet of raw foods and juices and has spent a lifetime studying the relationship between the body and the mind at all levels. And his most remarkable attainment is his profound awakening to the energetic dimension, or “bio-electric-magnetic” field, of life. While this dimension of reality and experience is one that many have heard of, it's a world that Peter actually lives in.

In recent years, the TED conference has gained a reputation for blissfully big ideas buoyed by unrelenting optimism. So few conference goers were prepared for venture capitalist John Doerr to choke up with emotion as he kicked off the second day of talks on Mar. 9.

Ray Kurzweil sees a radical evolution of the human species in the next 40 years. The merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene research and nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality.