Earlier this month, The New Yorker explored the tech industrys obsession with solving death.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT CORNETT FOR THE NEW YORKER <\/p>\n
Earlier this month,The New Yorkerpublished Silicon Valleys Quest to Live Forever, which explored the tech industrys obsession with solving death. On Facebook and Twitter, we asked readers to submit questions they had after reading the article. (Questions have been edited for clarity.) <\/p>\n
Do you think wealth will determine access to super-long lifespans? @smsBigBear <\/p>\n
At first, yes.Poor people usuallyhave more immediate concerns than worrying about where to get the best, most invigorating fractionated blood plasma. But wealth also determined access to the first personal computers (fifty-five thousand dollars in 1948), the first cellphones (thirty-nine hundred and ninety-five dollars in 1993)and the first Teslas (a hundred and nine thousand dollars in 2008).It may seem fundamentally unfair that billionaires will get the first fruits of Silicon Valleys longevity research. Another way to look at it, however, is that theyre subsidizing treatments that, if they succeed, will rapidly get much cheaper and become widely available. <\/p>\n
I was wondering why some of the very intelligent people you interviewed have so much faith that the human body and\/or mind can persist for hundreds of years, or even forever. I found it hard to identify anything humans have ever made or tinkered with that has lasted much longer than a few decades. Isnt creating some hardware or software that lasts for hundreds of years a precondition to achieving eternal manmade existence?Neelroop Parikshak <\/p>\n
Great point. It does seemlikely that the first android body your consciousness gets transferred to might turn out to bethe eight-track tape of consciousness repositories: buggy, cumbersome, and doomed to rapid replacement. If we cant figure outanenduring, unhackable storage mechanism for data, how can we hope to find a permanent resting place for the vastly more complex and multifarious connectome wiring our brains? <\/p>\n
Whats the most complex organism that has successfully been cryogenically frozen and reanimated (e.g., using methods like those of Alcor Life Extension Foundation)? Peter W. Knox <\/p>\n
Scientists havereanimated a tardigrade (a hardy .02-inch-long micro-animal known as a water bear or a pudgy wudgy) after thirty years in the deep freeze. But the tardigrade wasnt dead to begin with. Last year, the researchers who successfully froze a rabbit brain, preserving its synapses intact, won the prestigious Small Mammal Brain Preservation Prize. Just kidding. (I mean, there really is such a prize,worth$26,735,and they really did win it, but I wouldnt say that its all that prestigious outside of the fiercely competitive small-mammal-brain-preservation community.) Also, to prove that the brains connectivity had been preserved intact, the team had to slice the brain open to check. Bottom line:cryogenicfreezingis not a surefire Plan B. <\/p>\n
In your opinion, what is driving this need among billionaires and celebrities to live forever? Is it narcissism? Something else? Anonymous <\/p>\n
There may be a little narcissism in there, as well as somedenial that lifewhich is pretty good if youre a Silicon Valley billionairehas a terminus. But the main driver, I think, and the one that interested me most, was the deeply human impulse to ram through any boundary. Obviously, the ultimate boundary to our hopes and ambitionsand to everything else in the human experienceis death. A phrase I heard a lot was, If we solve this problem, we can solve all the other problems later. <\/p>\n
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The rest is here: <\/p>\n
Your Questions About Silicon Valley's Quest to Live Forever, Answered - The New Yorker<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Earlier this month, The New Yorker explored the tech industrys obsession with solving death.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY GRANT CORNETT FOR THE NEW YORKER Earlier this month,The New Yorkerpublished Silicon Valleys Quest to Live Forever, which explored the tech industrys obsession with solving death. Continue reading