Living forever
We are a part of the mortal world and one who has come to this mortal world has to leave it after a time schedule but still human quest for physical or spiritual immortality is everlasting. Man has always a wish of an everlasting physical life in this physical world. In our life, we live and progress by remembering legends which we might not have seen and similarly we remember our near and dear ones whom we have seen or not seen and will never see after their leaving this mortal world. In the present life also we always live in our past memories and wait for the future which never comes as every present moment is becoming past and future can never be seen unless someone as per mythology is bestowed by GOD (i.e., in the form of a Brahamgyani) to do so.
Before the electronic age, everything about past was in books and pictures, being reproduced with time to time questioning about the authenticity of original version or contents. Science and technology developments in terms of electronics has made it possible to record things and retrieve them any time just like live. People may have to go from this mortal world but we can make them electronically immortal. Electronics has already played a great role towards making people digitally immortal by storing their images and sound through stills and moving/videos. In some cultures, you attain a kind of immortality by doing great deeds, which people will talk about long after you pass away. Several religions feature some concept of immortality – the body may die but some part of you will exist forever but electronics can make it possible to be truly immortal by making to live forever in recordings. That’s the basic concept behind digital immortality. Some futurists believe that we will uncover a way to extend the human lifespan indefinitely. They’ve identified several potential paths that could lead to this destination. Perhaps we’ll identify the genes that govern aging and tweak them so that our bodies stop aging once they reach maturity. New techniques may create artificial organs that combine organic matter with technology and then replace our original parts with the new and improved versions. In future, it may be possible to just dump our memories, thoughts, feelings and everything else that makes us who we are into a computer and live in cyberspace.
Electronic immortality
Electronic or digital immortality by the means of preserving information for future reconstruction will provide a cheap and affordable tool of immortality (hypothetically indefinite life extension) to anyone. Digital immortality means a version of life could live forever and family and friends not only will be able to interact with the digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform but it can also dole out advice. With a lot of data, processing power, storage capability, we continue to create our digital footprints, in next few years, millennials will have generated enough data to make it feasible. With enough electronic data, machine-learning algorithms can approximate any personality -or at least some part of it to bring the digital avatar. The theory that humans will eventually be able to upload our brains to computers has fascinated futurists and neuroscientists for years. By transferring our minds into machines we could live forever, unmoored from the feebleness of our physical bodies. The concepts of death and bereavement as we know them now would cease to exist. Though, it will be hard enough to create software agents that can carry on a natural-sounding conversation, personality of a specific person that can interact, communicate, and make decisions. But, artificial intelligence (AI) could help transform any professional expertise from a scattered written record to a representation of knowledge that people can interact with. Politicians, celebrities and other public figures could outsource some of their public interaction for preserving their digital versions. AI would allow us to consult experts with whom we’d never be able to meet in real life. AI will be used to extract the most unique, informative and valuable information about a person by using not only passive recording but a variety of tests for actively extracting information. The approach is to extracts as much information as possible with the current level of technology and combines the knowledge of neuroscience, information and art theories and uploading the results under a protocol. The thought of living forever thus will no longer will be a topic/subject of science fiction but may just become reality by the middle of this century by theorizing that humans could eventually become immortal, not with their bodies, but by merging their brains with androids.
Developments
These predictions may sound like they belong in a science-fiction film, but there are people all over the world who are contributing work that may one day allow humans to live forever. Some of the work relates directly to the goal as scientists have succeeded in altering genes that regulate aging. If it’s possible for humans, then we may be able to prevent our bodies from aging and live to ages far beyond the average lifespan of today. Projects like Blue Brain may eventually provide other insights into achieving digital immortality. The Blue Brain project’s goal is to reverse engineer the human brain and create a virtual model that would allow neuroscientists to test procedures and treatments on a digital brain to see how a real human brain might react. Perhaps through this work we’ll achieve a greater understanding of how the human brain works and its relationship to what we call the mind. Scientists foresee a diverse set of disciplines approaching the problem through different methods, some of which may ultimately converge and convert digital immortality from a concept into reality. With no exaggeration, it is estimated that mankind could have ‘electronic immortality’ by 2050. Many startups are already offering services to manage human digital legacies and have plans to help us live electronically forever. The Silicon Valley-startup Eterni.me aims to let people preserve their “most important thoughts, stories, and memories” in an artificially intelligent system that could ultimately communicate conversationally with others once its creator is gone. Such an avatar could both soothe the bereaved and allow future generations to know much more about their great-great-grandparents.
Acknowledgement: The use of information retrieved through various references/sources of internet in this article is highly acknowledged.
