Society

The Immortality Code

The science of cryonics claims that if you can freeze a dead man at ultra-low temperatures quickly, before the essential brain structures have degenerated, it will one day be possible to bring him back to life.

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The Immortality Code
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"Being born is not a crime, so why must it carry a death sentence?"

-- Robert Ettinger, head of Cryonics Institute, a US-based organisation which promises to freeze your corpse and bring it back to life when the right technology to do that is available. (There's a membership fee discounton offer till March 2000.)

From Ashwatthama in the Mahabharata to Highlander: The Raven (Tuesday nights on axn), we humans have always dreamt, worried and fussed about life without end. To many, it's a terrifying prospect; to others, a liberating one. And to scientists, it's a grandly juicy problem to crack.

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Here's the state of play. The science of cryonics claims that if you can freeze a dead man at ultra-low temperatures quickly, before the essential brain structures have degenerated, it will one day be possible to bring him back to life. The body is kept suspended at liquid nitrogen temperatures, a point where molecular physical decay completely stops. The medical procedures to bring the person back to continue with his life have still to be developed. But, till date, whole insects, certain eels, many types of human tissue including brain tissue and a few small mammalian organs, have been frozen and revived. Indeed, hundreds of human embryos have been frozen and revived.

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"Granted, reviving a mature adult is different from reviving an embryo," says the institute. "But not in principle. Progress is taking place, freezing methods are improving and successes are accumulating. We have little reason to doubt that the technology of the near future will be equal to the task." A cheaper option is "neuro-suspension", where they freeze only your head, in the hope that the rest of you can be cloned and attached to your noggin sometime in the future. This is cheaper, because a head takes up less space than the full body, so less liquid nitrogen, less power consumption etc. What cryonicists are banking on to be able to re-incarnate you is "nanotechnology", a nascent science that aims to build molecule-sized robots that will repair virtually any damage to any physical object by manipulating individual atoms. These nano-robots will build your brain tissues and muscles back, and you'll be towelled dry and let loose on the face of the earth again.

Will your life insurance company then want all its money back?

Jokes apart, however science-fictional all this sounds, it could happen. There are too many things around us today, the prospects of which we relegated to the realm of the impossible with a sneer even 10 years ago. Also, the only absolute truth about scientific research is that ethical, religious or philosophical resistance can slow it down but can never stop it. Once Pandora unlocks her box, it can't ever be shut again. I may find the idea of coming back 50 years after death repugnant - eternal life, to me, promises only a terrible endless boredom, but the quest for knowledge is a self-fuelling process. The word "immortality" evokes two images instantly in my mind. One is the figure of Sisyphus, cursed by Zeus, king of gods, to push a boulder up a steep mountain, watch it roll down and then push it back up again, till the end of time. The other is the spectre of Ashwatthama, again cursed (this time by Krishna) traversing the earth in eternal leprous remorse. But my mental associations notwithstanding, the fact remains that the first human immortal could step back on to the street by 2040-2050. I may find some chance philosophical support for my views in medical terminology, where "immortalisation" means the process of cancerous growth of cells, but I cannot wish away the website where the Cryonics Institute, which offers the cheapest immortality schemes going, points out that "membership and suspension can cost you less than your monthly cable bill!"

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And cryonics is not the only route to eternal life. It's only a matter of time before humans are able to clone themselves.

So you could die, but as long as someone preserves a fingernail or a bit of your skin, those white-coated men in the labs will be able to build you back again from scratch. So no matter how many times you die, you can be back in action once more. Except that they're building back only your genetic structure. You can be fully you again only when you also have your memories intact, for they inform your attitudes and behaviour; and memories are extragenetic. How do you do that?

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Suppose somebody (most likely your parents) stuck a tiny video camera just between your eyes as soon as you were born, and it recorded everything that you saw and heard till the moment of your death. Suppose all that data could be stored. Suppose when they clone you from your toenail, they can also download all that data into your head? Would that clone then be really you? By 2025, the speculation goes, you will be able to store all that you ever do or experience on computers for less than $100!

But why, if your sentience can exist in digital form - an endless string of 1s and 0s - would you like to have your body back? Why do you need the backaches and running noses and sweaty armpits of a carbon-based biped? Will you then prefer to live on as just an electronic brain, able to, whenever you desire, re-experience the sensations of slurping the most luscious ice-cream you ever had, relive the best holiday you ever took, re-relish the best sex you ever had? Are we then looking at a thousand-year-away future when anyone who can afford it will choose to live an eternal electronic life and only the wretched impoverished will have to suffer their bodies?

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Will these electronic brains be capable of poetry? Assured of immortality, will they even want to write a fairy tale, paint a sunset, work out the mathematics of infinity? Will they have free will? If they are incapable of forgetting, will they also be incapable of wonder? Will they still be prone to jealousy and if so, why? When they sleep, will they know they're sleeping? Will they perchance dream?

And as prices keep falling due to competition and the inherent economics of silicon, one day, every human being will be able to afford to turn himself into electronic data. The numbers of homo sapiens - perhaps the only life form that ever lived in this vast universe which had a sense of humour and figured out the value of pi - will dwindle exponentially, till one day, the last man will press the last key ever to be smudged with a fingerprint and convert himself into a blizzard of bytes, leaving his body to putrefy next to the giant humming computers. But neither he nor any of his friends would ever experience the stench.

Will that be the end of the human race, or its transcendence?

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