By 2045, people can completely overcome old age and disease and gain immortality. However, for this we will have to merge with computers and practically turn into cyborgs. Such a forecast is given by the famous American inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil. He is convinced that the development of artificial intelligence will inevitably transform humanity.
The moment when this will happen is not so far away, the scientist believes. If technology develops at the same pace as it is now, it will take us about 25 years to "merge" with machine intelligence. By this time we will be able to scan our consciousness into computers, and also use computers to control our body. If we learn to correct its processes, then we are guaranteed practically eternal life.
The very idea of a singularity is inherently nothing new. In 1965, the British mathematician Goode introduced the concept of "intellectual explosion", theoretically describing a machine that surpasses a human in its intellectual capabilities so much that it is able to independently create even more perfect systems.
Back in the 1980s, Ray Kurzweil tried to set the pace of scientific and technological progress. It turned out that about every two years, the speed of technological devices doubles. Such dynamics was observed in almost all areas of science. This allowed the researcher to make an accurate forecast. According to the futurologist, by the mid-2020s we will learn how to reverse engineer the human brain, that is, we will be able to analyze the mechanisms of its functioning in order to reproduce them later, say, in a virtual form.
By 2045, thanks to the significant growth and reduction in the cost of computer power, the total volume of artificial intelligent technologies will be billions of times greater than the intellectual resource of all mankind that exists today.
These ideas are quite popular in the scientific community. So, a few years ago in the United States on the basis of NASA and Google, the Singularity University was created. And the Institute of Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco hosts annual conferences on singularity issues. For example, last year they discussed issues of increasing life expectancy.
However, not only cybernetics, but also biologists are trying to solve the problem of immortality. Not so long ago, the president of the American Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Thomas Sich and his fellow biologists, discovered a complex of proteins responsible for building up and repairing the terminal regions of chromosomes, the so-called telomeres. Let me remind you that these DNA regions located at the ends of chromosomes consist of a repeating sequence of nucleotides. When, before cell division, our hereditary molecule reproduces its own copy, the telomere regions are constantly damaged, since the proteins responsible for copying cannot reproduce them accurately due to the complex configuration of the ends and the specificity of copying.
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Thus, with each cell division, these ends of the chromosomes are shortened. That is, the length of the telomeric regions determines the "age" of the cell - the shorter the telomeric "tail", the "older" it is. When the telomere becomes critically short, the cell loses its ability to divide, that is, it grows old. This is observed in all cells of the vertebrate organism, except for stem cells and those that participate in reproduction, as well as cancer cells.
Telomere shortening does not occur in some cells because they are constantly being completed and repaired by a special enzyme, telomerase. In fact, it is present in all cells of the body, but for some reason it cannot work in most of them. So Sich and his colleagues found that this is because they blocked the synthesis of another protein called POT-1.
This protein, in combination with several others (collectively called shelterins), binds to the telomere and forms a special complex that forms the so-called T-loop - a site that can bind to telomerase, as a result of which telomere repair begins. Without the T-loop, telomerase is helpless - it simply does not understand where to start its work from. But if ROT-1 is absent, then there is no one to make such a loop, as you know.
Scientists hypothesized that injecting this protein into a cell could stimulate telomerase activity and therefore trigger telomere repair. This experiment was carried out by researchers at Harvard Medical School on mice, in whose bodies age-related changes were observed. They artificially injected the POT-1 protein into experimental animals. As a result, they showed clear signs of rejuvenation - that is, the repair of telomeres was in full swing.
Based on the results of such studies, one of the world's leading experts in genetics, Professor Aubrey de Gray, concluded that aging is the result of natural wear and tear of the body at the molecular level: just like a machine, the human body gradually wears out and stops functioning normally. If a way is found to periodically eliminate the consequences of this wear and tear, then the period of our life can be significantly extended and, perhaps, even achieve the fact that the body will live forever. From his point of view, experiments with the POT-1 protein are just the beginning of the path to biological support for eternal life.
At the same time, experiments are already being carried out on the "modification" of a person using computer technologies. For example, at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne, the Blue Brain project is being developed, the task of which is to create a virtual structure that mimics the mammalian brain at the neural level. For this, the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer is used. To date, scientists have already managed to "copy" one of the fragments of the rat's brain, consisting of ten thousand neurons.
Already 30 thousand patients with Parkinson's disease have been implanted with electronic neurochips, which allow them to better control their bodies. According to the head of the Blue Brain project, Professor Henry Markram, within the next decade, it may be possible to create a fully functional computer copy of the human brain.
Author: Irina Shlionskaya