Is it possible to transfer your consciousness to a USB flash drive and then restore it in a new body? Is it realistic to freeze yourself and wake up as if nothing had happened in 100 years? Is it possible to stop aging at the genetic level, and how far has cloning technology already advanced? We asked scientists and experts in various fields to comment on the different options for achieving immortality that we see in modern cinema and TV series.
In the new show "Altered Carbon" and the films "The Sixth Day" and "Out / of Myself" in the future, one of the main achievements of science is the ability to preserve the human mind on digital media and subsequently implant it into a new body. Is this even possible in theory?
Grigory Bakunov, director of technology dissemination at Yandex, head of the Yandex. Health service, author of the addmeto Telegram channel:
- One of the most important questions in general - what is intelligence, what is consciousness? We determine this by external reactions. How to distinguish intellectual activity from imitation of intellectual activity? On average, nothing. You know, today I was driving to work, and I have a clear feeling that most of the drivers who were driving with me simply imitate intellectual activity.
The whole concept in "Modified Carbon" is based on the fact that our knowledge of physics and nature, which we now have, turned out to be fair. That is, there is no excess of the speed of light. And people still want to go to space. And in order to travel far into space and at the same time not go into hibernation for a long time, they came up with this method: a person was digitized and stored on a hard disk, and then a new body was built and this digital copy was moved into it. The entire narrative is built around this concept.
Altered Carbon.
To simplify very much, we have such a huge set of chains in our head that describe our reactions to various external stimuli. Purely in theory, I believe that one can come up with a design that ideally describes these neural connections so that they can then be restored. Now this is impossible even for some tiny creatures like annelids, for example. But there is a very important point with the fact that consciousness is based on a non-existent scientific concept. We do not know what consciousness is.
There are many interesting projects now, many interesting attempts to digitize the brain, as they say, on the other hand. Not trying to analyze all the neural connections, but trying to analyze and mimic his reactions. And in fact, with a very high probability, you can build my model, if you collect enough data about me, a model that will behave ideally like me. And even, perhaps, solve some puzzles like me. That is, to demonstrate mental activity. Moreover, it will not be a mental activity as such. This is the cutting edge of human digitization - trying to imitate their actions.
Promotional video:
Altered Carbon.
Are there any first prototypes of technologies for the digitization of the human mind, similar to those shown in the movies?
Grigory Bakunov:
- There is a very good project Luka. He takes the notes of a person who communicated a lot in instant messengers, and recreates his communication style. As a result, you can - they present it this way - to communicate with the deceased person. But this is still an attempt to work with an imitation of a person's reaction. This is the very, very beginning of the movement towards this very singularity, towards having a digital idea of a person.
It is clear that we, I think, in 50-80 years will reach the state when it will be possible to describe rather accurately every neural connection of a person. I have no doubt that a digital copy of a person will appear. Will this lead to the fact that we can store a digital copy of a person? I probably believe that we will be able to remove it, and it will be a working model describing your current behavior. It is not clear here whether it will be possible to preserve consciousness in this way. We will struggle for a long time to come to prove that the person restored from this copy is the same person with the same consciousness, and not just a creature that imitates the behavior of another person.
In the film "The Testament of Professor Dowell" and the TV series "Futurama" life after death continues not the entire human body as a whole, but only the head with the brain, whose life is supported by various technical or chemical tricks. Are scientific searches carried out in a similar direction?
Igor Artyukhov, biophysicist, director of science at KrioRus, member of the coordinating council and one of the founders of the Russian transhumanist movement:
- Freezing a living person is now legally considered murder in all countries except Switzerland. Or help in suicide, if a person does it to himself. Therefore, today only people who are legally considered dead can be frozen. But death is a very loose concept. Even if, relatively speaking, a person's head is cut off, he seems to be obviously dead, but 99% of his cells are alive, including the neurons of the brain, which, in general, are the bearers of personality. And they will live for several more hours, and many cells even for days. Accordingly, if in the future it becomes possible to sew the head back to the body, then the question arises: in how good can it be preserved until this future? The same applies to death for any other reason.
The main damaging mechanism during cooling is the formation of ice crystals, which, purely mechanically, tear the cell walls. Therefore, if we want to preserve the body as well as possible, and most importantly, the human brain, then blood is washed out from its circulatory system and a special solution of substances called cryoprotectants is introduced. There is a rather complex composition, but the main substances are those that prevent the formation of ice crystals. When the desired temperature is reached, the body is transported to storage and gradually cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, and then immersed in liquid nitrogen.
Professor Dowell's Testament.
Some clients of the Russian cryo-farm, which already has 56 patients, ask to freeze only the head, because it is the brain that is considered the carrier of the personality. Sometimes even just the brain is frozen. It is believed that rebuilding the body will be technically easier than reviving the brain after freezing. After stopping the blood supply to the brain, neurons live for several hours at normal temperature, and if cooled, then the time can increase tenfold, up to several days, so that it can be saved with the expectation that one day it will be possible to restore it. Forecasts of when this will be possible are, of course, purely speculative, but we are talking about decades, most likely about the middle of this century.
In the film "Forever Young" and the TV series "Futurama" the main characters are frozen for a long time, after thawing, they calmly continue to live in the future. Can modern cryogenic freezing provide a similar result?
Igor Artyukhov:
- In fact, after freezing, people, of course, do not come to life yet, because the task of restoring a person after freezing has not yet been solved. It has not been solved even for much simpler animals such as a mouse, for example. Now we can freely freeze and thaw only very small animals like ticks, some insects, tardigrades, and so on. Roughly speaking, up to a millimeter in size. Further - great difficulties.
"Forever Young".
In humans, we are still able to defrost only tissue samples, such as a segment of the ovary, for example. A woman can be treated for cancer, in which her ovary is destroyed. If you take a segment of the ovary from her and freeze it, then you can transplant it back to her, and her menstrual cycle is restored. There have even been cases of pregnancy. A piece of heart tissue can also be frozen, but this has no medical significance yet. The biggest thing that has been frozen to date is a rabbit kidney. She was frozen, then thawed, transplanted back into him, then another kidney was removed, which remained, and he lived on a kidney that was in a frozen state. It has been proven to be complete.
Now a lot of attention is paid to what we can do for transplantation. The fact is that nowadays, if organ transplantation is performed, everything has to be done very quickly. If a suitable organ appears, then its viability is from several hours to a maximum of a couple of days, and with every hour the organ loses its viability. During this time, it is necessary to prepare the recipient, who could not expect the operation at all at this moment. There were cases when during transplantation they were infected with severe infections. In one case, the patient even died. He underwent a kidney transplant, and after a while he died of rabies, because the donor had rabies, and he did not know about it, he died in a car accident. Of course, they are tested for HIV, AIDS, but there are many more infections, so there is always a chance of transmitting something. Matching is also very difficult. And if there was a bank of organs, then it would be possible to slowly check for all imaginable infections, select a perfectly compatible non-rejected organ and calmly prepare a person for surgery.
Altered Carbon.
In the series "Black Mirror" in the series "San Junipero" we are talking about a virtual city to which you can go after death and stay there forever. If physical immortality is unattainable, then is digital immortality ever possible, in which human consciousness will continue to live and feel something indefinitely? How can it be organized in reality?
Grigory Bakunov:
- This series does not say that people who move there retain consciousness. It is quite possible that the imitation of digital consciousness is preserved there. But imagine that San Junipero is just the first stage of the future described in Altered Carbon.
The first stage is to try to remove the brain reactions from a person and move him somewhere out there into virtuality. But it is completely unclear why this should be done. If you can remove this data, then with a high probability in a few years you will be able to transfer this data into a new body. Recently, they were able to clone a small monkey using the same technology used to clone Dolly the sheep. And this, in my opinion, is the first successful experience in years. This means that the person is actually close. For example, in 15-20 years in those countries that spit on international law and ethical standards, they will be able to grow clones of living people.
"Black mirror".
If you have a way to download this consciousness into a computer, then in a few years there will be a way to download it back to the brain. And there is an important question that I always had to this story with San Junipero: why should these people be allowed to live in this virtuality? In order to interact with the living people who are left?
Perhaps what we have been shown is just a transitional period. When humanity has already learned to unload consciousness, but has not yet learned to load it. In the place of these people, of course, I would not move into virtual reality, but would ask to save me on a hard drive or any convenient medium at that time, in order to restore my digital copy in the body later. Then there will be many questions. For example, is it true that this is my first copy? Or, in fact, I was restored from this save 50 times and then killed, for example?
Does this sound like immortality? No, it looks like a different configuration of life. Because death is still possible. Imagine even being saved every day. Although you can recover from the copy you saved yesterday, the world around you has changed. This automatically means that you were dead for some part of this time. You don't come back to life, it's not you anymore. Any death, even the smallest, even for a day, will still be perceived as death, I think.
Altered Carbon.
In the films The Island, The Sixth Day, Moon 2112 and Jurassic Park, cloning appears as a completely familiar, well-developed technology, with the use of which people do not have any special problems. What is the real situation with the cloning technology, which we have heard about for more than a dozen years? How far has science advanced since the cloning of Dolly the sheep, and how far has it gone before the cloning of humans?
Irina Zhegulina, geneticist:
- Animal cloning has gained popularity as a method of producing genetically identical animals or animals with the necessary traits for scientific research and is considered a really well-established technique. To date, mice, cattle, pigs, goats, rabbits and cats have been successfully cloned. People are not cloned for ethical reasons, it is simply prohibited. But in theory it is quite possible!
How does this happen? For cloning, you need the nucleus of a living cell from the donor (the one who needs to be cloned) and an egg from a representative of the same species as the clone. Plus a little scientific magic in the form of a procedure for transferring the donor's nucleus to an egg without a nucleus, as well as an electrical impulse, so that the egg begins to develop into an embryo and a clone is born in a surrogate mother. But if you take a dinosaur as an example, you won't be able to clone it. First, dinosaurs have lived too long, their DNA, even in the most ideal samples, is destroyed and is not suitable for transfer. Secondly, there are no dinosaur eggs (although, of course, you can take the eggs of ancient reptiles living now).
"Island".
The first point with DNA is the most difficult, because even synthesizing new DNA using pieces of DNA from a dinosaur and, for example, a lizard, we will not get a clone of a dinosaur, but a new animal with new sets of genes. So success here is not close yet. I find the cloning of pets that is about to become available is interesting. Scientists' observation of the life of clones in the second generation will provide new (rather encouraging) answers to questions about the safety of animal cloning technology.
In 2017, scientists compared the longevity and health of Snoppy (the world's first dog cloned in 2005) and her somatic cell donor, Tai, a breed of Afghan hound. In short, both Snoppy and Ty were generally healthy until they developed cancer at the age of 10 and 12, respectively. The lifespan of the donor and the cloned dog was close to the Afghan hound's average longevity of 11.9 years. Then four more clones of the Snoppy dog were created, one puppy died of natural causes, the other three are alive and well (now they are about one and a half years old).
These are these cute clones:
In the film "Time" people are genetically programmed so that at the age of 25 they stop aging. Will humanity in the future in reality somehow turn off the biological clock and stop aging at the point that a person wants?
Valery Ilyinsky, geneticist, founder of Genotek:
- We can conditionally distinguish two sides of aging - cosmetic aging and the development and accumulation of diseases. The first is how a person looks. It is generally accepted that people with wrinkles and sagging skin are considered old. At the same time, a person with wrinkles can be healthy: he may have practically no serious diseases of the cardiovascular and nervous system and other diseases associated with age.
Or there may be another situation: a person looks young, but suffers from diseases arising from age-related changes in our body. Of course, most often external aging and the accumulation of diseases approximately coincide in time and are interrelated. It is possible to slow down or reverse the cosmetic manifestations of aging. In theory, it is also possible to slow down or even reverse the decline in body functions with age: decreased strength and endurance, thinning of bones, decreased hormone levels. It is much more difficult to reduce the likelihood of developing age-related diseases, but early diagnosis will allow them to be detected in time and successfully cured. Genetic testing plays an important role in early diagnosis, as it often reveals a predisposition to the disease even before it begins.
The most difficult situation is with oncological diseases. To defeat them completely, you need to change human nature. The fact is that the process of cell division in our body is inevitably associated with the occurrence of mutations. The older a person is, the more his cells have accumulated mutations. Over time, this can lead to the development of cancer. But with the help of early diagnosis and genetic studies of predisposition to different types of cancer, it is possible to identify the disease at an early stage of development. If a large-scale system of early diagnosis and genetic testing for disease susceptibility is created in society, many diseases will remain in the past.
"Time".
In the domestic film "Temptation B", based on the book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky "Five spoons of elixir", the writer learns about the sect of immortals and the elixir of life. Is it possible that the secret of immortality has already been discovered, but it is successfully hidden from the rest of humanity? Is it possible in principle to keep such a discovery secret from the whole world?
Tigran Amiryan, Ph. D. in Philology, researcher of modern literature, author of the book “They wrote a conspiracy. A conspiracy detective from Dan Brown to Yulia Kristeva :
- Inventing and hiding the secret of immortality, medicine for deadly diseases and other things - this is the main theme of all Western conspiracy stories spread in the media. Some researchers say that such conspiratorial ideas are used by large corporations to eliminate competitors. An example is all types of conspiracy theories related to the AIDS drug or cancer. The main message of the conspiracy theorists is that Corporation X invented the disease in order to subsequently control the masses by offering cures for the new plague. Here begins another wave of suspicion about other large corporations that could potentially launch similar stories in the media in order to eliminate competitors. The same models work in political discourse. This all causes constant fearsexcessive suspicion and so on.
"Temptation B".
The secret of immortality, like any other information, of course, can be kept secret. The desire for immortality drives many cultures, and it can be found almost always in all societies. I am not ready to assess the possibilities of science, but to believe that a certain group of people are hiding such information is to believe in a conspiracy. I don't believe in a conspiracy. But, as my colleagues joke, if you don't believe in a conspiracy, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Daria Slyusarenko