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Immortality

Immortality is called the escape from death and exist for an indefinite period of time, even eternal.

Summary

/ / Reverse Chronology

According to sources, immortality for the soul, body, or both. It is posthumous or land. The origin of this concept is not certain. There are a few landmarks.

  • In the nineteenth, the spiritualism develops a doctrine based solely on the immortality of the Spirit and said communicating with the spirits of the dead. Bertrand Russell does not reject a priori the phenomenon, but says Modern Vision

    Living things potentially immortal

    There are beings whose very simple biological structure and mode of reproduction particular, can be regarded as immortal. From the simple to the complex include:

    (Special cases: the multicellular animal to be the most resistant to any form of external land destruction or not is currently considered the tardigrade , spur full species. The oldest trees in the world can expect to live about them for five millennia individually. The animal older than 400 years, some reptiles 190. The human being has officially surpassed the 120-year life expectancy in 1995 , thanks to one-and single- representative species, Jeanne Calment. Finally, some animals with neoteny (or syndrome Peter Pan ) die without physiologically old, as the axolotl , the opposite phenomenon resulting in a progeria )

    Carrel: The chicken heart "eternal"

    The Nobel Prize in Medicine 1912 Alexis Carrel was able to keep alive in vitro heart of a chicken for a term whose estimates vary, according to sources, 28 years to 37 years . But the typical lifespan of a chicken is 5 years. This experience led him to wonder whether the longevity of an organization that was really limited by that of its components or whether to seek another cause, internal process of death.

    Rostand: The flower or chair

    The biologist Jean Rostand (1894-1977) said in an interview that "we do not know if the man is a flower or a chair" and explained about this provocative: the chair is potentially eternal, since it is treated with care and repaired regularly. The flower, on the contrary, it is already in the program of his own destruction. In both cases, men can expect to discover one day physical immortality: an interview is usually a simple matter of technique and discipline, a program, it can probably deteriorate in the gene. For Rostand, "the most pressing need is to get a clearer picture to determine which of two directions to work."

    On the evening of his life, says Rostand is convinced that "if we had dedicated to research in biology all money spent on military budgets of all countries, the question of immortality, or at least of eternal youth is already set.

    Hayflick Limit. Telomeres

    In 1961 , the biologist Leonard Hayflick discovered that certain specialized cells seem to divide about 50 times in succession. Better still if they are allowed to divide 30 times, then they are then put to rest for a time high, a resumption of the reproduction limit to 20 successive divisions: these cells seem to possess a sort of internal timer. His peers gave him the name of the Hayflick limit. We later discovered that this limit is due to an incomplete reproduction of the DNA strand ends ( telomeres ). Yet this reproduction is complete in regard to sex cells. We eventually discover agents that inhibit the telomerase. However, making the cells immortal, we must take care not to make cancer cells (see Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line of "immortal cells"). In addition there is the problem of treating all the cells of a living organism.

    Ettinger: the waiting room cryology

    In 1964 , Robert Ettinger published her book The man is immortal?.

    This book contains fourteen thought experiments on the theme of identity. His concern is to identify what changes a person that seem acceptable (including cryopreservation) to consider that it is always himself. The question arises with an even more acute if we created (thought experiment) a remote copy of an individual: is it possible then no problem of conscience and destroy the original view that the individual has just been teleported ?

    Ettinger's ideas gave birth to companies providing conservation organizations - sometimes simple minds - the human cryogenics. A 1986 article Goldanskii teachers and Vitalii , however, raises fears that even at the temperature of liquid nitrogen chemical reactions by scanning tunneling continue to occur over months, damaging more and more organizations involved.

    Gamow and Hofstadter: What is the "me"?

    In M. Tompkins s'explore itself (not reissued book) the physicist George Gamow wondered about the question of where is the self in an individual. He imagines the thoughts of a population of clones kept in mind blank (no matter how) and which could be transferred by a process given all the knowledge and habits of an individual and his tastes. When the spirit moved to the new individual, can we consider that the person has changed their body and just get rid of the old? It is difficult to answer this question, close to the previous one.

    Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett , passionate about the issue of cognition and of the identity , decided to establish a kind of state of the art of creating a compilation of the most interesting articles from them, written on the subject. This will be The Mind's I, translated into French under the name Frames of Mind. There are a lot of thought experiments, including one that suggests that the self may well be relocated to several locations where the communications follow ("Where am I?"). See also article noosphere.

    Gordon Bell and the project Mylifebits

    In the immediate future, Gordon Bell believes that we must be able to store a very large part of the experience of a person on one or several terabytes , and access them directly by the method of hyperlinks invented by Vannevar Bush. It is especially here an auxiliary memory and perfect in principle, but if memory is the foundation of identity, then maybe there would be in that kind of backup of what reinstatement of at least one virtual individual. This research project is funded by the company Microsoft .

    Kurzweil and the dream of immortality by the artificial intelligence

    Kurzweil takes the example of progressive substitution also exhibited by Bruno Marchal:

    • If we replace A neuron by its functional equivalent, it has been altered in any way the individual? No, because his behavior will be similar in every respect.
    • If we replace them all one by one, we end up having a complete individual, functionally identical to the previous electronic form. For Kurzweil, this is the path by which man is most likely to achieve, if not immortality, at least a hope of extending his conscious life by a factor 10 or even 100 ... as the political and economic stability ensures the maintenance of the machines and pay their electricity bills.

    In practical terms, the problem is presented in three phases:

    1. It should initially radiographed the brain, not with a resolution of one tenth of a millimeter as permitted methods of medical imaging by nuclear magnetic resonance , but rather to seek information on each cell where it is located. Kurzweil points out that there is something "passing around" in the brain blood flow. His rationale is that bet millions of microscopic machines from the nanotechnology could exploring the land, immediately forward the information (they could be stored), and the latter being collated by computer
    2. The process can not be instantaneous, and it probably could not even expect it to be total. We do not know how long would a scan (probably between a few tens of hours and a few years), and in the meantime our opinions on many subjects have changed, and our selves. Kurzweil does not unduly concerned about the question during a night's sleep our ego also changes slightly, but that we worry unduly (except very young children, then in full phase learning); otherwise we arrived in our lifetime to forget some old and new knowledge without great damage to our mental integrity
    3. More complex is the reconstruction of the scanned mental state (with very high redundancy, since a location will be analyzed over time by quantities of microsensors), the representation of each neuron and glial cell , and finally burning at all in the silicon or reconstitution on machines processing the information of one kind or another. However, this third phase may be forthcoming if needed several decades, the first two having to be carried out only during the lifetime of the individual.

    It is important to remember that this is currently speculative , in other words, theoretically possible but not certain yet.

    The company Imagination engines (start-up founded by veterans of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT) says work on a project like this called InItsImage which is detailed on its website.

    Aubrey de Grey and the 7 biological causes of aging ( SENSE )

    The project SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence ( 2002 )) aims at the radical extension of life expectancy of human (and youth) through medical procedures created to counter the malfunction of the organization.

    For example, the under-ambitious and innovative WILT expected to block repair of telomeres in the body by preventing the synthesis of telomerase (to make the cancer impossible) periodically while repopulating the body using stem cells healthy (telomeres of these stem cells are intact, the Hayflick limit is no longer a problem).

    The funding strategy is based on the Methuselah Mouse Prize ( price Methuselah Mouse ). William Haseltine, the pioneer of sequencing the human genome, said about it: "There is no comparable effort to it, and it has already contributed significantly to the awareness that regenerative medicine is a reality very near, not a hypothesis. "

    The jellyfish nutricula of Turritopsis

    Turritopsis nutricula falls outside the normal aging process of cells, and even reverses the process of growth (which is conceivable, the structure of a jellyfish is much less complex than that of a vertebrate)

    "Playing often in deep water, and since they can little or no die, these jellyfish are currently developing their presence in waters around the world, not only in the Caribbean waters where they were originally. And Dr. Maria Miglietta the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute explains: "We confirm a silent invasion world '"

    September 2010: the professor's announcement Skulachev

    In September 2010, Prof. Vladimir Skulachev, the University of Moscow, announced that it stopped aging in mice using an anti-oxidant penetrates throughout the body and is harmless to his vital organs. The oxygen is normally converted into water by the processes of life, but a small percentage turn into free radicals harmful to DNA and they are the ones that this pill is supposed to stop. The 1999 Nobel Prize Gnter Blobel confirms the seriousness of this discovery, and Aubrey de Grey visited Moscow to discuss the proposed candidates for Methuselah mouse.

    This claim is in line with a similar in a British laboratory a few months earlier, and early 90s, the announcement of the beneficial effects of DHEA by Professor Beaulieu. It is, however, that ad and a few years will be needed to confirm or refute their effectiveness on the one hand, their real safety and their possible generalization to the general public on the other.

    Pros and cons

    Point of view in favor of mortality

    • Paul Valery believes in Tel Quel that "just as men need to change clothes, ideas need to change men": the renewal of generations prevents its opinion that the company does sclerosis.
    • Georges Wolinski , in an episode of The Life of George complicated killer, indirectly responding to the concerns of immortality Cavanna , explaining that "an immortal hands forever after what he did not want to do," and that So it is in all certainty (or near) death that drives people to act.
    • Robert Ettinger mentions the opinion of generous people who refuse immortality because we must make room for future generations, while finding that philanthropy strange when it comes from people "who do not even give to charity on 1 % deductible from their income. "

    Point of view in favor of immortality


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