The Fastest Route to Immortality? [video, research papers]

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Want radical life extension to the point of immortality?

You can try working on it one cell at a time: Human Endothelial Cell Life Extension by Telomerase Expression [pdf]

You can try caloric restriction: Revisiting the Role of Fat Mass in the Life Extension Induced by Caloric Restriction [pdf]

You can use pharmaceuticals: Life extension in Drosophila by feeding a drug [pdf]

You can follow the program laid out by Ray Kurzweill and Terry Grossman: Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever

But if you’re impatient, you can live forever starting right now by having a character named after you in Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.

Watch the video to find out about other swag you can get, then download a free sample of the book and collect your immortality here.

Humanity 2.0: Lecture on Life Extension, Human Augmentation + Their Social Effects

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

The TV Ontario show Big Ideas is one of the best products of public television in Canada.  It’s shot in a lecture or oral essay format and its speakers come from many disciplines, but include scientists, popular science writers,  and science fiction writers, like Steven Pinker, Cory Doctorow, Freeman Dyson, and Clay Shirky.

Besides being broadcast, Big Ideas TV shows are available as podcasts, either in video or audio format and can be viewed online.

The episode I want to foucs on was released on February 3, 2012 and features Canadian science fiction writer and Hugo and Nebula winner Robert J. Sawyer [home page, Amazon.com page] giving a talk called Humanity 2.0, which is, in effect, a primer on human augmentation, life extension, and the social effects of our increasing internalization of our technology and externalization of our consciousness.

Sawyer is mostly summarizing ideas that originate elsewhere — as I’m sure he’d readily admit — but he also sprinkles in some original thoughts and he’s a genial speaker who gives a lucid talk that’s accessible to newcomers, but still has a few ideas in it to interest veterans as well.

For the podcast, go to the audio or video link above and scroll down to the entry for 02/03/12 (their date format, not mine).

The video is embedded below.

Brain Mapping, Uploading, and Immortality — Part II (Sebastian Seung)

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

While Dmitry Itskov is hiring talent to make the instantiation of human consciousness in a synthetic humanoid body a reality (see Part I of this series), Sebastian Seung, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT is working out the details of mapping that consciousness.

Seung’s new book Connectome deals with the attempt to create a map of the neurons in a human brain and the connections between them.

The home page for his lab, with a list of publications and links to several of them, is here.

You can find an NPR article and a podcast of a reasonably good interview with Seung here.

Seung’s TED lecture is embedded below and below that is the video trailer for Connectome.

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Brain mapping and uploading feature in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details and download a free, previously published short story on my site here.

Blog posts are on the Home page.

Details about the novel are on the Luck & Death page.

The free story is on the My Writing page.

Brain Mapping, Uploading, and Immortality — Part I (Dmitry Itskov)

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Numerous news articles have recently devoted attention to a project launched by Russian media entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov to turn a familiar science fiction trope — the instantiation of human consciousness in a synthetic body — into a reality.  He conceives of this happening in stages:

• the development of a functional humanoid synthetic body manipulated through an effective brain-machine interface
• the development of such a body, but including a life-support system for a human brain, so that the synthetic body can replace an existing organic one, and
• the mapping of human consciousness such that it, rather than the physical brain, can be housed in the synthetic body

News coverage can be found on the web from Gizmodo, Wired’s Danger Room, CTV News, the Daily Mail, and other sources.

Itskov’s Global Future 2045 initiative can be found here.

A short video (2 minutes) of Itskov discussing the project is embedded immediately below, with a longer one (27 minutes) further down.

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One of the places this science fiction trope plays out is in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details and download a free, previously published short story on my main page here.

Blog posts are on the Home page.

Details about the novel are on the Luck & Death page.

The free story is on the My Writing page.

This man might live to 1,000

Read it here.

Signs of ageing halted in the lab

Read it here.