Last week I had a few cheeky emails respond to me re: travels in Romania, vampires, and such. It made me think on the overarching topic of immortality.
A vampire is a sort of quintessential mythological example of an immortal creature, but hardly a practical one. One of my favorite living examples is the immortal jellyfish, a creature which can indefinitely reverse its own life cycle and maturity stage.
Another example that has become popular much more recently: scientists have mapped in its entirety the brain of a fruit fly, and people have done crazy things like running digital simulations of an actual biological fruit fly in Minecraft.
While not “immortal” in the live sense (this fly in question has very much physically perished), we have imaging of what its precise neural structure looks like and how it responds to all stimuli in perpetuity. In this sense, the fly has taken on a life far grander and far more long lived than its own physical body could ever take it - a legend, if you will.
And that’s just a fruit fly. In 2026.
We’re converging on a point where digital technologies are making everything accessible - that you can literally inspect another biological creature down to the nerve cord on your browser. The root of biological aging reversal exists in nature already, and porting this to humans is a manner of sequencing and inspection.
The Kurzweilian Singularity is predicted to occur by 2045 - where all machine intelligence far exceeds combined human intelligence by orders of magnitude. Where hard science problems like medicine are much more readily solvable for human biology.
I think if we give it 20 years, we will have our own shots at immortality - at least, a halting of aging or a reversal to youthful prime.
I had someone tell me: “I wouldn’t want to live forever.”
That’s a fair rationale; I probably wouldn’t want to be physically present for the heat death of the universe; those sorts of thought experiments. My answer is cleaner than that, however.
If I have plans for tomorrow, I probably want to not die today (or even tomorrow). Repeat forever as long as you like.
Make plans for tomorrow and keep showing up for this beautiful world - it’s only going to get more marvelous from here. Mark my words (and Ray Kurzweil’s words) for 2045, or even sooner.
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov