The techno-geeks who are seeking the key to immortality
09 MARCH 2013
John Hearne
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-technogeeks-who-are-seeking-the-key-to-immortality-29119118.htmlIf you want to extend your life, there are a couple of basic steps you can take. Eat healthily. Take regular exercise. But if you've more money than you could ever spend in one lifetime, you take a different approach.
This isn't the first attempt by the super-rich to urge science to cure what may ail them in the future.
Another death-fearing rich person, Martine Rothblatt, has something similar in mind. The transsexual entrepreneur believes that the best way to conquer the grave is to upload everything about yourself to the internet so that scientists, at some indeterminate point in the future, can create a robot into which your digital consciousness can then be downloaded.
Rothblatt, however, doesn't envisage an eternity for rich people only. At
cyberev.org, ordinary folks are invited to store 'digital reflections' of themselves in photos, videos, texts and so on. The site tells us: "When coupled with future software that elicits the consciousness immanent in such digital reflections, [this] will enable the person to be revived, feel alive, and enjoy a sense of conscious continuity with themselves."
