Alexey Turchin Is A Scientist Who Records His Life To Become Immortal In Future

Whenever we think of death, a chill runs down our spine, just by the thought of this idea. On the other hand, there are people who are working on keeping us alive, with advancements in the field of medicine, helping humans live longer, and maybe, even attain immortality.

Some are finding ways to stop ageing, some are finding ways to transfer consciousness into another living being. And then, there are people like Alexey Turchin, who believe that we can attain this by doing truly digital.

Alexey Turchin

Alexey Turchin is a life extensionist and transhumanist from Russia, who feels that a human can attain immortality in a variety of ways with the help of advancement in technology. A graduate from Moscow University in the field of Physics, Art and History, he walked down this path after a friend of his in school died when he was just 11, igniting the spark in him to work on achieving immortality.

The Immortality Roadmap

He has listed out a paper discussing an ¡®Immortality Roadmap¡¯ to help humans live forever. The roadmap has four different plans that people can pick to choose their path to indefinite life extension. The presence of multiple plans, in his words, is like a failsafe that will help the endeavour to not crash when one of the plans falls apart.

Plan A: Surviving till tech catches up

Plan A is the survival till the time we reach a point where technology has advanced to an extent or where a friendly super-intelligent AI exists that can ease the transition into immortality. Until then your chances are limited to applying as many options to defeat ageing -- either by replacing diseased organs with bioengineered ones, or staying alive in a nanotech body (whenever that becomes possible).

Representational Image: 20th Century Fox

Plan B: Cryonics

Plan B kicks into play if you die before the superintelligent AI comes into existence. This involves cryonics -- basically freezing your body after death to wait till technology advances to bring you back to life. Even today, there are several companies dealing in cryogenic storage that allow you to store your physical self in cryogenic chambers after death. Many are even working on their own solutions to bring people or their consciousness back from the dead.

Plan C: Digital immortality

Plan C however, is the more interesting one, it¡¯s called digital immortality. In case cryonics becomes a dead end, you could always rely on ¡®Digital Immortality¡¯.

Here, Alexey recommends collecting everyday memories and personal experiences in a digital data format -- in the form of audio records, videos, or even noting down how each day went by in text and storing them in protective storage mediums such as hard drives or discs that are indestructible, till a time the superintelligent AI comes into existence and takes all this information to create a digital version of ourselves, based on our memories and experiences.

Getty Images

This is something Alexey himself practices, where he has gigabytes of data that he records and stores either in the cloud or offline storage, as well as traces of his DNA. He even takes EEG recordings of him doing particular activities like art or listening to music, to give AI whatever data he can to create the closest version of him, when the time comes. Here, he¡¯s listed a set of guidelines on how you could create your own backup of consciousness.

Plan D: Hope of immortality¡¯s existence

The last plan, Plan D, is more of hope -- a hope that if everything else fails, we must have faith in the existence of immortality -- either in the form of quantum immortality or based on a super-intelligent AI.

He recommends applying all of these instead of sticking with just one or two to have a secure passage into the extended lifetime or immortality.

How long does one have to wait?

Of course, all of these plans are rather time-consuming and according to Alexey, this is not happening anytime before 500 years. In a conversation with Russia Beyond, he explains, ¡°The development of AI is going rather fast, but we are still far away from being able to ¡®download¡¯ a human into a computer. If we want to do it with a good probability of success, then count on [the year] 2600, to be sure.

Getty Images

But is this really doable?

On paper, it looks promising but there lies several challenges that need to be dealt with to bring a phenomenon like this into existence. Take for example digital immortality. Now Alexey believes that an AI will help create your digital copy and bring you into existence.

As highlighted by one Popular Mechanics article, he has even stated that this AI could even help in restoring our biological life by digging our grave and creating the clone from our DNA to make a vessel for our digital consciousness.

Not only we don¡¯t have an AI that¡¯s as powerful as recreating a human consciousness, but the things we are expecting this AI to do for the billions of people on Earth will also equate to a ton of energy demand, something that¡¯s not available on our planet, however, Alexey has hinted that a Dyson Sphere around the sun could help achieve this.

A Dyson Sphere is a proposed megastructure by physicist Freeman Dyson -- essentially a shell that surrounds our Sun (yes the Sun) that will be capable of harnessing the crazy power that it keeps emitting -- roughly 400 septillion watts per second.

Dyson Sphere: Wikipedia

Sure, this could provide us with the power we need, but not only is this crazy challenging now, but we also don¡¯t even have the material that can withstand that kind of heat and stress being close to the sun. But here too Turchin feels if humans can¡¯t do it, nanorobots could, on a separate planet where they¡¯d mine this special material and create the structure for the Dyson Sphere.

While we don¡¯t know if all this would come to fruition in our lifetime, it is sure as hell fun to think about.