Singularity part 2 – You and I, we may not die

Just in case the magnificent implications of a technologic singularity have not dawned upon you, consider this: If you can manage to stay alive for another 30-40 years, you might not die at all.

Can we live forever? To answer this question, let’s consider why people die in the first place, and what can be done about it. There are a number of ways to die:

You can die from “old age”. Of course, it’s not the age in itself that kills you. Age kills you indirectly because your bodily organs, such as your heart, deteriorate as a result of the wear and tear you’ve exposed it to over the years. So if you take care of your body, you can reasonably expect to live longer than if you did not.

If organ failure doesn’t kill you, there are plenty of diseases that can. A friend once told me that if nothing else kills you first, cancer will get you eventually, and it’s only a matter of time. Cancer is a big one. Other major culprits are heart disease, liver disease, and, in the third world, malaria, aids and tuberculosis, to mention a few.

And then, of course, there are ways to die that have nothing to do with your physiology. Accidents, homicide, suicide, genocide etc.

Now, what can you do about each of these today?

If your kidneys fail, you can have a transplant, but these are tough to come by, especially if you’re old. If you get a disease, you can take medicine, receive treatment and/or hope for a cure. And finally, if you’re murdered by your ex-wife or killed in an accident, there’s little we can do about it.

Enter technologic singularity. Forget these “truths” that you hold to be self-evident, because the premises are about to change drastically. So how do we learn to tackle these causes of death in the future?

Ray Kurzweil predicts that in a few decades, people will have billions of nanobots (blood cell sized robots) in their bloodstream, to manage a wide range of tasks.

If you have diabetes, they can deliver insulin. If you have Parkinson’s, they can deliver dopamine. If you have cancer, they can be sent in to eradicate your tumor. This has been done with mice already, and literally dozens of projects are underway to develop these bloodstream-based BioMEMS for humans.

The nanobots will also act as a personal physician, continually reporting on your general health: If something is wrong with your body, the intelligent nanobots automatically order the necessary drug, nutrient or antibody required to deal with the ailment, and fix it before you even know it exists.

In his book, The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil writes that “ultimately we will be able to determine the precise nutrients (including all the hundreds of phytochemicals) necessary for the optimal health of each individual. These will be freely and inexpensively available, so we won't need to bother with extracting nutrients from food at all.”

Of course, if you still want to spend time eating, you will be able to. For understandable evolutionary reasons, humans have a gene that makes our bodies hang on to the calories we consume. Since we live in a time with plenty of food, this previously advantageous genetic inheritance causes obesity-, diabetes- and heart disease- epidemics. But we've successfully "turned off" that gene in mice, and soon we’ll know how to do it in humans. The mice whose fat-retention gene was turned off ate 30 per cent more than other mice, but stayed lean and healthy, and lived 18 per cent longer.

Programmable blood is only 10-20 years away, which means that from 2030 on we’ll be able to replace the blood cells in our body with more efficient, nano-engineered blood cells.

Biologic blood cells can only store a few minutes worth of oxygen, whereas the nano- bloodcells that Rob Freitas is developing can store a thousand times more. Bad news for scuba rental places.

Freitas also enivions white blood cell replacement “microbivores” that download software to destroy bacterial, viral and fungal infections, thousands of times more efficiently than, say, antibiotics.

Once we have these abilities to effortlessly and automatically keep track of our health, kill off infections and diseases, and replace malfunctioning organs, we’ll be running out of possible causes of death, increasing human life expectancy on a monthly basis.

But surely, there is nothing we can do about people who die suddenly in an accident. Once people are dead, they’re dead right?

Maybe not.

At the University of Wisconsin, scientists are now finding out how to resurrect previously extinct animals by extracting DNA information from fossilized hair. Our technologies for DNA decoding, are becoming ever more sophisticated, and in the future we may be able to do this with humans. But that’s still speculative.

In any case, you should start rethinking your future.