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brought back to life, as long as it remains physically intact. It’s just a matter of giving a jump start, using the appropriate type of jump leads and battery and engine. And the artificial intelligence engines are being prepared for that day when it becomes commonplace that people prefer being cryogenically frozen instead of burial or cremation. For one thing, it’s potentially a massive market. Morbid as it may be to discuss the whole subject. Among the most advanced AI engines are said to be Google’s Deep Mind and IBM’s Watson. Both companies are strongly interested in the health sector. While neither has publicly expressed an interest in cloning people or in bringing them back to life after they are legally dead, they are directly involved in the business of prolonging life. In Google’s case, it has invested in Calico, which says it’s tackling ageing, and describes itself as “a research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan”. Calico is not a cryonics company as such, and probably employs conventional healthcare methods and techniques, much the same way that IBM does with Watson and all the work it does in the healthcare sector. But there are biotech companies out there that are engaged in what is known as tissue engineering, which essentially means creating human flesh, bone and organs from scratch.
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Android apocalypse Do androids walk among us today? Do we know? Do even the androids know they are androids? If they look like us, live like us, and are made of flesh and bone just like humans, how can we tell them apart from us?
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e’re all gonna die. That’s a fact. But some of us refuse to accept it. From Dr James Bedford, who became the first person to be cryogenically frozen in 1967, to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, who also want to be cryogenically frozen upon their passing through this world onto the next, there are many famous and nonfamous people who simply refuse to accept that death is the end of their life. For an increasing number of people, leaving a last will and testament, or a video, or a message stored with a company like Heavenote, is simply not enough. They don’t want leave anything, least of all life itself. They want to cling on, no matter how tenuous their connection. And who can blame them? Nobody wants to die. It’s this primeval drive to avoid death that, arguably, gave rise to some of the world’s largest religions. Christianity and Islam both offer clearly articulated visions of life after death, although Judaism is less clear about what lies beyond this “mortal coil”, as William Shakespeare called it. Spears and Hilton are among the more famous people who are known to want to preserve their bodies. At a guess, there must be many others, but not many have admitted it. In the film Vanilla Sky, the main character, played by Tom Cruise, is cryogenically frozen. If you want to put money on which other famous people have opted for cryogenic freezing, Cruise would probably win you money. Walt Disney is widely reported to be cryogenically frozen, but those reports have been denied. And it would be people like Cruise, Spears and Hilton, who have high enough incomes to be able to afford “cryogenic
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preservation” services, as they are known. Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics company, charges at least $220,000 for “whole body cryopreservation”, and $100,000 for “neurocryopreservation”, which probably means only the brain. Another company, the Cryonics Institute, says it charges $28,000 as an initial fee. There are other fees, including an ongoing charge for maintaining the bodies for as many years as it takes for the scientists to learn how to reanimate them. So it would be best to go beyond the prices mentioned here and visit those websites if you want a better idea of the overall cost. ’Til death us do part, temporarily The hope that people who choose cryogenic services have is, when scientists have figured out a way to keep humans alive even after their bodies die, they will be brought out of their cryogenically frozen state and given the chance to live again. Life support machines could be seen as one step, one gateway to understanding how it could be done, but it’s just a start. The overwhelming majority of people choose “traditional” after-life journeys, such as burial or cremation, for their souls, if they believe in them. Even for non-believers, it’s just the way things are done. But there have always been those who would really rather not start the journey at all. The pharaohs of Egypt had their bodies mummified and entombed inside pyramids with all their treasures in the hope that the gods will lift their souls to the stars, or something. In fact most religions have successfully sold the idea that there is something beyond death, that the end of life for our physical
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bodies is simply a transition from this world to another. But there’s a difference between religious beliefs, which generally cannot be proven, and scientific theories, which not only require experimental proof but also require the results of those experiments to be repeatable. Those who are deciding on having their bodies cryogenically frozen are doing so in the clear-minded hope that scientists will give them some form of life at some point in the future, and want their body tissue to be intact to give themselves the best chance. That people’s minds can be uploaded to the internet is tacitly accepted by most people now – if it hasn’t already happened, it’s only a matter of time. In terms of hardware, there is enough computing power in the world to generate virtual clones of humans, but the software probably still needs to be refined enough to emulate the subtleties of variation in human behaviour. So, people already accept that their brains could be
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he past three decades have seen T the emergence of an endeavor called tissue engineering in which scientists, engineers, and physicians apply tools to construct biological substitutes that can mimic tissues” Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
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A tissue of lives The phrase tissue engineering may be relatively new, but as a field of study it can be traced back to mid-1600s, to British scientist Robert Hooke, who first coined the term “cell” after dissecting and observing insects through a microscope. Some 200 years later, Carl Thiersh, a German scientist, attempted to grow skin cells to heal wounds. But while Thiersh sought to grow cells on the body of the patient, another German scientist, Leo Loeb suggested the idea of growing cells outside the human body. That was around 1900. And from that point on, a vast amount of research has been undertaken to grow human cells, as well as tissue and organs, outside the human body, or in vitro. A number of milestones have been achieved since the days of Thiersh and Loeb, but perhaps the most significant are the developments that have occurred in the past 30 years. A report in the Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ARCBE) says: “The past three decades have seen the emergence of an endeavor called tissue engineering and regenerative medicine in which scientists, engineers, and physicians apply tools from a variety of fields to construct biological substitutes that can mimic tissues for diagnostic and research purposes and can replace (or help regenerate) diseased and injured tissues.” The ARCBE report goes on to talk about “new, exciting technologies – for example, microfabrication, and 3D printing – that may enable future breakthroughs”. To that end, 3D printing technology has already been used to fabricate organs such as the heart, which is said to be one of the easiest organs to replicate. The ostensible and stated purpose of all this tissue engineering is to help people who have faulty or damaged organs, such as a heart or kidney, by replacing them with labmanufactured organs, for example. A large number of biotech companies are currently engaged in developing techniques for creating human tissue. Examples include LifeLike, LifeCell, and Cytograft, which says it uses “cells harvested from the patient or another human donor to repair diseased cardiovascular tissues and organs”, which is about the same as what the others say they do. But what if tissue engineering is used for more sinister purposes, such as building a fully functioning human body
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