Never say die - the quest for immortality

In the high-tech hothouse of Silicon Valley where the leafy streets are lined with temples to Microsoft, Apple and Google, one establishment seems strangely out of place.

Moffett Airfield is a relic of another era, three vast hangars stark reminders of a time when people took to the skies in airships, travelling across San Francisco Bay at a sedate 80kmh.

Today these lighter-than-air leviathans have long since sailed off into the sunset, but the dream still lives on in the form of a replica Zeppelin that takes tourists for a trip down memory lane.

As they float over the sprawling airfield, where Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin park their personal Boeing 767, they are most likely unaware of an extraordinary odyssey taking place right below them.

Nestled alongside Hangar One, a gargantuan structure that covers an area the size of six football fields, is a modest building housing an elite organisation known as the Singularity University.

It’s here that some of the world’s best and brightest minds, including two young New Zealanders, have been on a quest to find the Holy Grail – immortality.

Brothers Luke and David Hutchison from Auckland were two of just one hundred and twenty scientists from all over the world selected to take part in cutting edge  research into nano-technology – the science of manipulating atoms to build microscopic structures.

Luke says it has profound implications for humankind.

“If you lose an arm we should be able to trigger some growth factors where the arm used to be and you should be able to regrow a new arm.

“If you have congestive heart failure we should be able to grow a second heart in your chest cavity and then cut out the old one, rather than transplants. So you grow from your own tissues.”

The university’s co-founder, Peter Diamandis, describes nano-technology as the ability to take atoms and “position them exactly where you want them in the human body like building blocks.”

“We humans are in one sense machines,” he says. “The heart, lungs , the tissues, the organs in us are machines that wear down.

“What if you had the ability to actually go into your heart, your lungs, your skin, any part of your body and go back and rearrange it to where it was when you were twenty years old, back to that state of longevity?

“We literally would have the ability to control exactly the structures in our body so immortality is one consequence of nano-technology.”

Dr Diamandis delivers his show-stopping statement in a matter of fact way that belies the enormity of what he is saying.

So, let’s get this right, is he really serious about this?

“Yes, absolutely serious,” he says without hesitation. “The ability to literally live forever, where you would have the option to choose to live as long as you wish. I believe this is within a time horizon of, I believe, thirty to fifty years from now.”

The university’s chancellor, Ray Kurzweil, is even more emphatic.

For decades he’s been hailed as one of America’s great futurists, an inventor and philosopher whose predictions have an uncanny knack of coming true.

He believes technological change is happening exponentially – doubling and redoubling every few years.

This means humans are heading towards a convergence of their bodies with their machines, a moment that Dr Kurzweil has dubbed the Singularity.

“We’re creating these machines to make ourselves smarter and that, in fact, is what we’re going to do with them.

“We’re going to put these very small, very intelligent machines in our bodies to make ourselves healthier and in our brains to make ourselves smarter.

“It wont require surgery, we can send them in through the bloodstream non-invasively and they will extend human intelligence just as the devices we carry in our pockets do that today.

“By the time we get to the 2040s there’s going to be a vast increase in human intelligence through this merger with the new technology we’re creating.

“That’s such a profound change that we call it a Singularity.”

Dr Kurzweil’s predictions may seem the stuff of science fiction but he has news for sceptics – it’s just the beginning of a world without an end.

He predicts a time, may be only decades away, when our technology is so advanced that we can literally preserve our consciousness on a machine.

The nanobots we will create will be able to map our brains and transfer our consciousness to a separate hard drive – yet another kind of immortality.

“My memory, my skills, my personality is information massively distributed throughout my brain,” he says.

“Today, that software is embedded in the hardware. When the hardware crashes, the software dies with it.

“We just accept that as the reality of biological existence but we don’t have that idea with our machines.

“If I break my computer I can recreate all of its skills, its knowledge, its memories from the back-up.

“So, yes, we’re going to be able to back-up our brains. If I do that and it’s stored in a different place is that me? Or is it a different person who just happens to be similar to me?

“It’s actually a deep, philosophical question.”

It’s also a deep ethical and environmental question given the stress being put on Planet Earth through its seven billion inhabitants.

Can it sustain an even larger population that refuses to die?

Ray Kurzweil believes he has an answer for this.

“Once we’re non-biological we can spread out very easily to the rest of the universe.

“We don’t have to send missions of complicated creatures like we have today, we can send out missions of nanobots, microscopic-sized devices which are powerful computers with greater than human intelligence.

“They will go out and colonise other celestial bodies and mine them for materials so they can create copies of themselves and basically spread our machine/human civilisation that way.

“That’s very far into the future but that’s the ultimate destiny that I see for our civilisation.”