Is it Possible to Live Forever by reaching longevity escape velocity and using cybernetic enhancements?
Meet Sheila Nirenberg who is building an encoder and a transducer for the blind to see.
Living forever includes upgrading our organs and senses with bionic and cybernetic human enhancements. Sheila Nirenberg of Cornell University is building an encoder and a transducer that takes the light that hits the retina of a blind person and creates electrical impulses that the retinal circuitry would normally make. Sheila explains that these impulses are a code that the brain uses to compile what it is looking at. What she has been working on is breaking the code and building a retinal circuitry interface with an encoder that can create and then send into the brain the electrical signals using the same code that healthy retinal circuitry would fire off to the brain. Sheila also explains that these encoders can be built for other senses such as the auditory (for deafness) or motor neurons that lose the signals when a stroke occurs. As we develop and refine the circuit interfaces, new ways of acquiring information will become available with capabilities that will allow our brain to pick up light, sound, smell, and touch that are beyond our current range. Interfaces that can send electrical impulses into our wetware (brain) can help with computer brain interface technology, limbs, and senses for the cybernetic human. Human enhancements are already being created and are available today.
When will this happen? Find out in this follow-up video.
Living forever will happen to the majority of people alive today. This is because the majority of us do not need it today; the progress of medical products and treatments in the emerging future will continually grow at exponential rates, allowing us to make radically better solutions for age related diseases. With our technology advancing by a thousand times in just a ten year period, we can stay ahead of the build-up of biological damage that aging creates. This anti-aging strategy has been given a name, “longevity escape velocity”, which has been described by Aubrey de Grey. His Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) organization is mobilizing the biotech and medical fields to create solutions to stop ageing and even reverse the damage of aging and make anti-aging a part of humanities accepted medical practice. Life expectancy tables are about to become moot with IBM, the X-prize, Gnome, DARPA, Google, Autodesk, and Microsoft pushing medical technology past the capabilities of mere humans. The average person living today will be able to continually extend their healthy lives. This is because 20 years from now our technological abilities will be a million times more advanced than today and a billion times more advanced in 30 years. We will utilize superior bio, nano, synthetic, and artificial intelligence replacement systems, organs, and senses at incredibly low to no cost. This changes everything.
