Immortal innovation: Can tech help us cheat death?
In 1988 a two-year-old girl called Michelle Funk fell into a river near her home in Salt Lake City. She was under ice cold water for over an hour, she underwent a lung and heart transplant for over two hours before she eventually breathed life back into her tiny body. Being pronounced dead is something that innovation is trying hard to change. But for some being dead is merely an inconvenience, and we’ll meet them and others this week on the Innovation Ramble’s Death Episode.
Almost all cultures have been obsessed with immortality because of what is known as Terror Management Theory. We are terrified by the thought of being dead from an early age but we learn to live with it and suppress it as a lingering fear. The philosopher Heidegger wrote that this causes us to have irrational beliefs about our mortality.
Heidegger would see that this is proven by the billions of dollars pouring into Silicon Valley biotech firms working to ‘hack the code of life’. Last year, hedge fund manager Joon Yun tapped into this quest and challenged scientists to find a way to push human lifespan beyond its current limits (the longest known/confirmed lifespan was 122 years). So far, 15 scientific teams have entered the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, which has a $1m prize fund.
Immortality is the ultimate hack and we’ve always been been pursuing it. The immortality game has four plays, the Elixir of Youth, Resurrection, the Soul and Legacy.
1. Elixir of life
Google executive Ray Kurzweil takes 150 vitamins a day as part of his strategy to cheat death. The current phase of his ‘bridge-to-bridge’ strategy is by staying alive until robots can subsidise our immune systems. Hannah Critchlow of Cambridge University supports his view that humans could live inside machines, suggesting that it would be possible to upload our brains into computers as long as they have 100 trillion circuit connections.
Ray and Hannah are late to the game while Japan's tiny Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is one of the only known animals that has figured out how to defeat death. Shin Kubota of Kyoto University’s Seto Marine Biological Laboratory claims it is the only animal in the world able to reverse its aging process instead of dying. When they’re damaged or hurt, the jellyfish spends three days returning to its polyp stage and eventually becomes an adult again. Kubota suggested that we really don’t know their lifespan and that they might live forever.
2. Resurrection
The concept of resurrection has been a big hit in the Christian faith and it’s still very much alive today. If you can’t bare the thought of your friends and family not being with you then maybe you should investigate Project Elysium. This is a service that creates a realistic 3D model of you that can be interacted with via virtual reality. The project records you speaking so your mates can have a conversation and interact with you like you were still there. Each 3D render in Project Elysium comes with all of the PowerPoint presentations you’ve ever made. Not really.
3. Soul
Most cultures have a concept of the soul living on after death. There is a Chinese tradition of burning paper replicas of their dead loved one’s possessions for them to take with them into the afterlife. Paper Pets are crafted and burned as well as concubines, laptops, airconditioner units, Viagra, cigarettes and Apple Watches.
4. Legacy
Living on after death in your legacy is the most achievable and provable form of immortality. Philanthropy, park benches and statues are all life preservers but on the island of Tana Toraja the families live with the bodies of their dead. The recently departed will stay in the family home for years as they pass from one life to the next. They see that their relationship with a person in the family doesn’t end with the physical death in the family. Kids will play and talk to the dead body of a grandparent. This allows them to get used to the idea of the relative being dead in a non abrupt way.
A 2014 PwC study estimates the value of the digital assets of all UK individuals at a staggering £25 billion. Given our world is increasingly digital, many service providers are adding features allowing user to manage their virtual legacies.
Facebook has recently announced the release of its Legacy Contact Service, allowing users to choose one person who can access your account after they die. This individual will be able to pin a post on your profile, respond to friend requests and update your profile picture and cover photo. However, they won’t be able to log into your account, see private messages or edit anything from your past. If this isn’t your cup of tea, Facebook also offers a feature to self-destruct in the event of your death, rather than giving someone access.
Upon his death in 2002, the last wishes of Edward Headrick (inventor of the frisbee) were that his ashes be mixed with plastic polymer, and the mixture then molded into a set of memorial Frisbees given to family and close friends.
We’ve been investigating innovation a subject at a time for the past six months and the fact that we keep returning to is that so much of our lives are controlled by what goes on in our subconscious minds and in our DNA. Our level of fear, happiness, love, health and even when we die is intrinsically set at a pre-set level by nature. Innovation is desperately trying to challenge this in all of these areas. Immortality is a theoretical certainty but also an uncertain reality but with an impending sixth mass extinction we may have to come up with the answer sooner than we think.
In the meantime download the Innovation Ramble on iTunes.
Tom Ollerton is We Are Social's marketing and innovation director and Alastair Cole is chief innovation officer at Partners Andrews Aldridge / Engine Group. You can follow their innovation ramblings @innovramble