Following on from the thoughts on the digital afterlife the concept of immortality raises many questions from a scientific standpoint.

The aspect of immortality that we are concerned with is the adjective from the Oxford English dictionary - “living forever”. Outside of spiritual beliefs the idea of ‘forever’ is difficult to fathom; indeed science has a great deal of difficulty with infinity. That which has no end point cannot be quantified or easily explained. The very concept of infinity dictates that it has no solution and since it has no solution it cannot be proved.

In a real sense infinity can be described as a concept of our impression of reality. In our reality it is always possible to take one more step in a journey out into the Universe, it is inconceivable, to us, that at some point we would reach the ‘edge’ and be unable to go any further because that would be a boundary after which nothing, not even reality itself, could exist.

The prospect of living forever is therefore only limited by the boundaries of our reality but even then that is only in turn a limitation of current knowledge; a billion years from now it may well be possible to create our own alternate realities. A universe where everything is exactly the way you want it.

This is not a challenge to the existence of a creator but a celebration of the advancement of life, a life that has moved forward from its creation on a never ending road to achieve bigger and better things.

Now that we know the principle of immortality is theoretically possible we can think about the multitude of obstacles on the road to achieving it; I’ll introduce these problems in part 2.

In my last post I introduced the expression “digital afterlife” and although that entry was pretty much tongue in cheek it is well worth further thought.

It may well be true that our most powerful computers today only have the processing power of the average earth worm but with Moore’s law holding true it can only be a matter of time before your desktop PC can do everything without you. Now this leads to some interesting possibilities for a digital immortality which would be much better than reincarnation simply because you would still know who you are.

Let’s fast forward to the year 2200. IBM have just released their latest PC, the 495986, complete with deluxe dual core soft touch temple sensors that will discreetly download every bit of information in your head while you sleep. The following morning you are woken up by your digital other self telling you how fantastic you look - and from this day forward there are now two of you; the fragile flesh and blood version and the immortal digital one.

Every night until the day you die, you strap on the temple sensors and update your digital counterpart to ensure there is an exact copy of you and every day you spend countless hours chatting away to someone who agrees completely with everything you say. After you die of course your digital other would continue to evolve without you and being an emotionless sort of a chap he may well evolve in a way that you wouldn’t have expected.

Let’s suppose that the president of the US does this and then unexpectedly dies during his term, would he have named his digital counterpart as the vice president? On the next election he might run with the slogan “The incorruptible politician.”

But would such a digital person really be emotionless? This idea stems from the belief that in order to have emotion or higher logic a being must possess a soul and while not wishing to enter into a religious argument, this belief is as outdated as the belief that man was put onto the Earth 6000 years ago. There is a plethora of evidence that emotion and logic are functions of processing power and that consciousness itself is just a heightening of the senses in an evolutionary path to allow a life form to judge its environment for the purposes of survival.

Knowing all of this it would be a simple matter, on the day of your demise, to transfer your digital other self into the body of a cyborg; another you that would have all of the same thoughts, dreams and aspirations as the former you. It would in fact be no different than having the capability upon your death to ‘possess’ the body of another person.

It is rather sad to know that we are among the last few generations of mankind that will need to suffer disease and death and that our descendants just a few more generations down the line will be able to continue on as part man part machine that will take them on to witness the end of the universe in a multi billion year digital afterlife.

Just a few years ago a friend in IT told me that data storage would probably never pass 15 megabytes, because no-one really needed that much data storage anyway. Regardless of this rather short sighted forecast Hitachi have this month announced a single hard drive that will be capable of storing four terabytes of data within the next four years.

The question though is still the same; how much information can a human possibly want or ever hope to use? For example, Hitachi state that the new drive will be able to store over a million songs; are there a million songs that have ever been recorded? I don’t know but I’m pretty sure I don’t have time to listen to all of them and even presuming we could add them to winamps playlist without choking the poor thing, it would take over 7 years at 24 hours per day to listen to them all, so don’t hit the repeat button by accident.

It all reminds me a little bit of my bookcase; 50 or so books of which I have read less than half but always intend to read once I get a minute. The big difference between my bookcase and the hard drive however is that it is like someone adding another few hundred thousand books for my ’sometime in the future’ reading pleasure.

Maybe it’s just my turn for being short sighted and just maybe it won’t be too long before you can stick a probe into your ear and download every bit of information contained in your conscious and sub conscious so that your great, great grand children can flick on a PC 50 years after you died and have a conversation with a life size 3d rendition of you. Although given the general state of education these days it probably still wouldn’t require 4tb !

Maybe I could also continue to contribute to this blog in the year 2100 from my digital afterlife or possibly finally get a chance to read those books gathering dust behind me.