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.