Immortality vs technology

If you could live forever, would you?  Believe it or not, billionaires have already been funding scientists to invent technology that would allow them to live forever.  They plan to accomplish this by mapping one’s brain completely and downloading everything you are, your personality, your emotions, your memories–everything, down to the tiniest idiosyncrasy–onto a microchip. This microchip then, acts as functional copy of a person’s brain.  The microchip then can be implanted in a flesh and blood clone body or a robotic body. This allows one to leave their body, or “biological shell” and continue their existence. Human cloning and consciousness transfer has quietly become the most promising lead for science and technology to cheat death and live on for the rest of time. I will be laying out what scholars, scientists and the billionaires funding them have said about how these technologies work and the current progress of their development, then I will make the argument that these technologies should be banned.

I see it being nothing but trouble for humanity and very well could unleash an irreversible curse upon the Earth.

The two components to upload your mind onto a microchip go as follows: 1. a scanned copy of one’s neural and neurochemical architecture and 2. a sufficiently powerful microchip to run the scanned copy of the mind.  The next step is to create the clone body.  The two steps to create a clone are: 1. an egg with the DNA removed and 2. the nucleus of a cell from a tissue sample of who you want to clone.  That nucleus is then implanted in the empty egg and then put in a surrogate mother.

Human cloning has been a hot ethical debate since Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996, the same year that I was born. Dolly’s cloning caused a bit of a panic as the news broke since people believed humans would soon follow. Fast forward 22 years after Dolly was born, and 23 mammal species, including cattle, cats, deer, dogs, horses, mules, oxen, rabbits and rats have been cloned. Recently, Chinese scientists had a major breakthrough cloning monkeys for the first time this year. This breakthrough drew a lot of attention from the scientific community, as shown in Doctor Leonard Zon’s statement as director of the stem cell program at Boston’s Children Hospital, “it is the first primate to ever be cloned.  We are closer to cloning humans than we’ve ever been before.”

There are currently projects, companies and nonprofits, such as the 2045 initiative, ClonAid and Carboncopies respectively, that are actively seeking to achieve a transfer of consciousness into a clone or robotic body.  The billionaires funding these scientists do not believe they are just throwing their money away on a pipe dream;  Dmitry Itskov, the main financier of the 2045 Initiative, said in an interview, “I believe it will be done, otherwise I wouldn’t have put money into it.”  The mission statement for Carboncopies states, “We have already made strides.  Looking at the years since the Carboncopies Foundation was first established in 2010, the possibility that the brain can be mapped and understood sufficiently for brain emulation has not only been accepted, but has grown to become an inspiration for research goals of numerous scientific labs and collaborative projects. Steady progress is being made today on the scientific and technological challenges.”

The individuals funding human cloning and the initiative for transferring consciousness see it as a cure for death. I, on the other hand, believe death and rebirth is part of the natural order of things.  In the show “Altered Carbon,” where I first learned of this technology, I found there are many problems with living forever. Rich people are the only ones with access to this technology and this exacerbates wealth disparity and the common folk’s ability to move up in the world.  Imagine Vladimir Putin living forever, or Kim Jong Un.  In fact, according to MI6 British intelligence, Kim Jong Un is reportedly obsessed with human cloning and is seeking to live forever through this technology.  The North Korean people would be subjected to live under the tyranny of a ruler who could never die.  These technologies are on the horizon and if we don’t have a public discourse that alerts people about the potential consequences of such technology, immortality could be attained in secret by evil despotic leaders. I would be in favor of banning this technology as soon as possible so it will at least never come to pass in the US.  I see it being nothing but trouble for humanity and very well could unleash an irreversible curse upon the Earth.

Chris Cunningham is a third-year student majoring in communication studies. CC900349@wcupa.edu