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Immortality is just around the corner. That’s the claim some scientists are making.

 

Converging advances in biotechnology (through gene editing and stem cell technologies for example), nanotechnology (repairing the body through atomically precise engineering) and the more speculative ideas of fusing with super-intelligent machines using brain to computer interfaces (BCIs) or potentially downloading digital copies of our consciousness, all offer potential paths to hugely increasing our lifespans – perhaps indefinitely.

 

Cryonics suggests freezing our expired bodies soon after death until these and other technologies are advanced enough to bring us back to life and turn back our biological clocks.

 

Despite dramatic increases in average human life spans in the last 150 years or so (rising from about 30 to 70), so far there has been no advances in extending the longest lives – humans appear to have a maximum life span of about 125 years. Until this figure gets consistently breached, the possibility of significant life extension remains unproven.

 

But maybe that will change in the not too distant future, after all, we have already significantly extended the life-spans of other animals using biotechnology and other methods in laboratories, suggesting the potentiality maybe closer than we tend to think. Even people alive today can legitimately hold some hope of living for centuries or more.