Immortality: My Ultimate Aim

Immortality is not just living indefinitely, but it is the struggle to stay alive. This implies that you do not die of natural factors but of external actions. For example, you may die because someone switches off your simulation on a chip and you are incapable of saving yourself because you have not updated yourselves with the times and the environment.

It should, however, be noted that there is no thing such as 100% immortality. No one, including the environment, is immortal in totality else the law of life/energy would be violated. We will all ultimately die when all the free (usable) energy of universe is used up and there is nothing to work upon.

Personally, I'm interested in achieving immortality because I want to witness all that humans are capable of achieving. It would be sad if I had to die before the arrival of teleportation technology, or before I am able to take that intergalactic tour from earth to andromeda (with a preferred stopover at Mars). I would like to see true Artificial Intelligence being achieved, humans being habitable to silicon environments and the other millions of technologies and theories which are currently a simple idea or a daring premise. We haven't even achieved a millionth of our potential. We are going for a treasure hunt, knowing the adventure would definitely end before the goal is achieved.

There are many pathways to immortality. Currently, there are many descriptions of immortality and infinite prescribed ways to arrive at it. Some of these are:

• Running yourself into a computer simulation
• A brain transplant into your clone
• Tearing off the telomere from cells to make them immortal
• Preserving dead bodies cryogenically for future technology to make them alive.

Before we delve into the theory, I would like to discuss a few basic terms. The term 'environment', in the theory, is used in the most abstract sense. It makes complete sense only when applied to the context in which it is used. It may mean anything, where it fits best. For instance, environment could be earth, mars, carbon, silicon, bits and bytes, differential equations, time, EM waves, etc.

The terms 'organism' and 'energy' are also used in an abstract sense. They can be used to denote anything that we want to refer to. It should be observed that based on our definitions, the terms 'environment', 'organism' and 'energy' are mutually interchangeable. We can name any term anything as long as they makes sense. In this sense, an organism or the energy can be earth, mars, carbon, silicon, bits and bytes, differential equations, time, EM waves, etc.
Therefore,

Environment = Organism = Energy

All these three exist for the benefit of each other or in other words, they depend on each other for its existence. They exist mutually.

Now we take a look at the organism. (Please note that we can freely replace the term 'organism' with 'environment' or 'energy' in any of the text below or above. For example, if an organism lives or it has a life by exchanging energy with stale or nonliving organism, we may as well say that the environment lives rather than the organism. Alternately, the energy lives on organism via environment as a medium.)

Why do we live? Why do we come into existence? Basically, it is the environment which drives the life. As with every system, the environment wants to decrease its free energy. This is the reason why it gives birth to life. When life comes into being, then the search for ultimate energy harvester starts. This is called evolution. As the complexity in life grows, the organisms become better energy harvesters. They take energy from the environment, use it thus by converting the free energy into unusable energy, which is what the environment wants. It is the environment which is responsible for our death as the process of evolution cannot be halted. Evolution is necessary for the environment because it is the process by which new and better energy harvesters comes into being. If an organism lives forever, it could possibly trap all the resources for itself which would have otherwise lead to better organisms or which other organisms could have used in a better way. Thus it halts one path for evolution to occur and environment certainly does not want it. Hence, to become immortal, an organism needs to do one of the following:

• Fool the environment into thinking that it has evolved
• Constantly change the environment (from carbon to silicon to bits n bytes): thus making itself new (to environment) and thus giving time to environment to analyze its feasibility. By constant hopping around new environments, each time it gets into a new environment it gets more time to live
• Actually evolve into the existing environment
• Create a new environment in which it is the ultimate organism. By ultimate organism, I mean an organism which is the best harvester of the its current environment.

Whilst these are theories, they provide much stimulus to the mind seeking a more permanent existence.