Cancer is now the leading cause of death, but if these guys have their way, that will change in the next decade.

There will come a time when suicide is the most common cause of death. You’ll be able to live as long as you wish to. The only good excuse for death right now is that we’ve got to free up room and other resources for the next generation, but throwing away the accumulated knowledge and experiences of a lifetime to do so is such a waste. We’ll soon (relatively speaking) be capable of achieving the same benefit by only spending a small part of our lives in a physical body. The first generation of immortals may very well already be among us.

In fact, there’s a chance that we will be that generation. What would we need for it, that we don’t already have?

• It would require the ability to read all the data from a person’s brain. We’re making progress toward that already. Our achievements in that field are small right now, but they’ll get ever-larger, and at an ever-increasing pace. In the next hundred years, at most, that ability will be old hat.
• We’d also need the ability to store exabytes of information. Hard drives are growing ever-larger, and much faster and more durable forms of memory are already on the horizon. When the need arises, we’ll have the memory capacity for it.
• Finally, we’d need the processing power to simulate physical life for those stored minds. With the ever-increasing pace that technology advances, we’ll have that capability long before it’s needed as well.

Sounds like science fiction? It is (though it’s not common even there, as immortality makes it hard to design a good story). But that only means that it’s not reality yet… look at all the modern conveniences that have happened in the last century, and look at when they first appeared in fiction. As I’ve pointed out several times on this blog, today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.