Is immortality real? After all, it is impossible to get used to death. Man has never come to terms with the inevitability of parting with this land. The problem of immortality worries humanity throughout its history. The most striking thing about this seemingly completely unbelievable idea is that the elixir of youth existed not only in the minds of the ancients.

Is immortality real? Modern scientists are convinced of its reality. Moreover, they claim that they are on the verge of an incredible discovery. Gerontology, dealing with the problems of longevity and old age, has in reserve more than 300 different hypotheses about the mechanisms of human aging, among which the “thousand hearts” theory is of particular interest. As scientists suggest, despite the different periods of the earthly existence of every living being, nature endowed each of them with the same lifespan genes. But why, then, in this case, the rat was given a period of 3 years, the elephant - 60 years? It turned out that the heart of both the rat and the elephant is “designed” for one billion contractions. But in a rat, the heart beats at a speed of 600 beats per minute, while in an elephant, only 30. The same period allotted to them is exhausted at completely different speeds. Well, you know, you go quieter. .

According to researchers, it will be possible to regulate life expectancy when ways are found to slow down the work of the heart. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus, head of the laboratory of blood circulation of the Institute of Physiology N. I. Arinchin developed the theory of “thousand hearts”, according to which human life can be extended up to eight hundred years. We are talking about a kind of peripheral "hearts" that promote blood circulation through the veins. It has also been proven that the helpers of the heart are skeletal muscles, of which there are more than a thousand in the human body. The more the skeletal muscles are trained, the less load falls on the main “motor” of the body.

Studies have shown that regular muscle training improves the filling of the heart with venous blood and, accordingly, slows down the number of cardiac cycles. It is believed that a person who is engaged in physical education annually saves 20 to 30 days of life, since he has rarer heartbeat cycles than someone who leads a passive lifestyle. In trained people, all cardiovascular diseases come from premature wear of the heart. Solving the problem of longevity, scientists have proven that the hypothalamus controls the immune system. Tiny pieces of embryonic hypothalamus that had not yet developed were transplanted into old and decrepit mice with shabby hair. Mice were getting younger literally before our eyes. They have regained the ability to reproduce. In addition, there was a rejuvenation of the entire immune system, which strongly protects the body from diseases and aging. Some researchers generally believe that a person has two brains. One motionless, brain consisting of neurons and fibers intertwined with each other, which controls the emotional state, thoughts and actions. Another brain is mobile - the immune system monitors the state of organs and tissues. Lymphocytes, carrying out a single program, spread throughout the body, protect every cell, control all organs. Many studies confirm the close relationship between these two systems. How to explain, for example, that people who are cheerful get sick less, keep youth longer than people who are gloomy and always dissatisfied with everything?

Scientists from the Central Research Institute of Vaccines and Serum, the Central Research Institute of Medical and Biological Problems of Sports have established that frequent negative emotions lead to the emergence of immunodeficiency in the human body, that is, to the virtual disappearance of certain classes of antibodies. Comparing the blood of people who are optimistic with those of people who are emotionally upset, researchers at the University of California found that certain cells in the immune system are much more active in optimists than in pessimists. This allows us to conclude about the influence of the brain on the mobile. This means that a nervous shock is not only a psychological state, but also a physiological process that entails changes in the body. At the household level, managing these processes is available to everyone. A benevolent disposition towards one's neighbor first of all turns into good for ourselves, and vice versa. As for the researchers, they are trying to consider the problem of longevity at a deeper level. According to them, the transplanted embryonic brain in the hypothalamus transmits an updated genetic program, which contributes to the renewal of cells in the body. In addition, it has also been revealed that the transplanted nervous tissue helps to remove poisons from the body, rejuvenate neighboring obsolete tissue and accelerate the formation of hormones that cause accelerated growth and restoration of body cells.

The question remains a mystery for gerontologists: why are foreign embryonic cells not rejected? In the brain of a mouse, for example, particles of the brain of a rabbit, a monkey, and sometimes a person take root well and adapt to reproduction.

There is an assumption that this is a consequence of increased activity of the genes of nerve cells. Since human genes are the most active, they, according to some assumptions, cause the “over-optimization” of animal body functions. Therefore, in order to obtain a similar effect of rejuvenation in humans, it is necessary to find a creature on earth whose embryonic brain genes will cause over-optimization in humans.

An unusual theory about longevity, on which the Moscow biologist-chemist N. N. Isaev is working. He is developing a methodology for cycling age, that's what its essence is. In maple, in order to prevent its leaves from turning yellow, buds are plucked every three weeks. Every twenty days, the maple was returned in this way to the same mark, and it remained. . . evergreen. Similar experiments were carried out on animals. According to scientists, in the human body it is also possible to artificially suppress the three products discovered by biochemists, which “turn on” the next age phase. For two, substances-inhibitors are already known. Scientists have yet to find an overwhelming "brake" for the third product that causes aging and the solution to the problem of human immortality will become a reality. Who doesn't take their breath away from such conclusions!? But it is even more striking that restless science does not stop there. In the near future, scientists hope not only to "cycle" the body at a certain age, but also to "travel" through the ages. It is unlikely that there will be, however, many who want to return to childhood.

The fear of disappearing without a trace has tormented people for many thousands of years. Each of us at least once thought about what kind of epitaph will be written on the tombstone, and about what good friends will remember at the wake. I thought about it - and was afraid of my own thoughts. The Village begins a week of death and rebirth to tell readers about how humanity is trying to find a way to immortality, how doctors help the hopeless sick, and how to get rid of the fear of death.

1. Six ways to gain immortality

Cryonics

Freezing the body and brain is the most popular way to prepare yourself for eternal life. In the United States, 143 companies are involved in cryogenic freezing, and the market is estimated at $ 1 billion. The hypothesis that a person can be revived after being in a freezer appeared in the 18th century, but since then scientists have made little progress.

It is not yet possible to revive a frozen one, but it is possible to store the body for a long time - a standard contract is concluded with the relatives of the deceased for a hundred years. Perhaps in the twenty-second century there will be a breakthrough and the brain will be able to restore its functions after freezing. In the end, babies conceived with the help of once frozen sperm are already being born, and in 1995, biologist Yuri Pichugin was able to first freeze and then unfreeze parts of the rabbit brain, while they did not lose biological activity.

Digitization of intelligence

Another way to save your brain and consciousness forever is to turn it into a combination of zeros and ones. Many researchers are working on this problem. Gordon Bell, a distinguished employee of Microsoft Research, for example, is working on the MyLifeBits project - trying to design his own digital avatar that can communicate with his grandchildren and children after the death of a scientist. To do this, he has already digitized and systematized hundreds of thousands of photographs, letters and his own memoirs.

IBM has been studying the possibility of computer modeling of the neocortex, the main part of the human cerebral cortex responsible for conscious thinking, for ten years now. The project is still far from being completed, but scientists have no doubt that as a result they will be able to create artificial intelligence - a powerful and intelligent supercomputer.

Cyborg

Artificial heart valves, pacemakers, modern prostheses that work like real arms and legs - receive and process brain signals - all this already exists today. The concept of "cyborg", familiar to the layman from science fiction action movies, was invented in the 60s by scientists Manfred Klines and Nathaniel Klein. They studied the ability of some animals to recover from damage (for example, how lizards grow a new tail after losing the old one) and suggested that humans can also replace damaged parts of the body with the help of technology.

Scientists, as often happens, foresaw the future very accurately - technology already allows growing artificial organs and even printing them on a 3D printer, however, it has not yet been possible to make such tissues work for a long time and reliably.

Nanobots

Futurologists believe that by 2040 people will learn to become immortal. Nanotechnology will help, capable of creating microscopic repair machines for the body. Inventor Raymond Kurzweil paints a fantastic perspective: robots the size of a human cell will travel inside the body and repair all damage, sparing the host from disease and aging.

Not such a fantastic picture, though, MIT researchers are already using nanotechnology to bring cancer-killing cells to the epicenter of tumors. A similar experiment is being carried out at the University of London on mice - they can be cured of cancer.

Genetic Engineering

It is already possible to analyze the genome now, and for relatively little money - for a couple of tens of thousands of rubles. Another thing is that there is little sense in this. The technology is effective when doctors know what they are looking for - for example, a young couple is planning the birth of a child, but one of the parents has genetic abnormalities - there are tests that can detect the same abnormalities in the fetus in the womb.

Genetics is developing, doctors and scientists are identifying more and more new genes responsible for certain diseases, and in the future they hope to learn how to rebuild the genome in such a way as to save humanity from many terrible diseases.

rebirth

At first glance, the non-scientific way to gain immortality is to believe in the transmigration of the soul. Many religions - from Buddhism to the beliefs of the North American Indians - convince that human souls take on new life in new bodies, sometimes they move into their own descendants, sometimes into strangers, animals, and even into plants and stones.

Sociologists and psychologists look at the problem differently. They prefer the term “collective intelligence” and since the 1980s have been studying the process of accumulation and transfer of social knowledge, which leads to the fact that each next generation of schoolchildren and students learns according to a more complex curriculum, and the overall level of human IQ is growing. Scientists propose to look at the community of people as a whole organism, and consider each individual as a cell. She may die, but the body will live forever, develop and grow smarter. So, it's not all in vain.

Illustrations: Natalia Osipova, Katya Baklushina

Human Immortality

We, as embodied spirits, are connected with our body only by the time periods of our earthly wandering. Completing its earthly path, our body grows old, decrepit, dies and decomposes into those basic chemical elements from which it was taken. "For dust you are, and to dust you shall return," God said to Adam who sinned.

By the way, "not so long ago, materialistic scientists proudly ridiculed the testimony of the Bible that the human body was created from the "dust of the earth", but later, from the analyzes of protoplasm and the entire human body, scientists became convinced that this truth of the Bible is absolutely true and fully consistent with all scientific data.

Yes, a person dies ... But not the whole person, but only his body, "because the visible is temporary," and the spirit that left the human body continues to exist, because "the invisible is eternal." "And the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it."

Science has established that matter and energy could not create themselves out of nothing and even less capable of destroying themselves. They can, however, change from one state to another. This indisputable fact is recognized by all groups of scientists.

Another such fact, which follows from the first, is as follows: if it is impossible to destroy without God a single atom of matter, "the smallest speck of dust in the Universe", and we willingly agree with this, then how can one admit the idea that the incorporeal and imperishable spirit of man , who left the body, ceases to exist?

We say that with the death of the body, it decays into its constituent elements. But what is decomposition if not the division of a substance into two or more parts? Therefore, decomposition is unthinkable without the presence of matter subject to decomposition. These are the laws governed by matter. But what is not matter, but represents the mental, mental and spiritual side of a person, is not subject to the laws of matter and is not subject to division or decomposition. It follows from this that since the soul, as a spiritual substance, is not subject to division, then it cannot die and decompose, it cannot disappear.

The Creator tells people: "You are immortal" and the soul that loves God unquestioningly accepts and believes in this Divine revelation; but people, "by the cunning of their heart and by the stubbornness of their will," try to convince themselves that "everything ends in the grave"...

Isn't it already indicative that proud "scientists" and "cultural people" are ready to recognize any monkey as their distant ancestor, just to put an end to the issue of immortality and remove the thought of God the Creator from their vicious consciousness.

Of course, God gave us free will and each of us has the right to choose: to believe or not to believe in God, to recognize or deny the spiritual principle in man and the afterlife. But will our unbelief destroy the afterlife? Does our covert skepticism or open and convinced denial of the entire invisible spiritual world change the situation?

God does not prove to us the existence of the human soul after death, but He repeatedly shows this on the pages of Holy Scripture. God gives each person a special right to verify the truth of immortality, just as a person checks and becomes convinced of the existence of the law of gravity, the presence of electricity, the possibility of hypnosis, etc. In the spiritual world there are the same inexorable and indestructible laws as the laws in the material world. If a person is in no hurry to discover these laws and apply them in his earthly life, it is only because he does not want to obey either these laws or their Legislator.

The human spirit is immortal and physical death is powerless to kill it. Someone reasonably compared a person with a book: the human body is paper, turned by printers into a beautiful, solid volume, and the human soul is the ideas and thoughts contained in the content of this volume. Throw a book into a blazing fire and it will burn, turn to ashes; but only one paper will burn, and by no means the ideas or thoughts expressed by the author on this paper. The content of the book does not burn out - it continues to live in the minds and memory of the people who read it. For “nothing is lost to God”… (Isaiah 40th chapter). Scientists are convinced that from the day of the creation of the Universe to the present moment, not a single atom of matter has disappeared, but only changed its forms.

The horror of death and the thirst for life experienced by people at the thought of their complete disappearance are known to each of us, if not from personal experience, then from observation. Therefore, the vast majority of mankind has always believed and continues to believe in the immortality of the human soul, and only an insignificant number of "know-it-alls-screamers" denies it, having absolutely no reason to do so. Belief in immortality, rooted in the consciousness of the entire human race and passing from generation to generation , from generation to generation, must be based on an immutable Truth, otherwise what kind of lie could survive all those attacks, trials, tests and persecutions that Truth was constantly subjected to?This important historical fact and phenomenal phenomenon remains to this day without scientific explanation.

Some scientists, denying the immortality of the soul, recognize the immortality of dead matter, do not believe in the beginningless and infinite Creator of the Universe, but willingly believe in the beginninglessness and infinity of the space in which the Universe rotates. They believe that the entire Universe is held by the law of gravity, and they do not believe in the Almighty, Who created this law of attraction and keeps everything by this law. If scientists admit that everything is held by the law of gravity and such a belief does not bother them, then why should they be confused by the fact that the Almighty first created everything and established laws, and then began to hold everything?

Great and incomprehensible to the mind is the mystery of immortality, but even it ceases to be a mystery to us when we know God and reconcile ourselves with Him. To the question: is there immortality? - a person who truly believes boldly answers: where there is an Immortal God, there must be incorruption and eternal life.

"To the King of the ages, incorruptible, invisible, the only wise God, honor and glory forever and ever, Amen" (1 Tim. 1st chapter).

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From the book Orthodox Dogmatic Theology author Anointed Protopresbyter Michael

The immortality of the soul Belief in the immortality of the soul is inseparable from religion in general, and even more so is one of the main subjects of the Christian faith. It could not be alien to the Old Testament either. It is expressed by the words of Ecclesiastes: “And the dust will return to the earth, as it was; and the spirit will return to

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3.2.7.4. Immortality The soul is a simple and uncomplicated being, and that which is simple and uncomplicated, that which is not composed of various elements, cannot be destroyed, disintegrated into constituent parts. In the New Testament, the belief in the immortality of the human soul is quite clear. What

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Humans are just dirty sacks of blood and bones that are completely unsuitable for immortality. Everyone is aware of this: both ordinary stokers and billionaires. In 2016, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged $3 billion towards a plan to cure all diseases by the end of the century. “By the end of this century, it will be quite normal for people to live to 100 years old,” the naive Zuckerberg believes.

Of course, science has made a huge step forward, life expectancy has greatly increased. Although they consider it wrong, forgetting that in the old days infant mortality was very high, and therefore the numbers are so negligible. But the money invested in scientific research is not at all like that. Longevity and potentiality is a particularly popular obsession with the rich and famous, who seem to be very embarrassed by the fact that someday this happiness will have to be parted.

Often the shapes are not important - let them be a pulsating can of canned food or monkey gonads.

And the whole problem is that human bodies, those sad, falling, failing products of evolution, are simply not made to live forever. People throughout history have tried, but the garbage body has always gotten in the way.

Interested in the immortality of the oligarchs, politicians and scientists throughout history does not leave the dream to live to the end of time. The following is a summary of the various approaches that have been taken in the never-ending quest for eternal life.

Hack all diseases

Zuckerberg, along with his Silicon Valley friends Google and 23andme, created the Breakthrough Award in 2012 to promote scientific innovation, including those aimed at extending life expectancy and fighting disease.

He created a foundation that will donate $3 billion over the course of a decade to basic medical research. Some argue that this approach is not the most efficient. The money will be spent on studying one particular disease, rather than trying to pacify several at once. That is, it will take ten years to completely eradicate, say, smallpox, while people will seek salvation from cancer.

There is another problem - time. The patient ages, his condition only worsens, and the disease remains uncured. And aging itself is the biggest risk factor for all these diseases that are getting out of control. The older you are, the more exposed the risks are, because organs and systems inevitably wear out and break.

It is important to remember that we are not only talking about a few billionaires who can afford the best, but about millions of people depending on the circumstances. Therefore, some centers are investigating ways to stop aging at the enzyme level. One of the most promising is TOP, a kind of cellular signaling that tells a cell that it needs to either grow and divide, or be destroyed. Scientists believe that manipulating this pathway can slow down the most natural process.

Biohacking also plans to take its place under the sun, despite the debate over the ethical dimension of the issue: how far people can go to change their genetic code. Scientists, for example, are still scrutinizing CRISPR technology, which acts like a homing missile: it tracks a specific strand of DNA and then cuts and inserts a new strand in its old place. It can be used to change almost every aspect of DNA. In August, scientists first used gene-editing technology on a human embryo to erase an inherited heart defect.

Fresh blood, foreign gland

Throughout human history, we have toyed with the idea of ​​filling the body with replaceable parts to cheat death. Take the same Sergei Voronov, a Russian scientist who at the beginning of the 20th century believed that the gonads of animals contain the secret of life extension. In 1920, he tried it by taking a piece of a monkey gland and sewing it onto a human one (we will warn you right away: not his, he did not like science that much).

There was no shortage of patients: about 300 people underwent the procedure, including one woman. The professor claimed that he returned youth to 70-year-olds and extended their life to at least 140 years. In his book Life. Learning how to restore vitality and prolong life,” he wrote: “The sex gland stimulates brain activity, muscle energy and love passions. It infuses the blood stream with a vital fluid that restores the energy of all cells and spreads happiness.”

Voronov died in 1951, apparently unable to rejuvenate himself.

Monkey testicles have gone out of fashion, but unlike Dr. Voronoff, the idea of ​​collecting body parts is still very much alive.

For example, there is a lot of talk about parabiosis, the process of transfusing blood from a young person to an elderly person to stop aging. Elderly mice thus managed to rejuvenate. Moreover, in the 50s, people conducted similar studies, but for some reason abandoned them. Apparently, the ancestors learned some terrible secret. For example, that this method can be pushed from under the floor to very rich people. They love the blood of virgins and babies. As the story goes, everyone from Emperor Caligula to Kevin Spacey loves young bodies.

Although, to be honest, the experiments with transfusion were carried out on a person, but they did not end very well. It didn't always work. For example, science fiction writer, doctor and pioneer of cybernetics, Alexander Bogdanov, in the 1920s, decided to add fresh blood to himself. He naively believed that this would make him literally invulnerable. Alas, insufficient analysis, and the luminaries are already digging a grave. It turned out that he transfused himself with the blood of a patient with malaria. Moreover, the donor survived, but the professor soon died.

Rethinking the Soul

Humanity has been dreaming of immortality for so long that it has created four ways to achieve it:

1. Life-prolonging drugs and gene treatments discussed above.

2. Resurrection is an idea that has fascinated people throughout history. It began with the experiments of Luigi Galvani in the 18th century, conducting electricity through the legs of a dead frog. It ended with cryonics - the process of freezing the body with the hope that future medicine or technology will be able to defrost Magnit pizza more accurately than a microwave oven and restore health. Some comrades in Silicon Valley are interested in new versions of cryonics, but so far have not paid as much attention to it.

3. The search for immortality through the soul, which did not lead to anything good. Only for wars. The body is a mortal, rotting shell. Only the soul is eternal, which will gain immortality in the best of all worlds. Or like Casper, at worst. But let's put aside religious conversations. The soul, of course, is not a toy, but we are trying to write about science.

However, scientists have their own understanding of the soul. For them, it is not so much a ghostly essence of us connected to a higher power, but a more specific set of brain signatures, a code unique to us that can be cracked like any other.

Consider the modern soul as a unique neurosynaptic connection that integrates the brain and body through a complex electrochemical flow of neurotransmitters. Every person has one and they are all different. Can they be reduced to information, for example, to be replicated or added to other substrates? That is, can we get enough information about this brain-body map to reproduce it on other devices, be it machines or cloned biological copies of your body?

– Marbelo Glaser, theoretical physicist, writer and professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College –

In 2013, an independent biotechnology research company Calico began a project under the veil of secrecy to explore the depths of the brain and search for the soul. Everything was very pathetic: thousands of experimental mice, the best technologies, press coverage - the world froze on the threshold of discovery. And then everything somehow ended by itself. They were looking for "biomarkers," that is, biochemicals whose levels predict death. But all they could do was make money and invest it in drugs that could help fight diabetes and Alzheimer's.

Building a lasting legacy

By the way, we said that there are four ways, but we wrote only three. So, let's take the fourth one separately. This is a legacy. For ancient civilizations, this meant the creation of monuments so that living relatives would repeat the name carved on the walls of the tomb for a very, very long time. A person is immortal as long as his name is written in books and pronounced by descendants.

Today's heritage is different from the giant stone shrines, but the egos of ancient and modern owners are quite comparable. The idea of ​​uploading consciousness to the cloud has gone from science fiction to science: Russian web mogul Dmitry Itskov launched the 2045 Initiative in 2011, an experiment, or even an attempt, to make himself immortal for the next 30 years by creating a robot that can store a human personality. .

Various scholars call this uploading or transferring the mind. I prefer to call it personality transfer.

– Dmitry Itskov –

immortal planet

The worst thing about all these experiments, which makes them absolutely meaningless for most, is the high cost. For the average white resident of a developed country with a good annual income, this will be unaffordable money.

This, in turn, may mean that we will have a class of almost immortal or cloudy consciousnesses that control people, immured in a cage of terrifying analog bodies. But crossing a person with a computer will give rise to new superhumans, thinkers, half people - half lines of code.

Kennedy said the discovery of these options depends on which research path is most effective. If aging is seen as a disease, then there is hope for the long-awaited pill of immortality. As someone very smart said:

The challenge is to figure out how to improve health and do it as quickly as possible. If with the help of drugs, it is achievable. If with the help of numerous transfusions of young blood, this is less achievable.

Whether this will spawn a superrace of "destroyers" impervious to torment, time and the limits of the flesh is unclear. So far, all the fighters against mortality are afraid of the prospect of being soon in a wooden box and in a two-meter pit. But let them think better about the consequences, maybe mortality is better for all of us?