The Brain Preservation Prize

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The idea is that the your memory self, that that's the key to selfhood. That's who you are, your collection of memories. The next step would be scanning every single synaptic connection in a giant computer and then turning it on. But realistically, you know what he're going to do with that? The brain preservation prize. We can't even reverse engineer the human brain at the moment because there's so much we do with it. It's still like the most powerful instrument in the world. Ar er, I don't think they'll achieve what they think they're going to achieve. They have these, you know, scanning microscopes where they can see the actual synapses

Shermer and Ward discuss: religious immortality • Church of Perpetual Life in Florida • what it means to live forever • why lives have doubled in length the past century • Stein’s Law: things that can’t go on forever won’t • Why do we age and die? • how to live to 100, 1000, 10,000 years • escape velocity to reach immortality • Aubrey de Grey’s program • tech billionaires programs • transhumanists/extropians • diet, exercise, supplements, stem cells, telomeres, and other aging hacks • Ray Kurzweil • cryonics • nanotechnology • brain preservation • mind uploading and digital immortality • Ernest Becker and Terror Management Theory

Peter Ward is a British business and technology reporter whose reporting has taken him across the globe. Reporting from Dubai, he covered the energy sector in the Middle East before earning a degree in business journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Economist, GQ, BBC Science Focus, and Newsweek.