The human desire to conquer death is as old as civilization itself. From the search for the fountain of youth in 323 BC, consuming powdered Egyptian mummies in the 1500s, cryogenic freezing in 1967, and plasma transfusions from young donors today, overcoming our own mortality has been a constant concern.

Anything short of forever isn’t good enough. In the past 120 years, we’ve more than doubled our average life expectancy. The motivators for longevity are different: For scientists, it’s a matter of curiosity, for others like Bryan Johnson, who has used up mns of USD per year (and several liters of blood from his 18-year-old son) trying to reverse his age, it’s personal.

It hasn’t been the tech-driven gimmicks that raised our life expectancy from 32 to 71 — we owe most of it to advancements in medicine, sanitation, and hygiene. In fact, the earliest attempts by transhumanists to live forever by freezing their bodies until a “cure for death” could be found, ended with them turning into sludge at the bottom of their cryogenic chambers, becoming a frozen puddle of body fluids. So in 1984, scientists pivoted to neuropreservation.

Neuropreservation is a nice way to say that scientists are hoping they can reattach your head onto a different body. The head was the one body part that was least affected by cryogenic freezing — organs had turned to mush, bones were cracked, and the spinal cord was severed — so the safest bet was to hope that someone, sometime in the future, would figure out how to safely reattach it to a body, human or not (we see your raised eyebrow there), to bring it back to life.

Head transplants have worked in the past… briefly… on monkeys. In the early 1970s, Robert White, a neurosurgeon, performed what he called “a cephalic exchange” by cutting off the head of a monkey and attaching it to the body of another. It was reported that for a few days, the head was conscious and able to see — but the body was paralyzed. Then it died.

That was in the 1970s and science has come a long way since then. The concept has been generating interest within life-extensionist circles for a while, due to slow progress on medicinal and cellular fronts. So they turned to physical, more tangible solutions, endorsed by corporations like the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, that saw body replacement as the most viable way to solve aging with the tools we have now.

And that’s why when BrainBridge reported a successful head transplantation, we believed it. People and news outlets like the New York Post were really convinced that BrainBridge had developed a viable head transplant procedure. Unfortunately, the first public billboard advertising a way to finally cheat the reaper, even hiring for positions like Neuroscience Team Leader, was just a stunt.

The video and the company were manufactured by Hashem Al Ghaili, a Yemeni science communicator. And this wasn’t Al Ghaili’s first rodeo. In 2022, he released a video from another fake facility promising to use artificial wombs to incubate 30k lab-grown babies. It seems that the purpose behind the videos was to spark a discussion around the ethics of those procedures, which it did. Alongside a lot of existential angst.

If we double or triple our lifespan… what’s next? On a societal level, the act of eliminating aging or even achieving centennial lifespans may be catastrophic. If people stop dying, what will happen to our resources? How would we manage overpopulation? Would we still have a retirement age to look forward to if pensions had to extend to accommodate an indefinite lifespan? Will there still be value in living?

To the philosophical, death is what gives life meaning — it is the single organizing principle for how we choose to live. If scarcity is what creates value, will existence have any significance? What role does mortality play in shaping human values and behavior? Even if we develop the scientific tools to conquer death, will we ever be prepared on an existential level?

The answer may be to redefine what it means to live. Moving the goalpost — or removing it altogether — means that almost all our existential questions and methods are outdated. In the age of AI, immortality may mean something much different than what we believed it would be millennia or even just decades ago. Deceased celebrities have been brought back using holograms and CGI. But what if the goal was to immortalize the people we loved?

Grief tech is being developed to help people cope with loss by preserving their loved ones’ memory in a digital afterlife. Companies behind these ghostbots, like Somnium Space’s Live Forever Mode and HereAfterAI, gather data about a person and create an AI avatar that adopts their personality. AI chatbots like DeepBrain AI and ChatGPT have also been used for the same purpose. Beyond the physical and medicinal, this tech-solutionist approach — just shy of uploading our consciousness to the cloud — may be our closest shot at living forever.

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