how to live forever...

I have always been one of those crazy people that want to live forever. I want to be immortal (like Hulk Hogan). A year or so ago, I started writing a "statement of being a human being address" which dealt with solving three problems:

Eating

Sleeping

Breathing

(It did also deal with space travel and other such notions, but thats a blog for a different day.) Now, i quit writing that statement, partially because im not a good writer, nor a good debater, but moreso because other projects surfaced in its place.

However, in the back of my head, I am always pondering how to stay alive forever. Religious and fundamental implications aside, I can't get over the urge to avoid death. As if it was a disase.

Kristen Philipkoski, at www.wired.com, has recently written some very good articles about immortality, and more specifically about Alcor's Extreme Life Extension Conference. Alcor is a very interesting company because approximately 1,000 people pay Alcor $400 a year and have named Alcor as their life insurance beneficiary to cover the cost of freezing just the head for $50,000 or the entire body for $120,000. This is fascinating.

My first reaction is: Who the fuck wants to freeze just their head?

Upon a few discussions online and research, i can understand wanting to freeze your head in the off chance that future technology will figure out a way to clone headless bodies to then have this cryogenically frozen head surgically placed on, or insert your own crazy scenerio involving reanimating one's head (ala Futurama). Thus, restarting thier life, or head, in a new age.

Now, I have also heard of people diagnosed with liver cancer or other such terminal illnesses that have gathered the money to cryogenically freeze thelselves in order to be unfrozen in the future when a cure for their particular disease is found. This has been voted against by the courts; basically saying that it is murder/suicide to be frozen. Therefore, even if the end goal is to be unfrozen and still alive, the meantime period is a technical death. Interesting to note.

For those that havn't followed any of my previous blogs, lately they have been an account of my attempts of polyphasic sleep. Involving sleeping only 3 hours a day, I quit this project after 5 days due to my inability to follow the nap cycle. I am now doing a Lucid Dreaming project with a group of others.

My intentions for that experiment was to find a way to gain more time in the week. Essentially to be awake longer within the time I am given. It is one weak attempt and failed attempt at that, of me trying to live forever. I need to find a sleep doctor who can prescribe me Modavigil. Modavigil is the drug that can keep you awake as if you've had extra sleep, a more scientific and sterioded version of NoDoze. I do want to point out my sarcasm in the last two sentences, since I do not take pills (except Prenatal vitamins during my goatee race) and do not advocate taking pills to solve problems.

Which brings me to more information Kristen Philipkoski writes about nanotechnology (www.wired.com) as she talked about a Robert Freitas who is a nanotechnitian (or something like that) and works for a company with a lot of Z's and X's in its name. But he mentions amazing possibilties for the future with the development of new nanotechnology.

For instance, a way to avoid breathing. There is a hypothetical injection of just 5 cc's of respirocytes which would allow a person to run a five minute mile for 12 minutes without even taking a single breath. Respirocytes they are called, they are artificial red blood cells -- nano machines.

This is exciting to me because if we can find a way to constantly inject these cells or figure out a way to let our bodies adapt them into the normal workings of our system (keep in mind i have no idea if anything i am saying has any realm of possibilty in any way-im just saying things) into our body we could potentially go under water, float around in space, avoid poisonous smells, smoke ect.


"Death is an outrage!" Freitas said. "Let's do something about it."

I happen to completely agree.

I'm not signing up to freeze my head just yet (partially because i dont have the money), but I AM going to join the Curing Old Age Disease Society and search for other inventions, conventions, experiments that may be making progress in this direction.

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there is a discussion about my blog going on right now at stevepavlina forums: Steve Pavlina forum

check it out and add your comments.