But maybe, in the future, we won’t need to worry about organ failure. For all those times when there isn’t an organ to spare, there’ll soon be cloned copies, either grown in the lab or 3-D printed: We’ve already 3-D printed livers and kidneys, turned skin cells into stem cells and stem cells into organs, and we’re redefining the definition of fatality, thanks to a procedure called cold saline resuscitation. Replacing a dying body’s blood with a rush of cold saline can drop the body’s temperature and put a dying patient into a state of suspended animation. And once a patient is in that state, doctors can fix a whole lot of things that might otherwise be fatal: gunshot and knife wounds, hemorrhages and organ failure—especially if there’s a handy supply of spare, cloned organs available in the emergency room.
To our current tastes, there’s something a little ghastly about this paradigm: living forever, or at least a long time, in an eternal, static youth, with trips to the emergency room more frequent as we get older, to periodically replace failing organs. According to a 2012 Pfizer study, when it comes to aging, our greatest fears are of “being dependent” or “living in pain.” That might be replaced in our cultural imagination by fear of eternal youth leading to sudden, stunning death—what if your heart, 200 years old, suddenly gives out when you’re nowhere near a hospital? The body horror of the future may be very different from today’s, but it’s body horror all the same.
Perhaps the fix is to replace bodies—these unreliable vessels, plagued with problems!—altogether. That’s the goal of the most ambitious billionaire-backed immortality investment of them all, Itskov’s 2045 Initiative. Founded in early 2011, the initiative has already collected an impressive set of experts in specialties ranging from robotics and neural interfaces to artificial organ creation. Their goal: replace our current meaty cases with robotic or holographic avatars by (you guessed it) 2045.
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