Warning: this article is not about you. Sorry about that. At the current rate of technological progress, you're almost certainly doomed, like the tens of billions of other people already lost to time.
But some extremely lucky individual (who may already have been born) will be the first person to achieve some form of technological immortality. Their soul will become immortal like a meme.

Living forever is a self-justifying goal. It could be an endless vacation. Others merely want to continue as they are now for a trillion generations. With ever-accumulating schedule delays and backlogs, that might just be enough time to finally achieve their life's work.
Most people would like to keep everything they have achieved so far, while continuing to become more powerful in other ways. Like the Mormon heavens.

Could medical science advance fast enough to keep up with human decay? Ray Kurzweil and others seem to believe it will happen:

Human life expectancy would have to increase by twelve months each year (instead of a few weeks per year at best); with most of these benefits accruing at the end of the lifespan. Then there would be enough time to prepare for the next step, the invention of brain or mind scanning.
At first, many persons will become extremely decrepit, kept alive by artificial means in $1000 per day nursing homes. Powerful constituencies will demand the government fund this technology. Taxes will explode.
Slowly this technology will get cheaper and spread around the world. The moment when cellular decline can be reversed in any form, immortality will have been reached.

It will be a long road. The dangers outweigh the short-term benefits. Mankind's future may be defined by extreme caution.
The foremost risk is a short-circuit to progress. There could be uncontrolled nanotechnology, or worse, a method to remove all fear of death.

Real life-extension technology will be unbelievably expensive at first. Humans are much easier to replace than to repair. The research alone may require a hundred million scientists and engineers. The costs would cripple the richest welfare states. It may become the largest component of the world economy.

There aren't enough researchers: 90% of the world isn't pulling its weight. Most new drug patents come from the USA, followed by Europe and Japan. That might start to change if the world economy keeps expanding; or not.
It will be necessary to exploit mankind's vast surplus intellectual capacity in east Asia, and perhaps parts of India, Latin America, and south Africa, aided by intelligent software.

Human cells are excessively complicated and appear fanatic about dying when their time is up. Persuading them otherwise will require worldwide data and simulation networks and drug trials.
It might take a whole galaxy of planets to achieve something as difficult as human immortality, but there's no time for that. Since the pay-off is infinite, normal profit motives won't apply. However, open source drug trials, sponsored prizes, and global collaboration/competition can't succeed without some true first-class geniuses to synthesize this data into new insights.

Life extension drugs will come in many forms. It may take thousands of molecules to slow the aging disease, each with a unique 3-D shape. A single misplaced atom might disassemble the patient instead.
Some compounds will remove toxins and byproducts. Others will kill diseased cells, or stimulate undamaged cells to multiply, or trigger self-repair functions, or shrink micro-tumors.
New biotech may include 'viroids' to implant improved genes. At first they will make only simple changes - more potent mitochondria, proteins, and telomere switches. This would also require new methods of pain and nausea control. Obesity could be cured as a spin-off. It's easier to write about this than to do it.

Next, bionic implants and prosthetics will replace individual organs, along with artificial blood and then nerves. Implanted filters, chemical processors and drug dispensers will take over bio-functions. It would be easier if these were living machines assembled out of actual cells.

The final step is nanotechnology. If mankind survives their introduction, strange devices almost too small to see will perform microsurgery and major reconstruction throughout the body.
Around that time (2045++), brain scanning and duplication will become conceivable.
The first euthanized volunteers' plastinated brains will be pulverized to scan all their connections, leaving a pulpy mush. The scanner may contain trillions of atomic-force needles to rapidly analyze (and destroy) individual dendrites and synapses.
It may take years to process and convert the resulting brain data into a software person. This is the crucial step: once it's digital, it's immortal.

There may be some shortcuts on this unbelievable journey. In fact that's what I've been trying to invent full-time since 2011.
One is cryonics: freezing a deceased person's brain in the hope that it can be cheaply scanned and recreated in sixty years time.

Another path to immortality may already exist, though few have thought about it.
In theory, a sufficiently complete description of a person's memories and personality could be used to reconstruct their mind after their death. That's my life's work.
Someone could try to record every bit of information about their life, updating the list until the very end. It would include detailed diary entries, software-generated profiles and personality tests, photos and videos, and a full description of the subject's environment and society.
The more information, the more accurate the reconstruction. At the end, they would wear round the clock life monitors.

Fortunately data storage is getting cheaper. Even so, there will be many gaps, which might be filled with data from other human subjects.
Who knows how to convert a mind description into a working mind? It will probably involve AI templates, life simulations, and many years of slow improvement.
The reconstructed person might end up a caricature of themselves. They could choose to alter or delete their less valuable memories, keeping what they 'lovest well' (Ezra Pound); even if they never experienced these things the first time around.
Either way, an unusually large percentage of the first immortals may turn out to have been famous and successful in their human lives.



The best hard SF novel ever written? Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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