i'm standing in the arizona desert feeling somewhat lost before me superstition mountain land that is sacred to the native american apache try. my search seems to have come to an end. there are no apaches to be found here only mountain lions will i be torn to bits by not mines before i find the answer i see. you don't began at the family plot in a cemetery in lugano switzerland ever since i was

a boy i've always imagined my name would one day be chiseled on the gravestone beneath those of my ancestors something i was never particularly enthusiastic about . a few weeks ago my grandfather died in this nursing on he had a zest for life and arise sense of humor. in his final years he could hardly hear the news site was poor it seemed as though he was withdrawing from the word. i wondered to myself if such a life is worth living the idea of dying in a nursing home frightens me. but the idea that anyone or anything could outlive me seems equally ridiculous. the fact that the trees here in this park will still be standing decades after i've been put into the ground and simply inconceivable.

unfortunately all the effort i put into keeping myself young and isn't helped much . yes. and. the. jesus. of the good of. the awesome go. fires is now. zero. zero. zero gregory service officer. would. never be good night. and in fact advanced technologies and scientific discoveries actually do make it seem that the idea of

vastly extending long judgment is within reach i want to explore the possibilities and discover the secret of eternal youth in other words i decided to become immortal. i need someone to guide me on the road to eternal life so i decided to pay a visit to stephen king a philosopher who wrote a book called immortality. all

living things strive to survive to live on they have a will to live but we humans perhaps alone of all the animals are aware that this will to live will one day be thwarted this is our curse for being so damn clever and so we have to live in the knowledge that all our hopes or that dreams will come to nothing we live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse. and even though it might sound implausible almost every culture in human history has had some story of next year of life or fountain of youth or something they can help us to keep going forever and that's exactly the leader i've decided to pursue first the elixir of life. a good

place to begin is with our breed to great in san francisco he's a biomedical gerontologist who believes that the first humans who will live to be a thousand of already been born. made me already even be in middle age like me. i drive down to the town of mountain view in silicon valley it's own through the sense research foundation which degree co-founded the research findings are disputed in scientific circles but they're based on solid scientifically recognized data. here. i still think it's quite likely that the first person to live two thousand is in middle age or maybe even a little older i think that the first cohort in other words people born in a given year who were mostly live to five and it probably in their twenty's or thirty's now something like that oh work is focused on what we like to call

rejuvenation biotechnology so what that means if medicines that we can apply to people who are already in middle age or maybe even older and which will actually work have at the molecular and cellular level so to restoring the body of a state similar to a young adult in other words we are not simply looking to slow aging down we are actually looking at ways to reverse aging so that means that people who are not benefiting from these therapies will look and feel and then function in every way and really and physically just like young adults. with the help of degrees rejuvenation therapies i compliance again look like i did it twenty. the sense foundation laboratory looks like any other biomedical app but the disease they're trying to cure here is aging only part of the

research is done at this site the foundation also works with a number of prestigious universities such as yale cambridge harvard and wake forest . we start from the recognition that the body is a machine of course it's a really really really complicated machine but it's still a machine. any machine with of moving parts does damage to itself of a side effect of its normal operation so that means that we should be able to look at simple man made machine for that cause and ask ourself well how do we already today successfully create cars maintain cars so that they are actually working just as well as when they were belt and the answer is preventative maintenance.

so we're applying that same concept to the human body but the real innovation that i put forward nearly fifteen years ago now and which in spite of our work is that it may be possible to do repair comprehensively. we identify seven major types of damage to molecular and cellular damage that the body does to itself a side effect of its normal operation so there is one type of damage and the therapy which is very familiar to everyone these days in fact the type of damage is loss of self cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells and the therapy that is simply stem cell therapy everyone post themselves or because that's all it is if we are successful it rejuvenated people if we are restoring them to a younger biological age then of course we can do it more than once we can do it every thirty years or whatever and that means that we should be able to do exactly

the same to the human body in terms of how long it live as we do because there are plenty so there shouldn't be any limits on how people can live. yes or that indeed. i agree with what aubrey de grey says about ageing. the thought of getting old still seems dreadful to me sort of could be a bit of a leave at that but i'm glad he's putting all his energy and enthusiasm into it as he puts it curing the problem so. he's basically declared that i have a fifty percent chance of achieving eternal life by actually dared to expect more from the mortality group from the elixir of long life but i'll simply have to be satisfied with what i've got for the time being i mean. when we look back through history we see that the one thing that all of these

alexia drink has now have in common is that they're all six foot and they're all dead so many have a backup plan and that backup plan is exactly what the second fundamental kind of immortality story office stays with the idea that we are these. it's a cool things these bodies but it except these bodies are going to have to die but he says aha these bodies can rise again we can live again this is of course resurrection when we look around we see that in winter living things die the plants around us die back the leaves fall from the trees that in spring they are reborn they grow again so it's a natural cycle of life death and rebirth and many rituals in human history many religions have been about tapping into this natural cycle so that we to live die and yet then can be leap on. the latest version of the elixir of life doesn't work yet so as i continue my quest for immortality i'll try

a new tack resurrection to find out more about that i had to phoenix arizona. in most cases over eighty percent of the time we could be there at the bedside in the hospital a suitable that has been declared with the patient into the eyes follow from the hospital bed cover the ice at some water will use this device to circulate icy water around the patient or the cooling process as quickly as possible those first agrees are critical because the more you of the things are falling apart we also think of respiration when we study math we use this mechanical devices and do mechanical c.p.o. so restarting circulation not with the goal of reviving the person but we don't really want to revive the person but it is we have a restart everything so we can circulate the medications with take the souls as well as possible and maintain viability of the biological tissue for as long as possible so our goals were to get that temperature down from going to be done to

get above freezing as fast as we can and we don't want to google low freezing at this point because if we do that with that next step in place with which is removing the blood and body fluids then you get a little ice crystals forming. iyonix is the storage of patients at very low temperatures in the hopes that at some point in the future we will have the technology to repair damage to choose to reverse the aging process itself and bring those patients back to life and function so patients who we can no longer help with today's medicine throws up his hands and so there's nothing more i can do for this patient what we're saying is let's not give up on the person let's give them a chance the next stage of the process to really feel as a patient this is what we do it's very much like open heart surgery open up the chest access the main blood vessels in here when connected up to the fusion system

here in the chiller essentially what we're doing is proving as much blood and body fluids it's possible to avoid ice crystals formation and i suppose it was early destroyed crucial information in the brain but it will do a lot of them or so we would minimize that so the goal would be is not to freeze people simply freeze be watching we really don't like people vitrification really means that as well as the fluid that we use the crow protection perfect and fluid socially magical rate engine freeze as it gets colder and colder becomes a glossy substance just gets thicker and thicker it doesn't for many of my scripts so it just gets more more sort of holes the soles in place. then we'll drop the temperature rapidly below freezing to about minus one hundred ten degree c. point if you have one hundred ten one hundred twenty or so you have to go face friends or you're no longer a bag of fluid as we tend to be was the time you're actually becoming a true soul. the

final stage of quite a mix is patient storage and after we've done destabilization to transport the suit really profusion once patients reach mines a hundred ninety six degrees c. will be stored in these vessels do as they cool these are actually like gigantic fillmore's flux where you keep your coffee hot and cold. this contains a large amount of liquid nitrogen and four whole body patients chevys you know so she gets it when your patients in the center call in the middle this is a three d. printed version of the do is in which our patients are stored at so to imagine what's inside the do is because you can see and you can see how patients just thought they have up to four whole body patients but also in the said the color we could also still several hear a patients brain only patients in the something column so that would fit the

official backing. over one hundred forty patients have been preserved by the alec or life extension foundation. the cost of cryo preservation is currently around two hundred thousand dollars for a whole body and eighty thousand for brain only own members have a choice thirty two basic options you can either probes or entire body which about half the members of chosen or you can actually just probes of the brain the brain being important but that's where you live that's where your memory of this knowledge you reside and the idea that it's my own personal choice the idea of that is the rest of this will be pretty. your place anyway is going to be in bad shape by the time i need to be preserved probably for my to five years old when i just replace socially every cell in the body has the d.n.a. the structures to regrow body i'm not seems not very far in the future compared to restoring the brain it's a little complicated but also actions and practical advantages in that in some parts of the wall in some parts of america. you have a special permit to move

a whole body out of state and that could be a problem if it's after business hours on a weekend whereas the brain only is essentially a tissue donation and you can cross state lines immediately so you never. see the patient or alive. neither i don't consider patients to be alive because clearly there's no biochemical activity going on there's no but i was i'm they don't fit the definition of life but they're not dead either if by dead you mean permanently gone or irretrievable but the fundamental sense of death really is that you cannot be brought back you've gone but not lee and i would argue that something

for most of our patients they're not dead in that sense because we have stopped the condition from deteriorating and from you know electron microscope studies of the brain from c.t. scans from other research on our patients and on some i'm accountable tissue we know that in many cases we are preserving the structure of the brain sufficiently well given what we know of memory that we are preserving memory and personality. we can't bring anybody back today because we don't have sufficiently advanced technology we can of course quote preserve vers tissues and revive them there are dozens of types of tissues sperm eggs. valves blood vessels skin cells corneas or lots of tissues we've prior preserved and brought back unused as well know and so to go from a single tissue type to a whole organ like a kidney or liver or heart is currently on the very edge of possibility we can't quite do that we're very close by going from a whole organ to a whole organism like a human being or any complex animal is also beyond our ability to reverse the

process we can do it in very simple organisms we actually did some research recently with a microscopic womb called c. elegans we were able to actually teach a very simple task squire preserve it rewarm it and actually have it remember the tusk so we showed that it would actually preserve memory just. when will people start coming back and that's something that i can only guess that i would be amazed if it was less than thirty years for anybody. and i would be pretty disappointed as more than one hundred fifty so these are a very large range i would guess it really depends on so much it depends on how much research we do how much funding goes into regenerative medicine and the aging

research we don't want to bring patients back and so we can reverse the aging process. the idea of having myself trial conserved seems absolutely plausible but it probably doesn't work there's only one alternative to and that is food for worms and to be honest the thought of being preserved in a giant thermos doesn't really appeal to me at all. and what would it be like to live in a world where all the people you love are dead. i head over to a phoenix housing district reserved for people over fifty five. there i want to talk to a woman who may be able to answer. question. my name is linda chamberlain i'm one of the co-founders of al gore it was started back in one nine hundred seventy two by my husband and myself and we've really spent most of our life involved in crown nicks and transhumanism.

and i'm now retired. and my husband is a. crest aces and al gore this time as are my mother and my father in law. i can remember when my mother was dying of cancer and i told her you know what the next time we see each other we're probably going to be i'm going to have taken you out to a wonderful dinner at the best restaurant on the moon of titan with the best view of the planet saturn and you and i will toast to life is will be together again. to the youth worker who did your story of course. as an atheist. i had accepted the fact that there is nothing after biological death it's just

dust to dust just gone because i have accepted it doesn't mean that i liked it it was just a fact and then i read the prospect of immortality by robert it to who is considered the father of crying on x. and i said wow that's a great idea. well initially back in the early one nine hundred seventy s. . this was considered. a lunatic fringe kind of thinking i mean nobody was actually doing this this was just. science fiction and so we the problems we ran into was evenly and a member who had made arrangements for the us and. were at the hospital and were trying to get them released to us so we could do this they just looked at us as if we were just coops we just lunatics so i guess you'd say that over the last forty

years we've gone from lunatic fringe to cutting edge. a lot of people worry ball you know immortality sounds kind of good but when i get bored after i've lived a thousand years that's only assuming that you remain at exactly the same level of intelligence as you have right now but if you can think a million times faster. you can there will be so many exciting things for you to explore that right now you would be totally incapable of so i don't think that there's going to be any problem with being bored this can be more to do more to learn work find out. workers are going to be sure to prove i'm not at all convinced of this kind of resurrection. perhaps when you reach a certain point you should make way for others and not become a burden to anyone it's good your i stand in front of the mountain venerated by the

apaches when they got older they climbed up to the summit and waited for testicles switchy with. everything about the way we have structured our society is based on us living for certain out of time on average seventy years will say so the idea of how long we're in school or university or college how long we work before we retire the is jewish and of marriage the idea. having children and the rhythm of having children a place in one generation all of this depends upon a group of people living for a certain period of time and then moving on and making way for the next generation and those who want to live forever those who want to say we're going to be the generation that discovers the elixir of life i say forget it we're generations that

gone forget all the generations there could come in the future we we there's one single tiny thin layer of life i go into all forever and that seems to me selfish and man. steven cave is right the mortality is the dream of a crazy. my investigations are pointless i can't nor should i be able to escape the gray. so i decided to return to the tried and true methods of battling the process of aging. at the fitness studio i run into an old friend i haven't seen for years but catching up on news is sobering he suffers from a degenerative nerve disease that limits his mobility was to me if i actually show

and really could help. people through these simply meaning i take a lot of medication but by the media i mean to hear.