Alex Becker
Is your biggest fear death? I know mine is. Well, if you’re like me and constantly afraid of sleeping in the ground for eternity, you’re in luck. According to some former Google scientist dude, immortality will be attainable in humans by 2030. Yup, that means we just gotta stick out 7 more years.
Ray Kurzweil, a former Google engineer and apparent wizard, had predicted that humans will achieve immortality by the end of 2030. Kurzweil, who received the National Medal of Technology in 1999 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002, is famous within the geek community for correctly predicting several technological achievements well before they occurred.
Some of Kurzweil’s correct predictions include consumers designing their own clothing to precise measurements from at-home computers, a robot beating the world’s top ranked chess player in a match, the use of mobile and smaller computing devices, and wireless internet connectivity all over the world by 2010. All of Kurzweil’s predictions were made in the early 1990’s and came to fruition before their predicted timeframes.
In fact, according to Kurzweil 126 of his 147 predictions from the 90’s have been accurate. That is a whopping 86% accuracy rate. To put that into perspective, Kurzweil is twice as likely to predict the future than Steph Curry is to make a 3-pointer in an NBA game (42.8% career 3P%).
Kurzweil’s immortality prediction, which he made in his book The Singularity Is Near, was published back in 2005. He predicted that there would be microscopic robots that will be able to enter the human body and treat cells on a singular basis. Basically, this means that “nanobots,” as they are called, will be able to fight illness from the inside, permanently curing aging and diseases such as cancer.
Nanobots, as Kurzweil suggests, will also be able to target food passing through the system, enabling humans to eat whatever they want without it affecting their physical body. In a recent blog post from this year Kurzweil wrote, “Nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream will intelligently extract the precise nutrients we need, call for needed additional nutrients and supplements through our personal wireless local area network, and send the rest of the food we eat on its way to be passed through for elimination.”
Though there are many skeptics out there, tech billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel have already begun investing into Kurzweil’s ideas, spending millions of dollars developing technologies to extend life expectancies.
As for whether I believe it to be true, I’m not really sure. On the one hand, this guy seems legit and I really want to believe him. On the other, people have been saying Florida will be underwater by 2030 and that shit doesn’t seem to be happening so I don’t know who to trust. I guess only time will tell. Or ask a Simpson’s writer they probably know already.
We’d better kick the space program into high gear, then. If the birth rate stays the same and no one dies, we’ll literally run out of room on this planet and need to find and get to other habitable ones quick.