Would you like to put yourself to the test? To see what you’re really made of?

Then you’re ready for the longest survival challenge ever.

There are many survival challenges out there. On the show Survivor, contestants spend about 40 days in a remote location with limited resources trying to prove how resourceful they are. That’s nothing.

Try the 100 Year Survival Challenge!

Full disclosure, this is just hypothetical survival challenge, a thought exercise to see how clever you are. But if you want to challenge your mind, keep reading.

Everyone starts this survival challenge at age 50. This means to complete my challenge you need to live to be 150. Think you can do it? Well, no one ever has. The longest verified life anyone has ever lived is under 123 years. So, it’s a very hard challenge. But it’s not impossible. Let’s take a look at the rules.

Capabilities

To make the challenge a bit easier, I’m going to allow you a few things beyond what other survival challenges allow.

You can go anywhere in the world. You’re not trapped on some desolate island. But you can’t leave Earth.
You can work with anyone in the world.
You can use anything available in the world, including the best technology that exists today.
And since this is a hypothetical challenge, I will even allow you to use any feasible futuristic technology that could exist given the limits of our universe.

Restrictions

But just to make sure it’s not too easy, there are three restrictions.

First, you have to obey the laws of physics. My apologies to Harry Potter and Doc Brown, but this means no magic, no time-travel.
Second, Do no harm – You can’t kill, injure, or otherwise intentionally harm any other humans. (You can still eat meat).
Third, you have to fully experience the whole 100 years at normal Earth speed. This rules out suspended animation. You can’t sleep through the whole 100 years like Link from Zelda Breath of the Wild. It also rules leveraging the time dilation from Einstein’s theory of relativity. You may recall that’s the kind of thing where travel in a spaceship at near light speed so that you barely age while 100 Earth years slip by. Sorry, Einstein, I know that’s your go to for thought exercises like this, but you’ll need to get a little more creative for this one.

Success Criteria – Blind Identity Test

Here’s how we will judge if you have completed the challenge successfully. You would designate a group of your loved ones to be the jury. We will put them in suspended animation for 100 years so they are fresh and ready to do their part. If you feel bad for them as they are leaving everyone they know behind, remember it’s just a thought exercise. Remain calm.

Meanwhile, you’ll have to get to the finish line the slow and steady way. When you meet up with them 100 years later,you will correspond with you via text messages from different rooms. You will need to convince them that you are alive. If they believe it is really you they are texting with, you win. If not, you lose.

Some of you will notice this is like a Turing test. Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science, devised a similar test for determining if a machine was actually alive. But this is slightly different. We are checking to see not only that you are alive, but that you are also still you. I call this test the Blind Identity Test.

But, by now you are probably wondering why use this blind identity test. Why not just let them see you or hear your voice? There are two good reasons.

First, it ensures you are lucid and mentally sound after 100 years. I don’t want you just breathing, but still vibrant. If your loved ones see an aged you that is senile or brain-dead but still living, they may be tempted to say that’s you. But surviving as a mere shell of yourself is not sufficient to complete this challenge.
Second, The Blind Identity Test also allows your physical body to change beyond recognition. After all, you’re bound to look quite different at age 150 than you look at 50. You might even find changing your physical appearance to be advantageous to your survival. But your personality, memory, and your essence must survive.

Now that you understand the challenge, let’s explore some of your options.

Take Really Good Care Of Yourself

There are many possible strategies that fall under the category of taking good care of yourself. Eat healthy. Exercise. Avoid risky situations. Don’t smoke or do drugs. Wash your hands. All good things and those may well take you cruising happily into your eighties and maybe even nineties. But to go where no one has gone before, you’ll need more than just healthy living. There is a lot of ongoing anti-aging research. In fact, if you’ve got $1 million dollars to spare, you can even sign up for a new anti-aging therapy trial that focuses on repairing the telomeres. Telomeres are the caps on our chromosomes that shorten as we age.

I’m sure some of the anti-aging research will bear fruit. Some of it may improve our quality of life as we age. And some of it may extend our lives some. But Geoffery West, a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, suggests there is a limit to how much these anti-aging researchers can accomplish. He demonstrates that there are mechanisms built into all living things that that sets the upper-limit on their lifespans.

West explains that metabolic rate scales sublinearly with body mass and how this drives the lifespan of various organisms. This in part is why mice only live about two three years but humans live much longer. He concludes that the maximum life-span for humans is around 120 years, no matter what you do.

Research by The Endocrine Society published in Science Daily in 2011 states that “higher metabolic rates can contribute to aging, possibly by increasing the intake of toxic substances produced by energy turnover.” So our metabolism may be both friend and foe. On metabolism West says, “The very thing that’s keeping you alive is ultimately going to end up killing you.”

This leads me to believe that West is right there is an upper limit beyond which our bodies cannot survive.

I highly recommend you read Geoffery West’s book Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death of Organisms, Cities, and Companies or watch his interviews. So, if you’re going to make it to 150 years old, you’re going to have to overcome the fundamental limits of the human body. We’re gonna need something that takes us beyond the body. A take-care-of-yourself strategy won’t be enough. Still, please continue to take good care of your health, challenge or not..

Upgrade Your Body

To increase your longevity, you will find it necessary to replace certain body parts over time. Many of your original parts won’t make it to 150, no matter how well you care for them. There are already many types of transplants available today to replace those parts. It’s possible someday nearly all of your body parts can be replaced via transplant. There is a lot of researching underway to support growing new organs from your own stem cells. So perhaps you can simply keep upgrading your body’s parts to new versions.

However, there is one organ that is most problematic to upgrade– and that’s your brain. If we replace your brain with a newer brain, but don’t copy over the data, that’s just someone else living in your body. It would not continue your life. Your essence would be dead. Such an approach would fail the blind identity test.

So if your current brain can’t make it to 150, were not only going to need to replace your brain, we’ll need to copy all that data.

Better Call for Backup…of Your Brain.

What data would we need to copy? The entire state of all your neurons. Let’s call that neural state your mind. It’s that which makes you you. It contains all of your thoughts, memories, and personality.

Whenever we copy information, there are two steps. First we read the data from the old source. Then we write it to the new destination. Many times in between the read and the write we store the data in some intermediate storage.

Imagine a medical device that could read the entire state of your mind at once. In The Cendovian, such a fictional machine exists. This machine, like all medical devices, would store the info it reads in electronic form. With a backup of your mind in hand, we could then write your mind data to a new replacement brain.

Now with your mind extracted from your body, you would have a wider array of options for this new brain. But don’t give yourself a headache trying to decide. I’ll help you evaluate your options. I see three categories of options – biological, robotic, and virtual.

A New Biological Brain

Suppose you choose the biological option and we write your mind data into a new brain after giving you a brain transplant. By recreating the same neural state, you would be you again. Not convinced that is really you? Well, if I asked that person, they would certainly believe to be you as much as you now believe to be you. But I don’t want to digress too much into this. My characters cover this identity question in much more depth in The Cendovian. Just suspend your doubts for now on this one and let’s assume that is the new you.

Still, there’s a problem with the new biological brain approach. It risks violating the do-no-harm rule. After all, where would you get the new brain from? Snatching other people’s brains is against our rules, seems pretty harmful to them. Maybe you could grow a new brain from your own stem cells. But, this still feels a bit shady. If that brain is on, that is, actively processing, is that not someone else? Perhaps, someone else in a tortured, bodiless state just before their mind gets wiped and replaced with yours?

I suppose you could do gradual neuron-by-neuron replacements within your existing brain. With each neuron replacement you would copy the old neuron’s state to the new one. It would be very tricky. Perhaps it could be accomplished with nanotechnology. But at least it avoids snatching someone else’s brain.

Whatever approach you take to upgrade to a new biological brain, either incrementally or wholesale, if you don’t keep a full copy of your mind on some electronic backup, you run the risk that an accident destroying your new brain.

It would be a shame if after going through all the effort to move to a new brain you get hit by a truck and lose this challenge. This begs the question, why go through all that trouble just to return to the fragility of our biological form? Let’s look at options that offer greater durability.

Turning Robotic

Once we have an electronic backup of your mind, we should be able to run this using a software neural network to act as your brain. This will be easier than transcribing all the data into in the grey matter of a new biological brain. Then we just install the software mind into a robotic body and you have achieved robotic transcendence. You would have transcended your human body to become a robot.

With the ability to back up and restore yourself electronic, you could then continually swap out your hardware over time to ensure you make it the full 100 years. So, going robotic definitely offers you more durability over staying biological.

However, there is something worth noting. In the process of creating the technology to support robotic transcendence, you will almost inevitably first create the software to support digital transcendence. What is digital transcendence? In The Cendovian, I refer to transitioning from physical to digital form living in a virtual world as digital transcendence.

And I think this option will be the first one realized by humanity.

Making the Virtual Your Reality

Let’s suppose you went entirely virtual. What would this be like? Your mind would run as a software neural network. Your body would be virtual body run by software. You would exist in a virtual world. You and everything you encounter would be run by software.

Sound very different than the world we live in today. And it is. Although some theorize that our entire universe is being run inside a computer as a simulation. I’m not sure about that one yet. To go virtual you would need a complete virtual body. Being a body-less virtual mind would not be sustainable. Our human brains have evolved around our bodies, and these brains expect so much sensory input that we could not remain lucid and sane sane without at least simulating some of this.

I’m not saying we can’t have a sane life if some senses are missing. People manage that today. But if you were without all your senses– sight, sound, smell, taste, touch –the sensory deprivation would drive you mad. Moreover, it would not be the human experience.

Plus let’s not forget how you must complete 100 Year Survival Challenge. You have to communicate with your loved ones. If you have no senses, good luck doing that.

Which comes first, Robotic or Virtual?

Now I said that the technology to allow you go virtual will arrive before the technology to let you go robotic. Here’s why I believe that.

Any good engineer who wants to put a computerized virtual mind inside a robot will first want to test that mind software without the robot hardware. If you don’t test the mind software separately from the robotic body hardware, when things go wrong, it will be hard to tell if it’s a hardware or software problem.

To unit test the virtual mind software, you’d need a test harness. That is, you’d need software that simulates a virtual body to the virtual mind being tested. This test harness software would need to provide sensory input. And it would need to respond to virtual nerve impulses that virtual brain issues.

For example, a virtual mind might want to move its arm to reach for something, and then after feeling it grasp it. So, your test harness would need to simulate every nerve ending, every muscle, etc. While this virtual body software is complicated and difficult to create, it’s far less difficult than creating the equivalent robotic body. Imagine trying to create a robot with a sensor for every nerve ending you have. It’s not impossible, but much harder than doing it with software.

Because its easier and because it would be needed to test the robotic approach, digital transcendence will precede robotic transcendence.

The Cendovian Perspective

In The Cendovian, Richard and Pari believe digital transcendence is the most likely path to the long-term survival humanity. And there not trying to take one human through my hypothetical 100 Year Survival Challenge. They are trying to preserve all of humanity.

Throughout The Cendovian Chronicles series, the characters explore digital transcendence and the implications it has at a personal and societal level. While it’s possible that there are better solutions, my bet is digital transcendence offers you the best shot at completing the 100 Year Survival Challenge. But I’d love to hear what approach you would take.