What is feasible technology?

Transhumanism: What's the most feasible technology that humans could use to gain immortality as of now?

• As far as I know, there are 3 broad technologies geared towards human immortality today: cryonics, mind uploading, and stuff pertaining to genetics and fiddling with biology, like stem cells. Which one do you think seems most feasible? If I were to rank them in order of feasibility from low to high, they'd be: mind uploading, bio-stuff, and cryonics. We pretty much know nothing important about how the brain works; while biological technologies have and will greatly contribute to increasing our lifespans, I doubt that in the next 3-4 decades (maybe even century) we'll discover how to beat aging; which brings us to cryonics: there have been cases of people randomly getting frozen for days/weeks and surviving with not much damage and their personal identities intact.

• Answer:

  As of now, none is feasible. All three of them are theoretically possible, but all of them have to be developed first. There is a difference between "laws of physics do not prohibit something" and "we know how to do this". We need to invest a lot of money and many years of work of brilliant people in each of this approach in order to have any chance of getting some results. Cryonics might seem easiest to develop, but its huge drawback is lack of expected profit. What would economy gain from thousands or millions of frozen bodies in jars that do nothing and only consume energy and require maintenance? Not much, probably. Therefore there are very few projects in this area and I would not expect any breakthroughs in next 3 decades. Mind uploading might seem the hardest, but actually this area is developing at fastest rate. Current supercomputers are still too primitive to simulate human brain, but computers powerful enough to do this might be available in the next 10 to 20 years. There are billion-dollars ongoing projects focused on analyzing human brain. Notable examples are http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/02/remarks-president-brain-initiative-and-american-innovation and http://actu.epfl.ch/news/the-human-brain-project-wins-top-european-science-/. Our understanding of the brain will most probably grow greatly during the next 20 years and even though it might not lead directly to mind uploading technology, it will bring us much closer to it. Biological approach is different from the two above because only in this case some "partial successes" are very useful. We will not gain much from "partially successful cryonics" or "uploading some part of the brain", but successful life extension by 10 years is something worth many billions of dollars. And we might achieve this without full understanding of human biology, so we have a chance even now. There are many research project in this area. Scientists look into rapamycin, mTOR, resveratrol, sirtuins any slowly accumulate knowledge about aging process and ways to slow it. Something interesting might happen here even in this decade. http://extremelongevity.net/2013/08/18/children-with-disease-of-never-aging-may-offer-clues-to-immortality/ When it happen, it might give you enough time to witness next breakthrough that will prolong your life by next 10 or 20 years and to wait for next breakthrough, repeating this process to infinity.