[Death? and Taxes]

welcome, you have stumbled upon the web site of bryon fitzgerald bowers
Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “...nothing is certain but death and taxes”
but I would like to suggest that if he lived today,
his scientific mind might have questioned part of that statement
although, it would appear I am either insane or highly optimistic,
I can assure you I am sane, and highly skeptical by nature
- required premise of above statement: I am sane ;)

My Plan for Immortality

Many people have asked me why 'on earth' would I like to live forever.

wouldn't I get bored? (This always comes before ethical over population question...are we all bored of life? Is it that bad?)

shouldn't I worry about over population of the planet?

If I get bored, I can simply let myself die.

As far as over-population is concerned, this is a problem we will have to deal with very soon, whether individuals live indefinitely or not.

I believe necessity is the mother of invention and that we will figure out creative ways to live on our planet with the resources at hand. (Control how many children we have, colonize other star systems..etc..)

Also, eventually we have to leave the planet since the Sun will burn out (in 6 billion years or so), might as well do it sooner than later...

[also, just found out the moon will leave Earth's orbit in about 1 billion years, causing earth to spin wildly, of course we could put rockets on the moon to keep it from departing orbit, but better safe than sorry :)]

the Origin of my Crazy plan to Live Forever

long story short, the future fascinates me, and indefinite life extension is one way to get there. I am a computer scientist by trade, so I tend to view solutions to problems in terms of manipulating autonomous machine states.

So I started to ask whether a human body could be repaired like we repair computers when a part goes bad.

This question initiated my quest for a pragmatic workable approach to identifying and preventing human aging (hopefully within my own lifetime)

Possible Plans of Action (very broad) Plan A:

I would like to participate in the capturing (and enhancement) of the human brain. I then hope to store my own neural configuration in a robust storage mechanism. In order to capture the human consciousness, the molecular processes which contribute to the function of the many different kinds of neurons (brain cells) must be discovered, formalized, and manipulated in order to capture and store the human brain. There has been much research in this field, and here are a minute number of sites relating to the theories of information storing mechanisms of the human brain. (more to come)

• one MIT student's projected human brain stats
• The Human Brain (wikipedia)
• The Human Brain (BiologyDaily)
• Neural Networking (wikipedia)
• Artificial Intelligence (american association for artificial intelligence)
• Neural Networking (University of Texas)

Plan B: [the pro-life version ;-)]

An alternative to storing my brain in a non-destructable format would be to contribute to the development of a cure for cellular aging, or Senescence. With the advances in molecular analysis of what we are made of, we are starting to view the human body not as a magical black box, but as a machine composed of trillions of cells being driven by underlying molecular processes working in concert. These underlying molecular processes control our aging process. I would like to contribute in whatever way I can to discovering, formalizing, and manipulating these processes in order to control (hopefully prevent) the individual human expiration date. Here are a minute number of sites which contain some known information about these molecular processes. (more to come)

• Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence
• google Biomedical Engineering Directory
• Biology Daily (Really good Encyclopedia of all that is biological)
• The Human Gene Map
• National Center for Biotechnology Information
• Cardiac Inoic-Molecular Electrophysiology - Simplified

My Credentials:

• I have a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin
• I have only been briefly introduced to Artificial Intelligence and Networks via Academia.
• I am currently working towards obtaining a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin. However, because of cost and the fact that I have a full time job which is not related to this area of study, this process will be very slow. As I attain a more formal education (either self-taught or academia) in the molecular processes of the human body, I hope to be able to contribute to 'Plan A' and 'Plan B' effectively within the next 10 years.
• Addendum: I have attained a job with a domain of knowledge in the biological sciences, and have started my quest for immortality...still no flying cars..