You Could Live Forever With This Sci-Fi Time Hack

Elena Lacey In search of “ longevity ”—a buzzword now ringing through the hills of Northern California—Silicon Valley billionaires are pouring liquid capital into cryonic vats and genetics labs. They’re popping supplements, receiving hormone treatments, even pumping young blood into their veins. For all their feverish effort, eternal life remains a distant fantasy. Seekers of immortality are saddled with the body, the physical brain, the fact of entropy. Eventually, things fall apart; cells stop dividing, DNA mutates, organs fail. In a piece for the New Yorker , Tad Friend neatly divided the “Immortalists” into two camps: the Meat Puppets, who “believe that we can retool our biology and remain in our bodies”; and the Robocops, who “believe that we’ll eventually merge with mechanical bodies and/or with the cloud.” Both groups face potentially insurmountable challenges. The Meat Puppets struggle against the laws of nature and forces of decay. The RoboCops, who speak of “uploading” minds as if by zip file, are stuck with the complexities of consciousness. But there may be a third way forward, a workaround that sidesteps some of the problems of the first two and targets subjective experience. Call them the Time Hackers. Like the RoboCops, the Time Hackers want to tap into your brain. But their goal isn’t to transfer the mind—“ the ghost in the machine ”—elsewhere. Instead, the Time Hackers want to modify consciousness, deceive the ghost inside your head, and make you feel as though you’re living forever. Their object of study is time perception, and their inspiration comes from a plot device commonly used in science fiction. For frazzled writers of the fantastic, it’s often convenient to rewrite the rules of time. Depending on a plot’s needs, timestreams might flow differently in different places. Over here, time rushes by. Over there, time […]

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