AP PHOTO/MARY ALTAFFER
Exit
sets up in his hotel room.
Itskov, who has close-shaven
blonde hair and a vague shadow of
stubble, speaks softly, slowly and
with the calm self-assurance of
someone who’s used to considering much more cosmic questions
than those being posed to him.
How certain is he that humans
will attain immortality by 2045?
“I am 100 percent certain,”
he answers.
And what gives him that
certainty?
“My belief,” he says. He pauses
for a moment, then continues: “In
an ancient text, I read that whatever we have in our mind, in our
consciousness, whatever we intend to achieve, we will achieve. It
depends when, and it depends on
the internal certainty.”
Questions are frequently answered with a question — is he
religious? “What is religion?” —
and even the nature of death is up
for debate. Doctors can measure
the death of the physical body,
says Itskov, but no one has determined how to evaluate the death
of consciousness.
Itskov has already considered
a world in which biology is obsolete, and bodies are supplanted
by holograms or avatars. (“If
SECTION
HUFFINGTON
07.28.13
Why don’t people think
about something more
sophisticated than just food,
sex and children?”
the technology advances, I think
there will be no need for biology
at all,” he says.)
Within a century, he tells the
filmmaker, we’ll frequent “body
service shops” where we can
choose our bodies from a catalog,
then transfer our consciousness
Itskov
discusses
his plans to
achieve “neohumanity” by
2045 in New
York.