People have chased immortality since times unknown and the kind of crazy things they have done in the process to achieve it, truly makes you wonder if we are indeed the only intelligent species on the planet.

I mean, people have gone on lifelong voyages to find a magical "elixir" that would grant them immortality. Suffice it to say, we haven't heard from anyone who has managed to do so. Probably because they are long dead.

Anyways, we are in the 21st century and science and technology has made the seemingly impossible, possible. I mean, travelling thousands of miles in a metallic body? Who would have thought that would be possible one day?

Could it happen then that technological innovations could make immortality a reality as well? Not today, not tomorrow but maybe hundreds years in the future? If so, how exactly would that happen? Looking at current technology, we might have some clue.

Nanotechnology

Many experts have suggested that a day will come when it will be completely normal for everyone to have swarms of nano-robots in their bodies whose objectives would be to continually repair damaged cells, fight diseases and monitor, prevent or solve any problems with the body.

This may sound science-fiction, but I personally think this could happen within the next fifty years. We are already starting to build electronics at a ridiculously tiny scale, so it is not crazy to think this will indeed be possible within many people's lifetime.

How much of an effect it would have on the longevity of life is up for debate. I don't know if it would make someone truly immortal but I think it would have a significant effect and would increase a person's lifetime drastically. In the hundreds of years, maybe?

The Bionic Human

It will become increasingly easier for us to 3D print stuff, not only materials we use in life, but the different parts of our bodies as well. When something stops working or gets diseased, we would be able to just replace it with an artificial copy.

Or better yet, we could even one day print a living organ/body part with the help of the person's stem cells and then replace the old one with it. This would make organ donors redundant and could significantly increase someone's lifetime.

I wonder if we can achieve true immortality by this method. In theory, we could just keep replacing organs and parts when they get old, like we do with our clothes, but would it be feasible? And could we print the brain and replace the old one? That one sounds almost impossible. Time will tell.

Living Forever In The Cloud

Now, this one sounds the most sci-fi but it is also the one that would grant us true immortality. The idea here is that, we would be able to upload our consciousness into a computer/machine/server or anything of the sort. Once consciousness becomes digital, it can be transferred, replicated, stored indefinitely.

That is the key here. If we are to believe that what makes us, "us" is our consciousness, then being able to upload it to a digital medium would truly make us immortal. We could be stored in the cloud forever and when our natural bodies die, we could simply come alive again in a robotic body that looks just as real.

We could also continue to live in a virtual world, if we get bored of the real world, like in that one episode of Black Mirror. That would be the ultimate freedom that we seek I think - being able to live anywhere, anytime!