Google says humans could live for 500 YEARS

Google says humans could live for 500 YEARS - and is investing in firms hoping to extend our lives five-fold

Google has invested in taxi firms, smart thermostats and even artificial intelligence but it is also setting its sights on immortality - or at least increasing our lives five-fold. 

In an interview with Bloomberg, Google Ventures' president Bill Maris said he thinks it's possible to live to 500 years old. 

And this will be helped by medical breakthroughs as well as a rise in biomechanics.

He has already ploughed money into genetics firms and cancer diagnostic startups and said: 'We have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision. I just hope to live long enough not to die.' 

Mr Maris founded Google Ventures in 2009 and oversees all of the fund’s global activities.

He studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and conducted neurobiology research at Duke University. 

Elsewhere he has advised Aurolab in the development of a hydrophobic acrylic lens for cataract blindness, and helped develop Google’s Calico project.

Calico is a research and development company set up in 2013 by Google and Apple to tackle 'ageing and associated diseases.'

Google co-founder Larry Page said the project would focus on 'health, wellbeing and longevity' and last September Calico partnered with AbbVie to open a research centre into neurodegeneration and cancer.

Although these firms are focused on extending life naturally, there is also a group that believes machines will be the key to extending out lives beyond 120 - an age that has been quoted as the 'real absolute limit to human lifespan'.

Google's director of engineering, and colleague of Mr Maris, Ray Kurzweil has previously said that in just over 30 years humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity. 

At the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York last year, Mr Kurzweil claimed that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100.

He referred to Moore's Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing.

In Kurweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, he plots this development and journey towards singularity in a graph.

This singularity is also referred to as digital immortality because brains and a person's intelligence will be digitally stored forever, even after they die.

He also added that this will be possible through neural engineering and referenced the recent strides made towards modeling the brain and technologies which can replace biological functions.

Examples of such technology include the cochlear implant - an implant that is attached to the brain's cochlear nerve and electronically stimulates it to restore hearing to someone who is deaf.

Source: Dailymail Uk