Is digital eternity illegal?
Sooner or later it had to happen. On 24 September 2025, Maria Branyas, famous for being the longest-living woman in the history of Spain, died, having reached the age of 117. The trick? Apparently, her biological age was 23 years younger than her chronological age due to a combination of genetics and the healthy habits she maintained during her life, according to a study carried out by the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute.
The question is suggestive, as it allows us to fantasise about the possibility of prolonging human life. But for how long? If we were to ask Putin and Xi Jinping, they would say up to 150 years or even indefinitely, thanks to medical advances such as organ replacement surgery, as they would have been discussing during the military parade held in Tiananmen Square in September 2025. And they are not alone in their conviction, with billionaires such as Bryan Johnson investing fortunes in the quest for immortality.
In the hope that this could be achieved, other avenues are being explored, in which the physical casing (the human body) would not be relevant, as it could be totally replaced by some kind of hardware (robots, computer servers, storage units, etc.), so that the significant thing would be the physical body, which could be replaced by some kind of hardware (robots, computer servers, storage units, etc.).), so that what is significant is the extraction and preservation of a person's data, memories and thoughts, i.e. their consciousness, by preserving it in another person's body, as in the film Eternal; or in a virtual world where they could live forever, as in the San Junipero episode of the Black Mirror series.
And it seems that scientists see feasible the hypothesis that memory could survive clinical death if the brain architecture is kept intact, since, according to the study published in July 2025 in the journal PLOS One, within the research conducted by Monash University (Australia), after consulting more than three hundred neuroscientists, 70.7% answered that they saw possible to extract memories from the brains of deceased people through neuronal preservation technologies with methods such as cryopreservation with aldehyde and vitrification.
Digital eternity
Along these lines, so-called "deadbots" began to be created, designed with Artificial Intelligence (AI), designed so that relatives and friends of a deceased person can ease their grief by engaging in conversations with a chatbot capable of answering as if it were the deceased, thanks to a learning process (e-learning) that allows the system to learn to do so from the digital footprint left in cyberspace and social networks, creating the appearance that one is talking to someone who is no longer there.
This raises important ethical and moral questions, as there is no consensus on whether this contributes to delaying the acceptance of the loss, as well as legal questions related to privacy and data protection, especially in the case that there is no consent from the deceased person for their personal information to be collected, stored and processed, as well as for their image (name, physical appearance and/or voice) to be used by the virtual assistant. Moreover, the question even arises as to whether this consent would be sufficient in the event of degrading treatment of the dignity of the deceased.
But there could be a further twist, if it were finally possible to create "living" computers, as was proposed in the experiment conducted in 2023 by researchers at the University of Illinois (USA), in which they designed a computer the size of the palm of a hand, powered by more than 80,000 brain stem cells from mice.000 mouse brain stem cells reprogrammed between optical fibres in a grid of electrodes, in a Petri dish and under an optical fibre, with the idea of developing robots that use living muscle tissue to process information through a neural network capable of linking data.
This scenario would raise further dilemmas - moral ones, if experimentation with human cells were to begin; As well as legal, since European (Regulation (EU) 2024/1938, on Substances of Human Origin (SoHO), among others) and Spanish regulations (in particular, Law 14/2006, of 26 May, on assisted human reproduction techniques) set clear limits on the creation of human pre-embryos and embryos and the use of human genetic material for experimental purposes; although it is true that there are more permissive legislations such as China's, where research is being more avant-garde.
Be that as it may, it is not possible to put gates on the field. If there is the possibility of prolonging human life, either in the physical sense of the term or through the indefinite preservation of consciousness, it is certain that it will be explored further, since the desire for immortality is one of the hidden desires of human beings since the dawn of time. And it is a fact that regulations have been adapted to medical advances, so that what would have been forbidden in another era is now perfectly normalised, such as, for example, the transplantation of an organ.
And this transformation from humans to cyborgs advocated by transhumanism could be the key for humanity to achieve hitherto unthinkable goals, such as, for example, travel to planets hundreds of light-years away from Earth, either in "immortal" consciousnesses inserted into robotic units, or through cryogenised brains that would remain dormant for the duration of the long journey, to be reanimated at their new destination. We probably won't see it, but who knows if future generations will.
Read the full article here.
