Keep On Keeping On After Your Body Is Dead.
Okay, so let’s say you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness – say lung cancer - and you’re due to shuffle off this mortal coil within a year or so. Let’s also say that you’re not a happy little camper with this state of affairs. What some people in that situation do is have their person [body and ‘soul’] frozen until medical science can cure their now no longer terminal condition. Sometimes all they have frozen is their head on the grounds that maybe one day that can be thawed and grafted onto another body.
Perhaps there is another option which might be easier to achieve than cryogenics, especially on the grounds that it’s very difficult to freeze something as complex as an entire head (not to mention an attached body), thaw it out, and have it in pristine condition. What I’m thinking of here is your traditional sci-fi concept of the brain-in-a-vat. It shouldn’t be all that difficult (relatively speaking) to keep a brain in a vat that’s appropriately oxygenated and filled with nutrients that the brain cells can absorb as well as a waste removal process. Appropriate electrodes attached to various nerves, etc. can provide the mental stimuli – tailor made even – to keep the ‘person’ in a ‘living’ state akin to what they experienced before their body let them down. Such a brain-in-the-vat solution / condition could extend a terminal patient’s lifespan by … well let’s just say way longer than if the terminal illness had taken its normal course of events.