High-stakes debate and hackathon will probe brain emulation, organ replacement and biostasis at the frontiers of life extension.
Most of the longevity world is obsessed with “maintenance” – slowing down the clock or patching up the leaks. But in London this month, a different breed of researchers is asking a more radical question: what if we just stop trying to fix the old biological substrate and replace it instead?
Welcome to Longevity Levels 9 and 10.
This week, a two-part event will put some of the most controversial ideas in radical life extension under the spotlight: whole brain emulation, organ and brain replacement, and biostasis. The Defeating Entropy debate and hackathon will gather researchers, engineers and founders to pressure-test the outer limits of what it might take to overcome aging – and ultimately entropy itself.
Longevity levels 9 & 10: from maintenance to replacement
Within the Longevity Levels framework, Levels 1–8 are all about the grind of slowing and repairing age-related damage. Levels 9 and 10, however, go off-script – looking beyond mere maintenance toward outright replacement and the comprehensive control of biological time. It’s a shift in philosophy that treats the body as a modular system: if a critical organ fails, you don’t spend decades trying to coax a worn-out structure back to youthful function – you simply swap it out.
READ MORE: The Ten Levels of Longevity
In practice, this translates to a toolkit of tissue-engineered organs, advanced transplantation, gradual neural replacement, and biohybrid systems, all tied together by increasingly sophisticated surgical platforms. Biostasis – the art of keeping biological systems in a paused or ultra-slowed state – acts as the “save button” for the whole operation. It buys the one thing medicine can’t usually manufacture: time. Time for new organs to be grown, for therapies to be perfected, or for patients to be “skipped” forward into a future where their condition is finally treatable.
The debate: can whole brain emulation deliver radical life extension?
The program kicks off on the evening of 20 March with a formal debate in central London on a question that sits squarely at Level 10: can whole brain emulation realistically deliver radical life extension? The event adopts a traditional Oxbridge-style format, complete with structured cases, floor interventions from the audience and before-and-after polling to see which side actually manages to shift the room.
On one side of the motion is Christian Larsen, co-founder of London-based NethoLabs, who will argue that brain emulation is technically feasible and represents a viable route to preserving “what makes you you” beyond the biological substrate. Opposing him is Daniel Burger (Synconetics, EightSix Science), who will champion the gradual brain replacement camp – maintaining identity by incrementally swapping out neuronal tissue rather than attempting to upload it wholesale to a digital medium.
Inevitably, the discussion will pivot from engineering to philosophy: If you capture a full snapshot of your synapses and run it in silicon, is the resulting system still you – or merely a high-fidelity copy? With recent advances in whole-brain mapping in small organisms and emerging commercial efforts in human-scale connectomics, this is no longer just a “what if” for science fiction writers. It’s an oncoming practical dilemma for the field.
Defeating Entropy hackathon: Replacement and biostasis
Running 21–22 March, the Defeating Entropy hackathon is co-organized by SoTA and the London Longevity Network. It’s designed as a focused sprint on two of the most engineering-heavy strategies against aging: replacement and biostasis.
- Replacement track: Teams will tackle the nuts and bolts of organ replacement and organ banking – including scaffolding materials for gradual brain replacement, tissue engineering, biohybrid interfaces and the surgical hardware required to make it all work.
- Biostasis track: This is about cryobiology and suspended animation. Participants will work on everything from computational models for new cryoprotective agents to better organ preservation protocols and the economic cases for investing in cryo research.
The hackathon isn’t about blue-sky thinking; it’s built around specific bottlenecks identified by those in the thick of the research. Mentors and experts will provide the datasets and guidance to keep teams focused on actual translational hurdles. The end goal? Moving beyond a simple weekend project to create something – a prototype, a tool or even a new venture – that actually sticks.
Beyond cryonics: biostasis as a new medical paradigm
Biostasis and cryopreservation are often framed through the narrow lens of post-mortem cryonics, but the organizers are pushing a much broader view: a general “pause button” for biology. In this paradigm, cryopreservation isn’t just for the legally dead. It’s an elective tool for patients with untreatable conditions, a life-line for trauma cases where the “golden hour” is ticking away, or a way to buy time for children facing diseases that are currently beyond our reach.
The same toolkit has obvious implications for spaceflight – where mission duration and consumables are the ultimate bottlenecks – and even animal welfare, if better preservation can be linked to more humane sedation protocols. But a central, unsolved problem runs through every scenario: how do we preserve the brain at cryogenic temperatures in a way that keeps its structure and information intact, while remaining practically reversible?
There’s also a compelling psychological angle. In a world where even perfect longevity medicine wouldn’t eliminate suffering, a robust “pause” capability could offer a radically different option for those in acute crisis. Nature already has its own versions of biostasis, from mammalian hibernation to extreme metabolic slowdown, and recent experimental work suggests these states might even be induced in species that don’t naturally exhibit them, raising the prospect that human biology could be coaxed into similar regimes.
Who is building at levels 9 and 10?
The hackathon is a cross-disciplinary mix, bringing together domain experts, engineers with a fresh pair of eyes, and seasoned builders from the startup world. The crowd is set to be surprisingly varied, with high school students rubbing shoulders with founders who have multiple exits under their belts. They will all be united by a drive to work on aging, even if they aren’t always sure where the most impactful entry points actually are.
By curating a set of “non-obvious” but tractable challenges – from organ banking infrastructure to neuromorphic architectures for brain replacement – the organizers are hoping to redirect talent away from incremental health-tracking apps and toward the hard engineering of Levels 9 and 10. With partners like Pillar VC, CryoDAO, Klona Biotech, Fifty Years and Tomorrow Biostasis backing the event, it’s clear that serious capital is starting to view replacement and biostasis as investable themes rather than fringe curiosities.
As event spokesperson Mo Elzek puts it, Defeating Entropy is both a reality check and an invitation. It’s a reality check on just how far we are from practical whole brain emulation or routine suspended animation – and an invitation for a new generation of builders to treat these as near-term engineering domains, not just distant science fiction.
Closing the gap
Whether we end up as digital uploads or modular biological machines remains to be seen, but the shift in conversation is palpable. We’re moving away from the “supplement and sunlight” era of longevity and into the era of hard engineering. If we really want to defeat entropy, we have to stop being precious about our original parts and start looking at the body for what it is: a system that needs a serious hardware upgrade.
The Defeating Entropy debate takes place in central London on 20 March, followed by the hackathon on 21–22 March. Registration and tickets for both events are available until March 19. Click HERE for the debate and HERE for the hackathon.
