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There is something very weird about people routinely speaking of immortality as something that is actually a thing. For all we know, stars die eventually, the s
by stiff 13y ago
There is something very weird about people routinely speaking of immortality as something that is actually a thing. For all we know, stars die eventually, the sun will burn out eventually, the universe as we know most likely comes to an end and so forth, you can not cheat basic physics. To me this is the same kind of refusal that makes some people believe in god, and that shows how hopelessly biased we get on topics we are emotionally involved in. On any other topic with the information available everyone sane would asses the likelihood of success as maybe less than 0.001%, but if you ask about this specific thing, it's more like 50%...
(Speaking in advance: I understand this is in fact about life extension)
- flatline 13y agoDue to these circumstances, I suspect that this having possible applications into life extension is a really good way to get funding for your research, because death is 100% certain, and a .0001% chance of evading it sounds so good to some people that you can just about write your own check. Agreed though, death can be terrifying, but the idea of immortality is flawed in more ways than one. Are you really the same person you were 10 years ago? 10 Months? Weeks? Days? Minutes? Seconds? What is it, other than one's own fragile ego, that people are trying to perpetuate into eternity? A few extra years is one thing, immortality sounds like a fool's paradise to me.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago> A few extra years is one thing, immortality sounds like a fool's paradise to me. Feel free to pass on it then, assuming you'd actually make that decision if you really had the choice. That problem will naturally solve itself: the set of people still alive will trend towards 100% rejection of having a limited lifespan. "Everyone who had serious philosophical conundra on that subject just, you know, _died_, a generation before. [...] didn't need to convert its detractors, just outlive them." -- Cory Doctorow, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoSo you're going to volunteer for the sterilization and family-size controls necessary to make an indefinitely-living population feasible on a finite planet whose resources we're already overconsuming? Or are you just full-on into the Google-executive mindset where you use life extension to live long enough to deliberately invoke every other Singularity/transhuman/futurist douchebag trope in the damn book and go sailing off to space to find more resources for your exponentially-expanding population to consume?
- mistercow 13y agoThose are obviously problems, but there are solutions. Among them, "everyone dies" is just about the shittiest. Yes, I would happily volunteer to be sterilized in exchange for living forever. In a heartbeat.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoAnd you've already refrained from having children? Then, ok, fair enough. The question is, how do you make that fully general so that our ecosystem doesn't collapse and kill the lot of us? And then, how do you make the economics work out? Immortal transhumans need to eat, too, but once they get some kind of capital base going that expands faster than inflation, as long as they've got even the barest livable income, they'll eventually live long enough for their wealth to grow into "OWN EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE" levels. And we thought today's asset bubbles were large! Meanwhile, the young of the future will be even more screwed than we young are today, for precisely the same reasons but more so.
- mistercow 13y agoThe thing is, none of these problems happen the instant we solve death (and "solving death" is not itself going to be instant). Life expectancy will increase, population will gradually increase with it, and we'll be able to see the problems we have to deal with as a result a very long way off. It's similar to an argument people sometimes give me when I tell them I'm vegan, which goes along the lines of "If everyone suddenly became vegan, imagine what that would do to the world economy! How would we feed all of these people when our food producing infrastructure is animal based?" And the reason I don't worry about that is that I know that scenario isn't going to happen. When people stop using animal products, which I think will happen - not for ethical reasons, but for economic reasons as cheaper, more authentic substitutes arise, and the sustainability of animal farming dwindles - it will not be an overnight process, and the world will have plenty of time to adjust. It's basically the same with extreme longevity. We don't have to solve these problems with the tools we have today, because we don't even know when they will be problems that need solving. And we have no idea what tools will be available to us once we actually do have to solve those problems. But if you flip the scenario around, and imagine that everyone already lives forever, and these problems start to show up, do you really think that anyone would even think to suggest "Let's have everyone die after around 70 years or so"? That idea would be grimly hilarious in a very Modest Proposal sort of way.
- technotony 13y agoI think it's even simpler than that - if you are a billionaire life is pretty good, and the only thing that can get in your way is death so it's a natural place to want to invest - it's basically one of the only problems you have left!
- newsit 13y agoI'm not a billionaire, but I love my life and death/ageing is one of the few real problems I have. I'd rather have billionaires thinking like me and investing their money in solving real problems than buying yachts and marrying/divorcing every year.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoYou can't cheat physics, but there's a great deal about fundamental physics that we don't yet understand. Given solutions to the most fundamental bug of biology, we'd have a few million or billion years to solve the cosmological limitations on lifespan, and that's ignoring the possibility of improvements to the speed of thought or to the subjective experience of time. So, yes, the ultimate battle is with entropy, but we have a long way to go before that's the actual limiting factor.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoPlease point out even the slightest indication that entropy is beatable. Otherwise, make an ethical argument that covering every inch of the planet in people is a good idea. Otherwise, explain how you'll get the proper sterilization procedures working to control population growth and get resource consumption down to sustainable levels.
- foysavas 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoSo a prediction exists, with some evidence towards it, that it's possible to do computation that doesn't consume negentropy? Well, I'll grant you one thing: not quite sure what it is you're computing, but assuming your plan works, that was a surprisingly short path to conserving the universe's resources until your computational substrate suffers proton decay. I still have only hunches of what computation has to do with actual lives. Please, explain your Evil Plan out loud.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoEvil Plan, first draft: Build a Matrix, scan and emulate everyone, recycle the meat.
- Florin_Andrei 13y agoIt would be awesome to get to the point where we're worrying about the thermodynamic death of the Universe. But we're not quite there yet. Let's take the first steps first. And yes, "immortality" is a figure of speech. Much like "the infinite space" - we don't know if it's really infinite.
- nova 13y agoI'd happily take the 5,000 million years (or whatever physics say) lifespan now please. If I can't call it immortality, well, it'll have to do.