Silicon Valley's Quest to Live Forever | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley's Quest to Live Forever

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32 pointscaseyf77 comments

I think that on this subject, I am most at odds with my Silicon Valley friends. Most people I talk to seem to want to live forever if possible.

I think this would be a disaster. We would create a race of ultra wealthy Methuselahs who dominate the world and prevent the very "creative distruction" that Valley types claim to worship.

Talking about this subject is very like talking about vegetarianism. Many people would admit the basic premises under the practice, yet find some reason to ignore those premises and just keep doing what they're doing.

Are we doomed to destroy the world in our selfishness? Or is there a hidden upside to everyone (or worse, a select few) living forever on a finite planet?

I agree there are significant political problems associated even with life extension, let alone immortality. I suppose a charitable view might be that either or both might drive us to colonize our moon, Mars, etc. But what doesn't seem to get much attention are the psychological problems of living hundreds of years (or a more extreme 'upload' of your mind). My instinct is that there a whole host of psychological disorders waiting in the wings for people who manage to live much longer than humans have lived before. Not that there couldn't be treatment for those as well, but physical health is only part of the picture.

This brings up another subject where I find myself at odds with my hacker brethren. Look, I'm a huge fan of science fiction myself, but the idea that we are ever going to solve any of our problems by colonizing Mars is just that -- fiction.

Sure, I agree with Elon Musk that a disaster recovery plan for humanity seems like a sensible idea. Also, technology developed for space has applications down here in the gravity well we call home.

But we're never going to have a large-scale migration off-planet, or any sizable off-planet populations. A Mars colony even on the order of your average Antarctic research facility sounds incredibly difficult to accomplish. We are having trouble figuring out how to keep Earth -- the planet we literally evolved to live on -- habitable for ourselves. Why should we be able to transform a barren, icy, radioactive, razor-sharp-dust-covered, dead rock into a suitable place for us to live?

I feel like my thinking on this subject paralleled the work of Kim Stanley Robinson. The Mars trilogy was very popular in Silicon Valley (and, relevant to the original topic, that series introduced immortality as a plot device to maintain the same set of characters across (even wildly accelerated) geologic timespans). But then KMS went and wrote Aurora, which paints quite a different picture.

Assume it is a disaster: do you propose to stop it, and if so, how?

I doubt I can stop it. Even if I were to construct an impressively viral meme set akin to, say, Christianity or Islam, and which makes researching immortality or attempting to become immortal a primary taboo. Even then, it would only take a few people immune to my meme set to open Pandora's box here.

Still, such a meme set would significantly delay the inevitable. If you're going to spread ideas, a HN comment is as good a place as any to start. Beats a street corner and a sandwich board...

Why so pessimist? This planet can easily support 100 billion people (I know, citation needed), yet the highest projection of the world population in 2100 is less than 20BN [1].

In a few years we may very well be able to eat lab-grown burgers [2]. As a vegetarian would you oppose eating this type of meat?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_Meats

The ultimate ponzi-scheme.. the young born after us, shall inherit the slavery for not having grabbed early in history.

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