I cannot wait until we cure aging so we can die on our own terms. The right to death should be as inalienable as the right to life, and nothing short of the heat death should be allowed to make this decision for a sentient being.
1. If everyone lives until the end of the universe, what does that mean for the prospect of having children? I would think it would mean that we would need to stop having children at some point, or else we would overcrowd whatever portion of space that we are occupying at some point. Not being allowed to have children would be sad. I don’t have any children yet, but I want to have children in the future. It is an amazing thing.
2. Neuroplasticity decreases as we grow older. If we live forever, could we end up being stuck forever in our old ways?
3. Evolution could change us in very interesting ways. But only if new humans are born and old ones die.
4. What’s the point of living until the end of the universe anyway? I mean, I agree that life is too short and it would be cool to witness what the world was like in the future. But to live until the end of the universe.. I would not enjoy that.
5. Tbh I’d rather die of natural causes than have to kill myself. As long as my life is not ended too soon I will be content for having been alive and having had all of the good and some of the bad experiences that I have had. (Most of the bad ones I would rather have done without, but some of the bad ones were useful, and we don’t get to choose these things anyway.)
That said, I disagree with the premise. Any true form of immortality would virtualize us. As individuals we would be able to take risks as never before. Paragliding through dangerous canyons? Why not? Worst case scenario your fleshy avatar dies, and you wait a few weeks in a virtual utopia as a new one is printed.
And even that is only if we choose to continue to confine ourselves to human qualia. Being virtualized would enable us to experience the universe in whole new ways - who would want to constrict themselves to mere human experiences ever again?
I think this short story explains these concept really well. Don’t worry about the cliche romance backstory - it was written in 1989: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
[1] http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/ (with the warning that it is pretty gruesome)
Seems...shortsighted.
Not much differently than we do anti-vax or people who deny themselves lifesaving treatments today.
If we could solve this today we would already be well on the way immortality! But there are some theories, the most prominent of which is a Moravec Transfer[1]:
> A neuron-sized robot swims up to a neuron and scans it into memory. A computer starts simulating the neuron. The robot waits until the neuron perfectly matches its simulation inside the computer, and then replaces the neuron with itself as smoothly as possible, sending inputs to the computer and transmitting outputs from the simulation of a neuron inside the computer.
> This entire procedure has had no effect on the flow of information in the brain, except that one neuron's worth of processing is now being done inside a computer instead of a neuron. Repeat, neuron by neuron, until the entire brain is composed of robot neurons whose guts are inside the computer.
2. Living till the end of the universe would mean reconstructing your body/brain millions of times. I don't truly see any way around that. There can be 'gaps' of thousands of years between such reconstruction depending on the current resources of human civilisation.
3. It's perfectly acceptable to have both old and new humans in the mix. Natural selection isn't the only factor driving evolution and besides by your logic everyone suffering from medical conditions should be allowed to perish so that only 'fitter' humans reign.
4. The wonder of knowing what human civilisation is like thousands or millions of years from now. Learning hundreds of professions - each to mastery and the limit of human knowledge. An unbroken chain of human history. The ability to gain advice from your ancestors and lend advice to your descendants.
5. Yes, life extension should be a choice. By law, no one should force this on anyone. But again, no one should be forced against it either.
1) By the time we would live that long, we'd arguably be mostly virtual, and spread throughout the universe. So space wouldn't be an issue.
2) Yes, we might be stuck in old ways. But we could tweak ourselves however we wanted. With backups, of course.
3) I'm sure that there'd be lots of biological reproduction, somewhere anyway, so evolution wouldn't stop.
4) Most of the SF that I've read posits that people will spend most of their time in stasis. Or in bobbles.
5) Yeah, it'd be a tough decision to make. But if we got to the point of living that long, one hopes that we'd be doing it in good health. And if felt like you needed a break, you could just sleep for a billion years :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQliI_WGaGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0
2. Any neuroplasticity loss due to biological aging is itself accumulated damage which will have to be repaired as part of life extension.
3. Human evolution is now overwhelmingly the evolution not of genes but of ideas/culture/memes.
4. That's for an individual to decide. At the moment there are plenty of old people who can apparently think of no reason to live but they hide the fact. They are in effect waiting around to die. They eventually go to hospital and care home for a few years before death which entails a fair bit of suffering and costs a lot of money. This is a sad and somewhat cruel situation in my opinion.
5. I bet that the cheapest way to treat things like heart disease and cancer will turn out to be life extension technology (i.e. damage repair). So you may have to decide not to get treatment for things which are currently routinely treated by conventional means. Of course you might still fall down the stairs...
If every human that ever lived could live forever, would we have been born? And today, would there be enough space, enough resources, to live a comfortable life worth living if forever? I'm not saying that it makes sense to kill people to create more comfortable life here (as some might take it), what I'm saying is there's an upper bounds to letting people live for a long long time without impacting any future life negatively. One person living forever is not really be a big deal. But everyone? At which point we have to ask, if people have that right to death, how does it impact other's right to life, right to shelter, right to clean water, and so on. They impact each other.
On a side note, there's a fantastic albeit cheaply made film called The Man From Earth that follows a conversation with someone who claims to have lived since the dawn of man. It's great concept, and I highly recommend a watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth
I think any society that is capable of letting humans live forever — on the scales being discussed — would probably be virtualizing sentiences instead of relying on wasteful fleshy bodies.
Living via a human body would be a novelty experience, a vacation, a limiting of capabilities and senses.
Essentially, I think your point would be mostly mute by the time we develop true immortality.
Have you looked at the universe lately? There are enough resources out there that every human being currently alive could easily have thousands of civilizations of their own, even making very conservative extrapolations regarding the true energy use of a human mind.
For instance, imagine a hypothetical about whether or not it's safe to shoot someone in the chest, we wouldn't say it's safe simply because they could wear a bullet-proof vest, we would have to ask 'what are the odds that they are going to be wearing a bullet-proof vest'.
Personally I would assume that in technological terms stopping aging is somewhere below being able to harvest the large amount resources in space safely and efficiently. But I could be wrong.
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Seeing how I change with years, I’d like to live to 200-500-1000 years old. Not because I want to live so bad, but because this is a frightening distance that is a completely wild territory for us to imagine. I’ll watch that movie (if not yet), thanks for the reference. Everything I watched before was pretty “same person tired and/or mindless”-centric, like interview with a vampire, highlander, etc. But it was more entertainment, what humans like to see at cinema, than a really deep analysis of thousands of years old beings.
Thinking that you’ll be the same after an amount of time is naive.
It left me thinking about immortality from a normal human's perspective for a long time. He explains how it changed him, and where he started from. It's very compelling in my opinion.
I wonder about the ethical complications. If someone is dying from heart attack but you can save him every time he goes through it, will you force that even if the person want to die via heart attack? At what point do you differentiate between suicide or ability to quit it?
Eventual death puts some limits on the amount of bad things one person can do.
Many organisations suffer from their geriatric leaders, who have amassed too many followers and too much power over the years. But at some point they die, and there's place for change.