What if we could live for a million years?
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I suspect that limits of human psychology will probably result in a society like this, if we were to ever stretch our lifespans into millions of years.
What's wrong with being bored? I only live 100 years and I spend the majority of my life being bored. I want to be immortal so I can spend eternity being bored.
The people who claim they don't want to be immortal because they don't want to be bored don't get human psychology... Humans generally prefer being bored over being dead, period.
Being bored because of having literally nothing interesting left to do sounds depressive. I don't know what the novel's idea was, but this is what I would tell if I was going to write such a novel (alas, I'm not bored enough to do that).
Given that, I think there are probably different feelings which we all call bored. There is bored in the immediate term, bored in general, and ennui.
Solitary confinement sounds like the ultimate form of boredom. If you were locked in it with no hope of release, there's a good chance you'd eventually start looking for ways to commit suicide.
Most people don't commit suicide.
> Most people don't commit suicide.
Eh, not so much. Most solitary confinement in modern prisons is temporary and prisons have polices to prevent suicide (that are not perfect, but are still effective to some degree). Solitary confinement, even as it exists, definitely increases suicidal ideation.
Like suicide prevention ideation does not mean all people in solitary confinement want to commit suicide. I venture to argue that most people won't.
When I was a youngster, on the other hand, I was quite capable of complaining; "I'm bored!" even when surrounded by all my toys, books and the television and with the sun beaming in the sky.
I think boredom is a luxury of youth.
It was, in our time.
So many of our physiological systems and the way our consciousness works will have to change unrecognizably that the being that exists after these transformations can no longer be called human. If a thing thinks, it will be finite and want to be.
I'm open to suggestion and discussion but the 20-30 shift in experience may probably be a necessary part of the parenting cycle. And I quite regret the simple and deep joy of kids. Now (as I mentioned often here) I'm not in the best moods but so far no doctor or researcher addressed how to restore this happiness to agreeable levels.
Restoring in your life the same levels or type of happiness that you see in kids seems unrealistic. Not only that, there tends to be a bias towards nostalgia and how good we had it when we were younger. As I have gotten older, I have only felt a continuous trend towards more happiness in general though. I was a confused, anxious child. I feel better on every level - but that has come with a lot of work on making sure I am eating nutritiously, moving regularly (outside and in the sun), sleeping well, and leaning in towards work that I feel fulfilled doing. It also comes with fostering social relationships and cultivating a good social circle. That's what worked for me.
There is a path for everyone, and there are some generalities we can make on what that looks like, but in the end it is going to be unique to the individual due to their specific circumstances and genetics.
But there's a blend of excitement and joy in simple things that I find really lacking in adult life.
I'm also rewiring most my life and habits (somehow centering on simple usual and lively activities) but .. so far not good enough.
To be back to the original point, living longer will exhibit issues, and we'll have to work on that. I just find it sad that it's never mentionned.
I think most people realize that living longer will bring a whole host of issues that are hard to put into perspective today. But I also think that for most people, there is a bias against living longer because they think it will be filled of boredom and impaired mental and physical functioning, which I don't think will necessarily be the case.
Source?
> If a thing thinks, it will be finite and want to be.
I disagree.
This isn’t a serious comment if you’re presuming to speak on behalf of every “thinking thing”.
I don't know about the whole "damage" part but from a logical perspective you have a limited amount of space in your head and therefore limited memory.
If a thing thinks, by induction it will be finite. I don't know if it will "want" to be.
By induction there will be limits no matter what. You cannot have an infinite amount of memory in your head. You cannot have an infinite amount of anything anywhere.
However abstract something is, the symbolic nature of an abstraction must utilize at least one atom. For example, let's say we have a big number... <the number nine> that we want to abstract. We can choose to have that number be represented by a single symbol "9" rather than nine actual things. This is the true nature of what abstraction is, using smaller symbols to represent bigger things aka compression. But for that symbol to even exist it must be written down or memorized somewhere. This takes up physical space. Even your computer hard drive must use physical magnets flipped to different polarities to represent memory.
The biggest possible abstraction of a real world phenomena in terms of magnitude is to represent the entire universe with a single atom. In the end atoms take up space and even the biggest possible abstraction of the entire universe must take up the space of at least one atom. Your memories are no different... they are just symbols representing aspects of your life experience. Likely your memories take up much more space than a single atom and if your memories take up space and you have a finite amount of space in your skull, then by logic your memory is finite... this categorically true by logic.
Whether the finite memory problem is solved by garbage collection or whether it's not solved at all and people simply go insane is undetermined.
What is known for sure is that your memory is finite.
Using symbols to represent bigger concepts is a form of compression. The representation/memory of an animal in your mind is done using symbols rather than an actual animal.
This isn't speculation. A animal exists in reality as construction of millions of biological cells each in turn made up of billions of atoms. Depending on how big the animal is it could be more atoms that make up your brain. Therefore, for the animal to exist in your mind as a memory there Must be a form of information compression. You cannot fully hold an actualization of an animal in your mind because it is too big to exist in your mind. Your brain holds symbols of the animal.
What happens with a jpeg is the exact same concept as what happens in your memory. A jpeg is a symbolic representation of the actual picture. It is a form of lossy compression because details from the original picture are lost.
There is no difference between losing information during lossy compression and deleting information during lossy compression. Lossy compression means that data is literally lost aka deleted.
You can compress an entire memory into a single bit or into nothing. Lossy compression is a gradient where maximum space saving involves total deletion. Medium space spacing involves partial deletion and no space saving aka lossless compression involves no deletion.
Let me put it this way. A JPEG is lossy compression, there is literally deleted information when you compress a picture into a JPEG that cannot be retrieved. Do you understand this concept about the pictures you see on the internet? If you decrease the size when saving a jpeg in photoshop you actually lower the image quality to the point where you can lose a ton of information (aka deletion).
A png is an example of compression without loss. Same with zip, tar or rar file. The original file can completely be rebuilt from a a non lossy compressed file BUT NOT a JPG because a jpeg is a lossy compression. Get it?
Please thank me for teaching you. Or don't reply because you're too mad at being wrong and not appreciative of the fact that I didn't "give up" on a you.
"In the strict sense, it is not true that one's character is unchangeable; rather, this popular tenet means only that during a man's short lifetime the motives affecting him cannot normally cut deeply enough to destroy the imprinted writing of many millennia. If a man eighty thousand years old were conceivable, his character would in fact be absolutely variable, so that out of him little by little an abundance of different individuals would develop. The brevity of human life misleads us to many an erroneous assertion about the qualities of man."
- Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Perhaps it would, perhaps it would not.
For what this strange anecdote is worth, Alzheimer’s had not robbed my mother of her personality even when it was robbing her of object permanence, the concept of things having a left hand side, numbers over four, and speech.
Are you sure? I mean it could be argued we're not evolved to handle 50 years of noise and notifications given that we do not keep all that data but forget quite a bit of it. But then the response is that we handle it by forgetting it - what's the proof that the mechanisms that allow us to handle 50 years by forgetting will cease to work with significantly more data?
my personal feeling would be no, you will keep getting that memory of the person you liked in high school when you're 600 but your probably won't remember anything particularly clearly past 20 years before and the stuff from your 70s-80s will be totally gone.
I think the mind/human psychology would adjust like we do now. As we progress in life, we are shaped by our experiences, but most of what we experience become distant memories or are completely forgotten. When I look back on my early life, even things that were deeply impactful to me, the memories are almost like they almost happened to another person. IF we lived to be hundred of thousands of years old, I think we would just experience this to a more severe degree.
I'd think society would have a lot of trouble moving forward on issues when you don't have the great equalizer of the coffin to kill off old ideas.
That's assuming that you're going to have the resources to live a life of leisure, just because you're immortal. I think that's likely a false assumption.
Also, the whole world would be owned by the few people that were there since the beginning, with them seeking rent on everybody else. You'd be hip deep in debt to the ruling class from day one. Forget about democracy in a setup like that.
Also, with that much time, differences in education would smooth out, and even people who started with a small amount of resources would eventually be able to build up to financial independence, which gives labor more negotiating power.
> An extended life experience could make us wiser and more risk-averse since there is much more at stake....
> Increasing our fertility period in proportion to our life span will bring the risk of overpopulating Earth. With the current birth rate per person, the number of million-year-old people could increase to the untenable level of a hundred trillion. Moderating that would require a public policy that limits the birth rate to the desired level.
So basically, social ossification and stasis. You'll also have voters who made up their minds on all the political and social issues half-million years ago, and see no reason to change their minds (just like you have people who did the same a half-century ago).
I think any kind of extreme longevity scenario will result either ossification or a re-invention of death under another name (e.g. a memory reset). A finite thing can only go on forever by settling into some kind of repetitive cycle, otherwise it will quickly exhaust its memory.
Wait, does it imply that the current population trajectory is sustainable?
Making so many arguments why they so desperately want to die. Oh how meaningless and boring it would be.
But given they could live 1000's of years not one would choose to end it at 80.
Where does it come from? Deeply rooted pessimism?
I for one couldn't be more happy to live long enough to see us take to the stars. So much happened in last 1000 years who is to say next 1000 will be boring.
Even if you lived only, say, a thousand years, just putting a little money into some reasonably safe investment would result in enormous wealth over time. Surely if everyone did this, the amount of wealth would tend to drive down rates.
Even if we could live for billions of years, the Heat Death of the universe will eventually reap us.
So we must understand and embrace Death before we massively extend our lifespan. This is only one of the many things we must do.
Looking at a century’s candlestick chart for a stock would be something like looking at a weekly chart today.
Japan went through a few centuries were innovative wasn’t allowed. It was seen as a threat to the ruling class.
I’m all for a limited lifespan.
A million years * the per-capita-per-annum-consumption and your best contribution to society and the environment would be to jump off a bridge. Nobody would have children for fear of further dividing that meager pie.
Earth's population would skyrocket.
If we had the technology, I imagine we'd also have the technology to forget some percentage of what we knew every year, or at some cadence.
Or perhaps better, forget everything to experience the world fresh, then at some point have previous knowledge restored and available for reintegration.
Perhaps you could merge conscious entities. Or divide them. Install experiences. Delete them.
Maybe an artificial god in the future can perfectly simulate the universe to recreate everyone who has ever lived and died. That would be so weird and amazing, or would really suck if they were malevolent.
Example, 50 year tenure limit for professors after which they can't be professors any more or they're forced out to a different industry. Similar for politicians, etc.