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Comment by flakeoil | Hacker News Reader

Wow, imagine having 117B people walking around on earth right now. No thank you.

I'd like to substitute your picture for a more plausible one: imagine a world full of incredibly wealthy robber barons, using their fortunes to ensure that "colored" workers stick to their designated bathrooms, putting lead into everything because dying is something that only happens to the poor, and refusing jobs to workers with the wrong skull shape.

And if you think owning a home is hard, just wait until every property in your city is owned by a group of immortal British lords who insist on women dressing modestly and "No Irish need apply" signs everywhere. This may not be too far away from what your actual town looks like right now, but at least we currently have the hope that those people will die and be replaced by slightly-saner ones.

Yeah the naivety and/or selfishness of folks wishing to be immortal is beyond me, something about primary school math lessons skipped. I do hope they are not parents (at least yet). I can accept it in some form once we reach other stars, but not in this century and definitely not in next one neither.

First of all, such technology would be usurped by dictators for dictators only. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Putin and endless stream of other pathetic figures, they all desperately clinged to life and would burn this world to the ashes 1000x over just to stay immortal. I can't imagine how we could avoid global semi-permanent slavery, not with actual real human nature that we see manifested in the news every day. Its fine if you wouldn't use it malevolently, that says nothing about more capable and more sinister individuals who are out there in numbers you probably would have hard time accepting.

Second, where do we put all those folks if we actually achieve some hippie paradise? How do we feed them? Concept of individual ownership goes very much against this. The opposite is communism, which has 100% failure rate, and we tested it already on few hundred millions, no thank you. You have to live through it to see and feel its failures in their many aspects to understand, I did and never ever want that back in any form.

If me manage to cure death, then there is no need to stick around on earth. We can start exploring the universe.

How are those two concepts related

We could launch a vessel to Proxima Centauri right now that would arrive in thousands of years. If the passengers have lifespans measured in millions of years, that's comparable to a month for someone who lives 80 years.

Has a method of long term stasis been found yet (like you see in Interstellar or other movies) where you can nap and be kept alive for that long? Otherwise I think you'd still need to overcome the mental limitations of being stuck in a metal tube for thousands of years with no way out and no way to pass the time. Or at the very least, some way of staying asleep for a few years--wake up for a few months--sleep for a few years--wake up for a few months and so on.

My guess is that stasis would be feasible sooner than keeping people fully alive and awake for the whole journey. In the latter case, they'd probably spend most of their time in the holodeck. Either way, on the scale of the universe, living in a metal tube is not very far removed from being stuck to the surface of a small iron pebble as we are now.

One, no, it’s still thousands of years of isolation on a shitty ship.

Two, they would all die from a number of things over the course of a thousand year journey

I suppose you could hibernate for an indefinite time then and reach other solar systems.

If we managed to cut death, we probably would turn much more risk-averse. An unfortunate accident would make you lose eternity, not just a couple decades. I bet that would not foster many explorers.

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