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What if we discover the answers of the Universe, eliminate cancer, halt aging. What's next?
I'm curious to see what you are all feeling and thinking about when such questions arise.
I'm curious to see what you are all feeling and thinking about when such questions arise.
I believe after doing this we will get more and more mysteries and questions to answer.
I do not know if this true, but I like/believe in this quote from Douglas Adams:
You know this probably isn't that far off. After all, there is a number so large that if you could conceive of it, your brain would collapse into a black hole.
Or, to look at it from another angle. In an infinitely big universe with infinitely many possibilities, there would exist a race, species, or entity that are so far evolved and advanced that they're capable of simulating entire universes. In fact, the computing power required to do this is so immense, that for an entity capable of achieving it, it would be quite trivial to run infinitely many of these simulations.
For that reason, its much more likely that our universe is a simulation than vice versa. And if we were ever able to figure that out and prove it, I imagine that would be the purpose of the simulation to begin with, rendering it complete, and therefore there'd no more reason to continue it.
I mean that's just god reimagined as a computer.
I can't argue with that logic.
I remember awhile back reading a theory where someone did the math based on if computing power stayed with the trend of doubling every 2 years. Then us as a civilization are a little more than a century away from being able to simulate our universe.
My googling is failing me this morning. I'm not able to find the exact theory I remember reading, just a few reddit posts. Maybe someone knows what I saw.
I gotchu, you're thinking of Moore's Law.
Can I just live in Mr. Adam’s head for like two days… or maybe we all should just enter the Total Perspective Vortex…
I have my own fears of death, as do we all, but I think if we actually stopped aging / death, we are doomed as a species. "So long as men die, liberty will never perish" is a quote that I think sums it up succinctly.
That sums it up well. Personally I believe there are also metaphysical implications and constraints on 'halting aging/death' but the practical upshot is eternal feudalism with a never dying uberclass at the top of the heap getting richer and more deranged while everything around them is picked clean.
Similar to Altered Carbon in a sense?
I think about that scene from season 1 all the time when the dude goes down to the lower city and walks among the commoners like a god as his body is rapidly decaying from disease, just to swap into a new body right away.
Yeah. I can't imagine the wealth hoarding we could achieve if inheritance and multiple children wouldn't split family wealth.
Immortality without neural plasticity would doom us to a stagnant, geriatric society. We'd have people living forever with their fundamental dispositions fixed.
I think that if immortality came with having childlike neural plasticity, then our society could still evolve and develop new ideas and perspectives, and change would be possible.
Halting aging would have to be combined with halting pain and suffering to have any value to me. Life is full of painful things and honestly, as you approach your 80s and 90s there are a lot, if not most people who say, they are ready to go, life has been long enough. Much of that comes from losing friends and family, true, but can you imagine living to 1000 and witnessing all the wars, all the violence, all the injustice, all the suffering that would fill a millenia? No thanks. 90 years is enough.
Perhaps it’s a glass-half-full/empty situation, because I have the exact opposite perspective: I would love to see all of the advancements and innovations in art and technology that would provide new avenues of exploration, self-expression and enjoyment of beauty.
If you live in a western country, there's already tons of luxuries that would have felt equally preposterous to previous generations: We more or less eliminated hunger, we can fly in planes and access pretty much any information ever written down from a device in our pocket. There's always another audacious goal to strive towards. But the things you mentioned will probably keep us busy for a few more hundred years at least.
Then we finally get to play and enjoy ourselves without worry, just as children do.
I love Star Trek, but in some ways it's always been a bit unrealistic. Roddenberry's vision was of a future where humanity was happy to help and collaborate with one another. A content humanity that had no internal conflict. Which is a lovely thing to think of, but doesn't seem likely when you consider the nature of humans.
A book I read years ago illustrates this I think. The book postulated the invention of an absolute Truth Machine. One that's not fallible. One that no one can beat, defeat, evade, nada.
If you're near a TM and talking, it knows whether or not you're speaking truthfully. It knows if you're hiding something. And, it certainly knows if you're lying. The machine just knows. These machines are miniaturized until they're eventually wristwatch sized. People wear them just like watches, and it has little lights that illuminate so you can see if who you're talking to is being Truthful. Idiot proof, and in the event of an idiot, you can just go to a public Truth Machine and talk there.
The book spends a ton of time exploring how society changes with this machine. One of the postulates concerns negotiations. Consider how they work now. You go to buy something with a contract, which requires negotiation. Say a house. Right now, you just don't know what you're not being told. Is the house constructed well, with quality materials and workmanship that didn't cut corners? Is the foundation solid? What problems lurk in this house that will unveil months or years down the road?
So when you negotiate, you have all this in mind. You have to keep it all in mind. You use those fears to try to help drive the price down. One of the reasons someone would want to in good faith reduce what they pay is fear of being lied to, tricked, taken advantage of; so aside from greed and so on, you want to pay less because you assume shit will happen later that will cost you to resolve the issue(s). And sellers just want the most money possible.
With a TM, all uncertainty and deception, especially malicious deception, is utterly eliminated. With a TM, two parties exchange information on the proposed deal (whatever it might be). And after working through, truthfully, all other issues that might apply, you eventually get down to price. And with absolute truth in play, that final price exchange looks something like this:
The Truth Machine, James L Halperin
Then they simply split the difference and they're done. Both know they didn't get fucked over, and they both know the deal they arrived at is equally fair to them both. Unlike today when even years, decades sometimes, after a deal you wonder who got fucked, how, and why.
Humanity in its current state is just too consumed with greed. All kinds of greed. It's not just greed for money or power, it's greed for prestige, position, advantage. People are greedy for having the biggest slice of cake. They want the corner office simply because it's considered to be "the best." All sorts of greed threads all throughout humanity. Big greed, little greed, puzzling greed, stupid greed, dangerous and malicious greed.
So if we eliminate aging and cancer and install nanotech medicine that makes us immortal, if we institute utopian technologies that manufacture whatever anyone might desire at the press of a button at a trivial cost that doesn't impose on anyone, there are still going to be greedy assholes wandering around wanting more.
It's nice to think, dream really, that in a world without fear and blessed with an abundance of plenty such that any conceivable material want (not need, want) is provided that people will let go of their greed.
But I'd have to see it to believe it. And it only takes one, just one greedy asshole, to throw that wonderful dreamy reality into chaos. One guy who just isn't satisfied with enough, that he wants more. What more does he want? He wants to be more important, or in charge, or the most special. She wants more friends, or a nicer island to live on. Whatever they want, they want more of it, and even with endless largess some people just, want, more.
Look at millionaires and billionaires right now. There are people walking around that have banked billions who don't stop. Who just keep earning. We're not just talking generational wealth at this point, we're talking end of the universe wealth. Money piles that, thanks to capitalism, will never diminish unless some descendant takes it as a personal challenge to spend it faster than compounding investment interest can pile it up.
And they keep earning. They keep moving and shaking, they keep cheating and lying and stealing, they keep closing deals and buying people out and just taking more. People who have demonstrated an utter lack of acknowledgement of any sort of concept involving "enough." If they had enough, they'd stop. But they don't. They just keep taking.
These are people who live in humanity. If we invent all those magic things that eliminate all the issues with life, first the unwashed masses will have to fight past all the obstacles greedy people will throw up. When everyone has what they need, that's anti-capitalism. Which is a system that needs people to need things. To fear not having things. Things like food and medicine and shelter. Anything. Capitalism doesn't function as designed if people have enough.
But even assuming we win those wars, and the magic is deployed across humanity so everyone has enough, there are just people who don't understand that concept. Those people will meddle and problem-cause and even bring it all crashing down, simply because they can and want to. Because they can't countenance a world where those unwashed masses aren't bowing to them, needing them.
People like that are always going to be the problem. Whatever utopia we see on our horizon, those people don't want it and will work to prevent it. What they will work towards is any sort of world where they're special, valuable, and lauded.
Some people just have to be unique. Can't accept that they're not singular and of importance (in their own eyes) to the rest of us. Those people will always bring things crashing down simply so they get to be special.
So I doubt we'll ever get to a utopia. As depressing as it is, something like Warhammer 40K is a more likely outcome for humanity. In the far future, there is only war. Because it's in our nature to destroy ourselves.
There's an online story that bases itself in a reality like this, it's called 17776. Ultimately, all that will be left is to explore and perfect our understanding of the human condition, through whatever channel compels us to do so, like, say, cross-country football games.
Depends on how widespread this halting gets. If it's available for everyone, we better get some sterilization programs in place quick.
If it's only available to a select few, we should probably make sure to strip them of wealth and power such that we don't have some god-kings on our hands until it's universally available.
My favorite version of this type of society can be found in Iain M. Banks' Culture series.
I've got a problematic fave if you're interested in exploring this: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger "localroger" Williams. It's a sci-fi web novel originally written in the 90s that deals with the aftermath of a benevolent omnipotent AI that reprograms reality itself to eliminate suffering and death and fulfill any human desire. It's a fascinating premise written well, and the narrative jumps back and forth between the early development of the AI by its hapless creator and the rebellion of a strong-willed woman against its utopia in a genuinely engaging and thoughtful way.
The downside is that it goes to some incredibly dark and disturbing places -- in the brave new post-singularity world, some humans pursue extreme (consensual) violence and torture to feel anything at all, which is described in explicit detail. And the final (8th) chapter, After the Fall, is so tainted by bizarrely gratuitous squick that I strongly advise skipping it and leaving the final confrontation ending on a question mark (PM me for a capsule summary of the conclusion that minimizes the grossness if you'd like). But the rest of it is so interesting and unique that I do recommend it to those who can tolerate the textual equivalent of a Saw scene every once in awhile -- it really makes you grapple with the question of what life would even mean if we did manage to eliminate all of our practical problems, in a way I've never really seen before (though other recommendations in this vein are welcome!).
We already regularly create new universes with their own secrets. We call them video games. We can only dream how those would work after we solve meat and build a Dyson swarm.
There's a great scifi book by Arthur C. Clarke called "Childhood's End" which touches on some of this. Essentially, some aliens come to Earth and put a stop to war, famine, and all of the other issues that humans deal with such that we can live in a utopia. It touches on some ideas of spirituality and humanity that I think make it a great read.
Halting aging would change our entire perspective on what kinds of projects are feasible in a lifetime. But first we'd have to deal with population controls and resource scarcity issues. If we manage to solve that then there's all kinds of possibilities from dedicated individuals making scientific discoveries, creating massive art projects, or even traveling between stars.
Call me jaded, but after seeing what older people who've been in power for a while are doing... I'm going to say this is overall a Very Bad Idea.
Something I've been wondering about lately is just how much we've actually cursed ourselves with modern medicine. Granted that it was a kids' movie from the 70's, but the short version is that the way a town got rid of a bunch of terrible people was simply... by waiting for them to die off. Well, people are living longer then ever before now. And maybe that's NOT actually a good thing. Or as the old song goes, "the good die young"
It actually reminds me of a story I read in school. The way the story goes, a woman was granted one wish, so she wished that she had a magic tree which anyone who climbed into it would not be able to get down without her permission- I think the idea of to prevent thievery? Either way, she got old and Death (personified) came for her. She tricked Death into climbing the tree... and without Death, things actually got progressively WORSE around the world. It ends with her becoming more or less immortal by making a deal with Death, but my takeaway has always been that as sad as it is... people are supposed to die so that society can continue.
Everything goes black and text that says "Level 2: START" appears
"You have two attempts left from 9999. Continue?"
And timer.
What if some of the solutions are deliberately being hidden or withheld for whatever reason ?