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Attaining immortality
Peas
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I have a ton of things that I want to do and see which I don't think I will be able to achieve in a single or even multiple lifetimes. Even though living kinda sucks I am really curious about what's going to happen to the world and what kind of new things humanity will discover next. This might seem like a crapshoot but I thought I could try asking in here, you folks have been known for your wisdom, vast knowledge and sage advices.
How do I become an immortal? It doesn't have to be full immortality for now I guess, even just extending my life by a couple of centuries would be great, I could use the extra time.
How do I become an immortal? It doesn't have to be full immortality for now I guess, even just extending my life by a couple of centuries would be great, I could use the extra time.
+5
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Beyond that, vote in some socialists or get rich I guess.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Or perhaps create a following that exists specifically to bring about your return. Death is but a door, time is but a window and all that
Investing in cloning, digitizing consciousness, or research on upgrading the meat with cyborg implants all seem possibilities but you would be betting on your investment paying off within the next century which is far from guaranteed.
Alternatively, develop that technology yourself
That said...
Some of those things, you could work on for a lifetime and not finish. But if you care about doing them, perhaps someone will be inspired by you and carry them on. And if not? You spent your life doing what you cared about. And there's value in that.
Some of those things, you may not finish even before your time is up. That's okay! You get to decide in each moment what you want to spend your time on. Maybe posting on the internet, in this moment, is what you'd rather do. That's valid. Working yourself to the point of stress on something you feel like you "should" work on isn't healthy either. There's no scoring penalty at the end of a life for projects you took up and didn't finish.
Some of those things, you'll finish. And you can reflect back on them with fondness or new clarity, and then take up a new task.
Wait a few hundred/thousand years. Wake up, dig up your treasure hoard, buy an immortal robot body to encase your brain, and enjoy the dystopian cyberpunk robot body future. Assuming humanity doesn’t destroy itself and/or aliens.
/cryogenic life insurance salesman shill
Yeah but that doesn’t end with you turning into Robocop
I see your game here
In case of future robotic AI conquest and subsequent revival, at least you’ll already have a number
A moon mausoleum to house your cryogenically entombed body would also be an option; though I would recommend a moon of one of the outer planets such as Pluto or Neptune to avoid being incinerated once the sun enters Red Giant phase
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
No joke advice in H/A.
I mean you can't even get much immorality for a benjamin these days
The key thing is that if you want immortality for yourself, you'll have to convince enough people to go along with developing it. You can do that by throwing large sums of your own money at people, or you can do it by convincing enough people to throw their own large sums of money at it. Unfortunately, the general public is pretty defeatist about inevitable death, so it'll be a hard struggle. If you want to get anywhere, you'll need to start building as much influence as you can as fast as possible.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
My suggestion is:
A. Live healthy as already described above.
B. Living healthy includes living in a place that is healthy ie. clean air, good quality water, good healthcare, good work-life balance, good access to food without pesticides and other crap and so on.
And the other part is to make the most of your time, so look at your list prioritize and remember to account for achievable as in going for what is possible while waiting/searching for how to do the other things. Plus be willing to take some chances to do things, having a grand plan that assumes you will stay healthy until at least early retirement can bite you if something goes wrong while working towards early retirement - even very early retirement(long story).
I am not a doctor; experiment at your own risk, etc.
Now just hunker in your bunker, wait out a millenia in your snooze-pod, and hope death has a vaccine when you wake up. Or just get a lecture from Picard about how the Federation abandoned money and your savings and invesrments mean diddly. (Second best cast scenario)
Worst case, you never wake up. Your greedy cheeks are still forgotten in a freezer somewhere.
Worst case, freezing the water in your body has caused it to expand and destroy all of your cell walls.
Stem cell research, preventing telomere decay, and killing off senescent cells. There's also advances being made in gene therapy (e.g. CRISPR), and also active research into developing nanotechnology, though it's still early. It's not totally insane to think human beings can end aging. They're still vulnerable to death via injury and disease, obviously, but people are actively working on this problem.
Some ethical questions to consider before you jump at immortality though:
And hope that future technology can recover and restore your cryo preserved severed-head. (The budget option, vs whole body.)
If we are considering immortality, and if it is ever made available, I hope anybody's biggest objection to "biological immortality" is not boredom.
There's a great youtube channel out there where various space/sci-fi concepts are discussed in detail. Here's one of several relevant episodes on life extension:
How comfortable are you with the "infinate monkeys "hypothesis?
If energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transferred. And everything that makes you, "you" is energy in just the right combination. Then upon death, I like to think that
everything that makes you who you are, which is just energy, is transferred around back into the universe. Your unique shuffling of energy is reshuffled into the soil, into plants and other complex life, and ultimately space dust when our Sun burns out the Earth billions upon billions of years from now.
Here's where the inifinate monkey hypothesis comes in... Fortunately you don't exist right now. Some of your energy that was you is now that space dust or that cool nebulae forming. Now, if you wait long enough, perhaps the energy that made you unique might eventually reshuffle again in your "right" order, given an infinately long period of time.
Reincarnation?
Basic healthy living can get me 40-60 years. In that time, we should at bare minimum be able to replace my organs with artificial transplants as needed. That could give me another few decades at least.
At some point we probably crack aging and illness, but I'm not content with that. Statistically you'd not make it more than a few centuries before an accident killed you, even if we eliminate natural death. I want to see the sun expand and swallow up the earth, at minimum.
So, gotta digitize. Depending on personal philosophy you can do the bit-by-bit brain replacement with tech thing, but I personally don't mind the 'put body in coma, fully copy into a computer, carefully confirm successful upload, permanently store or destroy flesh body' route. Heavily redundant synced memory across multiple physical locations, preferably across the solar system if we can just in case of meteor (people lose a few minutes of memory from concussions or alcohol, I can deal with losing a few without losing my sense of self because my backup's a few minutes short).
I know people will tell me that's just a copy but the neat thing is that if I don't think I'm a copy it really, really doesn't matter. If I think I'm one contiguous being across the two bodies and the people around me accept that I am contiguous then I'm contiguous. I'd use Trek transporters all day no problem.
Let's say we do have the technology to upload ourselves perfectly in an android/synthetic human copy with quality of life no different then our biological best health. Or we can upload ouselves into digital simulation. It is still a copy of ouselves, ONLY appreciable by those who knew us. Our individual experiencing selves are dead. Even if we replace all organs, eventually the brain is going to wear out from dementia or cancer, or alzheimers, or numerous other failings. You cannot escape the law of thermodynamics.
Prove me wrong. Transporter technology then? Can a whole essence of identical being exist in two locations simultaneously? Not possible.
That kind of thinking leads to trouble, especially during these trying times.
Maintaining organ function will actually delay the onset of dementia quite a bit. Since we're already talking about super technology, a permanent colony of nanomachines crawling over your brain and the rest of you could do spot fixes as necessary to keep you healthy once that's not enough.
As for the teleporter/upload problem...I don't care to go around and around on this again, since it's as fruitless as debating religion, but I think of it like this: I write half a book in a text file, then copy and paste that text file to another drive, then delete the first one (or just cut and paste, which is doing this but faster) before I proceed to finish the novel on the new drive, its one book. A book isn't lost.
Or like this: If I were told that I died and was replaced with a copy with perfect continuity of memory last night in my sleep, could I confirm or prove false that statement? No, so all that would matter is how I felt about it.
It's a question of worldview and sense of self, and no argument or evidence is going to reliably bridge the gap. I'm not worried about it so I'm not worried about it, if you're worried about it then don't do it if it ever becomes an option.
You're gonna live forever, or die trying?
If there are infinite possible parallel worlds, then there must be a world where you never die
Follow-up: After doing some inquiries I also need to know if you live somewhere with a lot of rivers or dykes.