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.
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...
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.
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 :)
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. 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.)