So I just got myself a good reaming on Skepticsrock for suggesting, nay, insisting that immortality would soon become horrifically boring and people would opt out of it.
Well, I do know that 74 years, if you're lucky, sure as hell isn't enough. I can easily conceive of living 3-500 years no sweat, without boredom. Several thousand, more likely. If you cure obesity and the work week is 3 hours long, probably a lot more than that since pigging out on pizzas and greasy cheeseburgers is
extremely satisfying.
Some folks were claiming that they would like to live forever. I was insistent that it would become unbearable.
People got angry with me for claiming to know their feelings on the matter better than they did. Fair enough. But we also touched on the idea that the thought of immortality is somehow comforting. I don't understand this. I asked why, but I don't think I got an answer.
Well, here are some issues for those planning to live forever:
- Even curing or preventing every single disease known to mankind as well as general old age, you'll still more likely than not die in an accident in something like 5,000 years. Living a careful life, plus extremely advanced technology that can save all but the most destructive of accidents might get you 20k-100k years, but sooner or later the statistics will catch up with you. Even if you get to a million without faceplanting in a plane at 500mph, there are still the issues of murders and the like.
I read a sci-fi story once where, in the distant future, if you got into physical trouble, your body would automatically shut down and go into a long term storage/protection mode, awaiting rescue, rather than let the cells die off. Hence drowning even would not be a problem.
But deliberate acts and severe accidents will always be around. Even if you avoid doing any risky things, a plane might have an emergency landing on your bedroom at 3 in the morning.
- It's ok to imagine, as I do, chugging pizza and burgers and stir-fry 24/7 into a perpetually healthy body, but for millions of years? Billions? Googolplex years? And we're only just getting started.
- In the very long term, start thinking goolol years down the road, mathematically there are only a finite number of meaningfully different combinations of atoms and whatnot that can occur, so
repetition is inevitable. The only way around this will be partial mind wipes to keep things fresh. Indeed, the most obvious way around the Fermii paradox is that
this is happening already. It also solves the one objection that we're about to kill ourselves off. Specifically, the argument that, since you exist now, and that the population is growing rapidly, that it's more likely that we're about to wipe ourselves out than that you
just happened to be born in the early stages of human existance. Of course, that argument could be told to Thomas Jefferson or Jesus or Hammurabi or some Egyptian king 10,000 years ago, and they would have also thought humanity about to expire
by the same logic and they'd have been wrong.
I brought up god and "ultimate purpose," too, but people claimed that had nothing to do with the matter. However, I noticed that peoples' picture of this immortality seemed all nice and happy and limitless (they mentioned exploring new worlds and such). This sounds like some sort of heaven to me, not mundane immortality. It was as if immortality would be cool as long as it was also perfect.
Well, I reject the notion that evil must exist in order for good to have meaning. Going back to the cheeseburger and pizza concept, I don't have to be starving just to have great enjoyment of them. Nor does torture need to exist in order to enjoy an orgasm. I think people could exist for a long while just enjoying the positive aspects without needing the negative ones. Not forever, for that you'd need the regular partial mind-wipes, but for quite awhile.
