7 Arguments Against Immortality | 17
What happens when we crack LEV (longevity escape velocity) and start living forever?
WARNING: DO NOT come at me saying something akin to “Immortalism is dumb, and any self-respecting biologists today will say that our current efforts are pre-mature and this is never happening in our lifetime.” This is not the point.
Living forever means living for as long as we determine time to be.
The Wheeler-Dewitt equation's interpretation of General Relativity would suggest time is an illusion (the notation "t^2" in Einstein's equations could have either a positive or negative value for the variable "t" or "time” which is to say that it is subjective). In this case, time is not an illusion, and we’re going to interpret time as we intuitively understand it. No tricks or special effects. No thought experiments.
Below is a list of 7 objections to indefinite life extension. I hope you enjoy!
1. The Tityos Syndrome - The Crime Argument
“Tityus too, the nursling of Gaia who mothers all, was to be seen [in Tartarus], his body pegged out over a full nine acres, a huge vulture with hooked beak gnawing for ever his inexhaustible liver, the guts that are rich in torment, pecking away for its food, burrowing deep through the body it lives in, and giving no rest to the always-replenishing vitals."
-Virgil, Aeneid 6. 595
The Unrepentant Criminal
Tityos, a gigantic chthonic being from Greek mythology, once raped a goddess. As punishment for his crimes, he was duly sentenced to being tortured for all eternity. Fair or unfair? Inhumane or rightfully moral? The Tityos Argument asks: Will finite prison sentences become meaningless?
Discouraging an immortal population from committing criminal acts would be 100x tougher since finite punishments would be too insignificant to discourage criminal behavior. Today’s ‘lifetime sentences’ last about what, 150 years? What is a 150-year sentence when you live forever? After your term expires, you could come out, and all your family and friends would still be alive; virtually nothing would have changed besides perhaps some advances in technology, or maybe a squabble or relationship formed here and there. The repercussions of your actions could become incredibly insignificant to you. Breaking the law for personal gain makes sense when you’re only wasting a resource you have unlimited amounts of. It’s infinite leverage. Picture a heist team laughing hysterically as they’re taken in for custody. Certainly, there would be bigger and bolder Fast and the Furious movies. Maybe a spinoff of Money Heist too.
People Would Have to be Tortured or Held Captive Forever
The obvious solution, then, would be to extend jail-time. But how do we measure anything when our frame of reference is forever? 300 years? 1000 years? New moral weightings for different illegal acts will have to be made, and the criminal justice system will have to adjust accordingly.
Lifetime sentences will take on a completely different meaning. Surely it’s immoral to hold people captive for more than a hundred years. It still sucks to have to sit in jail for 100 years because it sucks to do something that sucks for any period of time. We’d be playing as devils, prescribing eternal damnation for the people who don’t measure up to our standards, casting them away for all the world’s existence and hereafter.
Perhaps punishment wouldn’t even have to be enforced within corporeal reality. There exists the option of simulation hell: speculative sci-fi tech that allows you to feel decades or even centuries’ worth of suffering within the span of a single real-world second. By warping time, it permits the punishment of criminals without “any real-world consequences.” On one hand, jails would definitely be much more well-run. On the other hand, this is pure unadulterated torture, but again perhaps, an efficient option. There’s also the argument to be made that if you live forever, for thousands of years, you’re bound to have a lapse of judgment at some point, right? Something you’d be criminalized by? Something you could be arrested for? Something to think about in that.
One scene from the show Black Mirror fills me with the most disgusting kind of fascination whenever it crosses my mind. In the episode ‘White Christmas’, you can pay to have your digital consciousness trapped in egg-shaped “cookies”, then trained to become highly effective personal assistants (who’ll be able to anticipate your every want and need because they are you). To coerce them into submission, the trainers push them to the brink of insanity by isolating them for increasing amounts of time (3 weeks, then 6 months, then 3 years). It’s sci-fi horror at its finest: chillingly ambiguous ethics topped with a gleaming heap of pristine aesthetics.
Rehabilitation through Brainwashing
How many hours of meditation does it take to reform a man? If you douse them with self-improvement videos day in and day out, do they become better people by osmosis? If children can be trained to kill by forcing them to slaughter pigs using AK-47s during childhood so that they become desensitized to murder, then how about exposing criminals to whatever the quasi-equivalent of that could be? Think of the infamous 1984 doublethink torture scene but rather than “1 + 1 = 3”, you instead embed altruistic thoughts.
Perhaps a more intense version of neurofeedback therapy would be more humane. You connect a device that scans your brain waves, and if it senses the altruism and kindness sectors of the brain light up and activate, you’re rewarded. If the “wrong parts” of the brain light up, you’re punished. Neurofeedback therapy is evidenced to inflect measurable changes to the brain very quickly, with an 80% success rate.
Combine these technologies with community service for 300 years or something similar. If kindness and altruism are muscles that can be exercised, then maybe rehabilitation through brainwashing could be an option to address Tityos Syndrome. Come in like the Joker, come out like Gandhi.
Death Sentences
I am being extremely optimistic here–– for some reason, the picture I have in my head of prison is one alike Norway’s jails. Small room, white walls, and IKEA furniture.
In reality, that is not the case. In impoverished areas, jails are terrible places to live. In places like these, maybe the better alternative would be to simply die rather than live throughout eternity trapped, lonely, and isolated. Maybe dying wouldn’t be the ultimate punishment in the criminal justice system, but one level below that. As social attitudes towards this considerably improve, the prevalence of death sentences and their widespread acceptance could just yet be a more favorable option.
The Good Place, a popular TV show (and one of my favorites), presents this same moral: people will always have the ability to improve.
In the final season, the year-long experiment proves that humans can show moral enhancement in the afterlife. The subjects institute a new system whereby deceased humans can earn their way into The Good Place by passing tests of moral development. Then, to avoid becoming numbed by the ennui of eternal bliss, humans have the choice to exit The Good Place and peacefully end their afterlife altogether.
As one character says, "No one is beyond rehabilitation." This is the central theme that runs through every episode of every season of The Good Place: every person is capable of redemption. Every person in the entire universe is given the chance, multiple chances even, to be a better version of themselves. Four lovable humans did it, as did a literal demon and cosmic robot. So I believe that we can too.
If we live forever, continuous rehabilitation would probably be the way to go.
2. Tithonus Syndrome: The Nature Argument
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
- 'Tithonus' by Lord Alfred Tennyson
What if becoming immortal gets rid of what fundamentally makes us human?
“Living forever goes against nature! It’s unnatural! Humans did not evolve to live unnaturally long lives. We are not adequately equipped to handle the moral, physical, and sociological implications of living forever!”
Nature Condones Immortality
A common argument against this syndrome begins with how living forever actually already does happen in nature. Creatures like the Planaria Flatworm, the Tardigrade, and the Turitopsis Jellyfish are already essentially immortal. Living forever isn’t necessarily going against nature because it already happens, and it already exists.1
Natural =/= Good
At this point and state of technological development, society should be slowly veering away from the naturalistic fallacy. The argument here is that “natural” isn’t always “good.” There have been many improvements in support of “non-natural” progress (modern medicine, infrastructure, etc.) just as there have been many improvements against it (ex. seed oils, microplastics, social media, etc.) Just because we carry the genes for aging, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work past them. Life extension is in our inherent human nature–– the drive to live longer is embedded in our DNA. Our ancestors worked hard to survive longer using the tools they had (ex. spears, hunting, building fires), all in the name of survival. We have different tools nowadays. Why not use them?
“What fundamentally makes us human” is debatable. Will living forever make us less compassionate? Less creative? Less driven? If, at the core, what makes us human is our personal agency, free will, and ability to take personal responsibility, then maybe not. See this passage from one of my favorite authors, Erik Hoel:
Humans might live on other planets, develop technology that seems magical by today’s standards, colonize the galaxy, explore novel political arrangements and ways of living, live to be healthy into our hundreds, and all this would not change the fundamental nature of humans in the manner the other paths would (consider that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream many of the characters are immortal). Such future humans, even if radically different in their lives than us, even if considered “transhuman” by our standards (like having eliminated disease or death), could likely still find relevancy in Shakespeare.
- How to Prevent the Coming Inhuman Future
Others still, would argue that the rarer something is, the more precious. Therefore life extension by default starts with the devaluation of the human experience. A counterargument against this is that while rarity is one source of value, there are also others. My favorite novel would not be improved just because I was the only one to ever read it. Do people with shorter lifespans live rarer, more precious lives? We already live as if we think we’re never going to die anyway. The implications of immortality on how we perceive everyday life will change everything forever.
3. The Sisyphus Syndrome - Existential Tedium (The Boredom Argument)
“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Some people think that given enough time, people will simply become bored. We will do everything there is to do. Eventually, even novelty will fall prey to the law of diminishing returns. Time wears away all emotion, and we will struggle to attach meaning to anything, falling apathetic and unconcerned, constrained to an overly maudlin existence.
I personally do not like this argument. For one, I really am almost never bored. Unless I’m choosing to be bored for the specific reason of becoming bored for the sake of becoming bored (hello, dopamine detox! boredom begets creativity, etc.). It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that we shouldn’t pursue longevity because of an argument that essentially boils down to “Oh no! But life might become boring for us homo-sapiens..”
The longer that we live, the more our experiences compound exponentially. More people will be writing more books, planting more gardens, and producing more exceptional choreographies. Experiences will be crafted en masse every single day. What would you pursue if you had all the time in the world?
Here are some (fun) things I would do off the top of my head:
Of course, first, I would read more and more books. Then reread my favorite ones. Then read some more. Oh to read forever. There is nothing I currently want more than to spend eons in one of those aesthetic home libraries with the grandfather wooden office desks and bay windows perfect for comfortable sunned reading in the afternoon..
I’d watch all the classic and good movies in existence because I don’t know nearly enough about film.
Extreme sports: go paragliding and wingsuit diving or marathon bungee jumping. I’d finally put all my bouldering experience to good use and go scale some actual mountains.
Guilt-free, I would spend days and nights dancing, weeks filled with bachata, salsa, and rueda.
I’d become even better at piano and art. I think by then, companies will sell century-long subscription packages for services. Think skill-based classes but for eons. From Zero to Michaelangelo. 2h/week but for 800 years.
After I’ve read every (good) book in the world, maybe I would finally get into video games. Some of those graphics I’ve seen look mind-blowingly outstanding. If I wasn’t motivated by the fear of wasting time and not fulfilling potential or whatever, I’d probably check out a video game or two (as of today, the only videogame I’m fairly competent at is Tetris). I’m totally checking out the VR world as well, please, and thank you.
This is to say nothing about the joy you’d feel about having all the time in the world to follow your curiosity and unearth your life’s work. (More on this later) The concept of “unbounded deep scholarship” is the ability of an individual to exhaustively and comprehensively investigate a given field. With the right work ethic, any reasonably ambitious person could clock in 10,000 hours easy on their field(s) of interest, and then some.
A multicentenarian being should be able to raise multiple rounds of children, understand the geopolitical history of all major nations, run a self-sufficient farm, pilot various types of aircraft, build structures in a personal architectural style, write 1000-page novels, speak ten languages, perform orthopedic surgery, understand the social customs of every influential culture, be familiar with all math discovered up though the 20th century, design a computer, cook with everything from mole to molecular gastronomy, be proficient in genetics and molecular biology, and contribute to longevity science so that one may only ever die gallantly. Specialization is for those who age.
- The Methuselah Dividend: Multimodal Mastery
Boredom is a state of mind; I bet you that there will always be something left to uncover. Something else to strive for. Even if things eventually do get boring, 1000 years of happy life followed by a peaceful suicide sounds much better to me than 70 years of happy life followed by 20 more years of slowly wasting away until you die.
4. Tantalus Syndrome: The Inequality Argument
Guess what,
In an immortal life
Money
will be important.
-mi
Tantalus (Ancient Greek: Τάνταλος Tántalos) was a Greek mythological figure, most famous for his punishment in Tartarus: he was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink.
“That was so completely unfair that I told Tantalus to go chase a donut, which didn't help his mood.” -R.R.
“When the release never comes, it turns into torture. There is nothing worse than to be perpetually on the verge of heaven, while trapped always in hell.” -M.R.
splat. *sizzle* Imagine having to flip burgers for hundreds and thousands of years. Most of my arguments above rely on having a relatively good standing in society: access to all these exponential opportunities will most likely only be accessible to the moderately wealthy and above. For those below that line….. I do worry.
Some argue that already existing social inequalities will be exacerbated by immortality, and social mobility will decrease, creating unchallengeable economic stratification. The movie Elysium explores something similar to this: In the year 2154, the wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth. We follow Matt Damon as he bravely undertakes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarized worlds.
The poor will become poorer.
The Poor will become poorer. If you were uneducated and signed hundreds of your years away towards some contract (because in your mind, time means nothing, and everything endures forever, right?), indentured slavery would probably become rampant. Exploiting the poor and needy would be much easier since they have the perceived ability to leverage their time infinitely. When does it become immoral? Perhaps a maximum-50-year-contract should exist.
All systemic bias and its effects would matter tenfold. Unforgotten grudges and biases might manifest themselves in all society’s institutional structures––making it near-impossible for people to climb the (already slippery) economic ladder.
Will the rich even share the secret of immortality?
Immortality might not even be available for everyone. Life extension research might only be available to the rich and the fabulously wealthy. A class of people who live for a million years and a class of people who will not. People with unimaginable skills bearing deep wells of knowledge whose lives span millennia. Sound familiar? Gods and ungods.
Many argue that this is highly unlikely due to basic economics. Furthermore, underground markets, hackers, crypto culture, and probably effective altruists (if their community is still alive by then, bless their souls) will never let this truly happen. Prohibition never has and will never work. The market will create generics or knockoffs of immortality technology. Planes used to only be available to the upper crust of society. Now, flights around the world are much more accessible.
Will the rich get this immortality technology maybe 10, 20, or 30 years before the poor people do? Absolutely. But it’s still better than none of us having the technology at all.
5. Malthus Syndrome - The Overpopulation Argument
Dear Thomas Malthus was an 18th-century British philosopher and economist, remembered by history for his theory that food production would not be able to keep up with the rising population, resulting in disease, famine, war, and calamity. Considering no one will die off, will the Earth end up overpopulated? Will all of us starve due to resource scarcity? I doubt it. This argument doesn’t properly take into account the exponential growth of technology. It underestimates what we’ll be able to accomplish with years of compounding progress and development.
To put this into perspective, coal and oil were useless 200 years ago. (crazy timeline statistic to think about!) But with innovation and time, look at how far we’ve come. We have vertical farming. We have synthetic biology. It’s common knowledge that global famines are just a matter of distribution. It’s a fact that innovation is positively correlated with population. As is productivity. No resource will be scarce as humans are always finding ways to extract resources out of seemingly useless other resources. When the greatest minds are given enough time and health to work on the most pressing problems in the world, my bet is on them succeeding.
Disruptive Technology as a Solution to Overpopulation
To expand on my previous statement, there’s the argument that disruptive science and truly striking scientific work comes from people on the fringes and those who play because they spend more time traversing science’s interdisciplinarities–– avoiding the the siloed specificity that’s (perhaps) contributed to the “Great Stagnation” in scientific research. Innovation is interdisciplinary and requires specialization.
Even under current circumstances, many paradigmatic advancements within science and technology occur at the interface of different fields. The reason that such interdisciplinary research and development is so fruitful stems from the way knowledge tends to become siloed within human organizational structures. There are invisible barriers between various academic fields and departments, companies and career paths, and intellectual traditions and schools of thought.
This artificial segregation of knowledge inadvertently impedes progress because it prevents information from readily combining in new and potentially useful ways. Thus, when such abstract compartmentalization is dissolved and ideas are able to combine with each other more promiscuously, innovation is more likely to occur4. Given that interdisciplinary work (by definition) consists of combining two or more areas of knowledge or expertise, it inherently facilitates such conditions.
Our current physical constitutions and the social constructs we’ve created to align with our natural life-timelines, have demanded that we enforce systems that promote division of labour and specialization to reach the heights of technological advancement that has brought our civilization to its current standard. Most of the time, a team of individual specialists is assembled, and armed with one another, they brave the trials of interdisciplinary scientific probing, monotony, and adventure. But so much can get lost in translation.
Coordination issues start to arise and synchrocity issues proliferate, with specialists each not fully understanding what one another are actually doing. Politicking and the bureaucratization that forms alongside any organized effort comprising more than a dozen people tends to rub the right (often essential!) people in the wrong way. Attrition sets in.
What falls in between the gaps–– what factual revelations are left unmade because of a misunderstanding of nuance caused by lack of proper context? What questions are left unasked due to disparate paradigms that haven’t spent enough time swimming in the same headspace to finally touch and as Matt Ridley puts it, “have sex?”
Radical life extension will allow individual humans to continuously acquire knowledge and stack skills indefinitely, which will alleviate the plague of over-specialization that burdens our innovative efforts.2 Our ideas can have the room to themselves and interact with uninhibited promiscuity, instead of relying on the statistically implausible chance that the right humans meet and somehow manage to overcome the barriers of human communication, talk about the right thing at the right time, the universe basically having to grotesquely contort itself while doing some 4D spacetime parkour to facilitate an introduction between two ideas and pollinate the right mind (which is sometimes not even one of the people directly involved! Someone needs to recognize and pick the flower in full bloom). A circumstance so rare that when it happens, we call it genius or magic.
For now. As Paul Graham says, it takes years to articulate great questions and find the right problem to work on–– great questions don’t just appear suddenly; they’re the sort of things that gradually congeal in your head. He argues that what makes them congeal is experience. So if everyone had all the time in the world to follow their passions and multiplicative curiosities––the renaissance people free to generalize as generally as they’d like, spreading their wings and expanding their breadth far and wide, while the monomaniacal able to drill down as far as they can go, uncovering holes and gaps in the literature and asking the right questions along the way––then this soup-like mixture of all this developed talent amplified by longevity is bound to result in some crazy innovation. We need not be so pessimistic.
However, there is the counterpoint that maybe more years of life doesn’t necessarily equal better, more useful, higher-quality output. Most people who achieve things do their best work within a certain period of time. Scientists, artists, see also: the lifetime of public intellectuals.
Maybe the 80/20 rule expands in proportion to this then? Instead of an annus mirabilis you have a decade mirabilii because of radical longevity? Anyway, it somehow seems like every person was put on this earth to have something important, something novel to say, maybe multiple novel impactful things to say (if they’re lucky), and then they drop off and/or fade away to live and enjoy the other aspects of life. Each person has some idea or purpose they were born to bring forth and make a reality in this land. Radical longevity seems like a good catalyzer for this or at least widens the margin of error people can have within their lives to find and do whatever it is they're supposed to do.
There are, ofcourse, probably anomalies to this. The energetic aliens who are like incessant persevering little critters. They just keep pushing away day after day, driven by incomprehensible levels of ambition, momentum, and genuine love for their work–– indefinite feedback loops of inspiration and agency, thermodynamic-defying cosmic beings of perpetual motion. Chipping away at progress for as long as they live. Maybe this is like, human’s final form of development–– longevity enables people to reach this level of peak maturation; they find something they like and do it for long enough and love it so much that they become aliens who energetically specialize in their own little personal monopoly. Even if they don’t, the possibility of current surviving aliens to keep working at the pace and quality that they do is motivation enough to want to see what they come up with given eons.
Interstellar Capture of Land
An example of a disruptive technology I’m keen to see happen that directly answers to the topic of this subsection is space colonization. It’s one of the sexier sounding solutions to overpopulation, among many others. It’s certainly a much nicer, techno-optimistic situationship to rally behind and root for than macro-worldwide policies introducing disincentives for childbearing (we could create something alike what China did, though they went a bit overboard, aka. female infanticide). As I said before, if skills compound exponentially, then our experts will become even more expert. Everyone could become so singularly good at what they do that we’d speedrun through the Kardashev scale in no time.
6. Asimort Syndrome - The Gerontocracy Argument
While compounding skills might eventually allow for the existence of Dyson spheres, think about this unintended consequence: Imagine Boomers that NEVER DIE.
Isaac Asimov, the father of some of the greatest sci-fi novels in existence, suggested that the old must die to make room for the young. Will there be room for young people to advance if the old people live forever? Society will be ruled by the elderly. There will be no room to advance to positions of power. Yes, indefinite life extension will give more people life experience and expertise over their domain. But therefore a consequence of this could be, that the elderly will be undefeated.
How will teenagers and young people rise to the top? Against literal 1000-year-old CEOs or programmers who have been coding for forever? I’d hate to be the person trying to go against a 2000-year-old Elon Musk. Or a Zuckerberg who has been keeping his brain fit and healthy doing his martial arts exercises for eons. Ruling the metaverse for all here and thereafter. Furthermore, older generations will also dominate younger generations when it comes to voting in politics. So, the churn of belief systems might not be flexible enough–– which would therefore be suboptimal for adequate societal growth.
Further thoughts on the gerontocracy argument and the age-related issues truly radical life-extension brings:
Will there truly be a difference between a 97,000-year-old and a 98,000-year-old? What do you think? What would the dating field be like? Right now, the common rule is to divide your age by 2 and add 7, right? So a 1000-year-old man could only acceptably date a 507-year-old woman and above?
Maybe once you’re above 100 or so, it’s free game.
Furthermore, if everyone looks young, maybe there would be absolutely no difference. An interesting thought experiment to think about :)
Maybe there would be diminishing returns to gaining experience since young minds benefit from more plasticity. The young will offer something the elderly cannot, and this will, therefore, carve out a new place for them in society. Who knows? Maybe all we’d need is a mandatory retirement age, and we’d be set. Maybe a whole economic sector with its own companies and businesses would be dedicated to this.
Or perhaps.. hitmen would become far more popular. If people aren’t dying, maybe there would be more demand for “murder-for-hire” services as there would be a moral need to eliminate people for the sake of true progress in any one field. Arguably, for those who subscribe to a more utilitarian-leaning code of ethics, this would be morally essential to move forward the human race.
Can you tell I love sci-fi?
7. A Final Argument: The Central Necessity of Evolution
ft. my good friend It Never Rains In Seattle
Part of what enables humanity to survive and adapt as well as it has is the very fact of how we reproduce. Sure, tardigrades are virtually immortal and, as it turns out, are pretty hard to kill. Yay. But, they also don't adapt/evolve. Human reproduction presents a reset switch both in terms of cognition but also in terms of our genetic wiring. Bisexual reproduction at a reasonably fast rate (relatively speaking) has allowed for a relatively rapid pace for the introduction of mutations and opportunity for evolution. The human species is wickedly adaptable, allowing for survival of our species in the most diverse ranges of conditions. At this point in time, our species also appears to be the one best suited to eventually spread beyond our solar system, thereby allowing the possibility of the species to survive the eventual death of our sun.
Regardless of whether the human species is "better" at adapting than other species, the point is that our species will only continue to survive if it continues to be adaptable, and that, in part, will also require us to continue to evolve. Whether or not tardigrades survive indefinitely as a species without further evolution (their survival stems not so much from adaptability as from relative indestructibility), humanity simply cannot. It's not how we are built. Humanity cannot endure as "indestructible," even if (when) we solve the aging problem; it derives its survivability from adaption and evolution.
Solving the aging problem and thereby allowing us to achieve virtual immortality fundamentally changes the reproduction cycle and ends our evolution. Not only does the body stop evolving, but social behavior will eventually ossify, as well. At that point, the next catastrophe wipes out humanity.
Maybe we end as we start: people, alongside everything, must always have the ability and space to improve.3 Old replaces the new, we hit one of the few core rules and specifications that form the structural language of the bedrock of code our version of universe matrix was programmed with, coherency that relates and bounds atoms and galaxies, one of the fundamental logics that make up the nature of our universe–– we can bend, twist, and shape it different ways, dye it red, blue or purple even, rip it up, or try and deconstruct and unravel everything so meticulously so we can change the weaving patterns completely and try to remake it from the ground up (which would take a sheer amount of effort and time), but no matter how many atomic bombs we explode or radical innovations we design to manipulate the fabric of reality, the material of the thread will remain the same: some truths remain absolute. One vital property of which being the crucial balance between creation and destruction, the core necessity of the cycle of birth, death, and evolution that has been happening since time immemorial.
What do you do with this information?
Really, it’s all up to you! I think it’s pretty clear that every argument here was more or less all based on absolute fantastical speculation. However, the fact remains that some really smart people are really truly banking on making this immortality thing a reality. Vitalik Buterin, creator of the second largest public blockchain, Ethereum, has made multiple multi-million dollar donations to various anti-aging research organizations, such as the SENS Research Foundation and the Methuselah Foundation. People like Yamanaka and David Sinclair truly believe that aging is a disease that can be cured. Some on the really kooky end of the scale are even talking about uploading digital consciousness into an eternal universal simulation.4 Make of this what you will.
Even if we don’t reach Longevity Escape Velocity in our lifetime, despite the short projected AGI timelines, we can still take advantage of the recent stem cell therapies and longevity efforts. I will absolutely 100% be taking rapamycin and following different longevity guides on things you can do right now to extend youth and live longer.
We build heaven. We become an interplanetary species. We essentially become gods. What then?
This video is extremely trippy but really makes you marvel at the possible scale of the world. I’ll leave you with it.
If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them in the comments!
A special thank you to Rogers Bacon and Rachel for the helpful comments, as well as Dwarkesh Patel and Steven Ritchie for reading over this article. I was also heavily inspired by this youtube video by transhumania.
Immortal Jellyfish (turitopsis) It has found a way to cheat death by actually reversing its aging process, according to National Geographic. If the jellyfish is injured or sick, it returns to its polyp stage over a three-day period, transforming its cells into a younger state that will eventually grow into adulthood all over again.
Planaria flatworms are famous for their regeneration abilities, where a worm cut across or lengthwise can form two separate worms. This apparently limitless regeneration also applies to aging and damaged tissue, allowing the worms to cheat death indefinitely, according to a study at the University of Nottingham.
Tardigrades are practically immortal animals. These creatures are capable of sticking around for thousands of years or even indefinitely “by entering a state of cryptobiosis, whereby their metabolism comes to a halt.
Lots of ideas from this section were taken from the multimodal mastery article by Methusalah Dividend
Maybe lock-ins or something is a counter (I don’t know enough) but I am running out of time to expand
I’ve had a few people from very unrelated circles, bring this up mid-conversation (without prompting) as a plausible reality they eventually see happening. This is really interesting to me as this type of future is so unlikely and crazy that I sometimes wonder how they all arrived at the same conclusion.