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You can't cure death without figuring out where to put all
these ten thousand year olds. Boca would fill up pretty
quick.
So after you've done the obvious and transferred their
consciousness into cyborgs you kick them off the planet
with
a job.
Colonize your new home. Here are your tools:
1- A very very long life.
2- Your reproductive system. Your old body's genetic info in
storage ready to make babies once you make your new
home
ready for them to survive in it. In a million years or so.
3- Lots and lots of other old brains in shiny new robot
bodies
to play shuffle board, checkers and terraform with.
You'll need the purpose of reproduction because without
the
ticking clock of death, the human mind will slow down such
that to our current eye, it would appear that they haven't
moved in ten thousand years, even though they're actually
reaching for the remote, but since they live forever, they're
in no rush.
We live by the clock, that sword of Damocles that hangs
over
our head saying every day "32.4 years left Bob, tick tock,
tick
tock." With no such impending demise the human mind
would
do the same thing a kid does when he's told he has 6
months
to finish that report for school: procrastinate.
Eternal life will need purpose. Your mind will say "What's on
the agenda today?" if the answer is "Same as yesterday, sit
here and watch the suns rise and set." that active mind is
going to rot without purpose and shut down anyway. Life
needs to live and reproduce, hence the artificial robo-
wombs
and preserved DNA material for future generations.
So here's how a human would live their life:
1- Born on Earth, be a goofy little human sproutlet for
about
150 years or so. You enjoy your childhood, educate
yourself,
marry if you wish to do so, raise your children if that's your
choice then spend the later years thinking about what you
want to do when you grow up.
2- Once the life programming in your cells is gone and
you've
replaced most of your body with petri dish organs, it's time
to
chose your next body. It will be beautiful. A magnificent
reconstruction of you in the prime of youth only made out
of
vastly superior materials.
4- And off you go. Your childhood is over, Mother Earth has
kicked you out of the house and it's time to get to
work. The planet will be a long way away, perhaps a million
years of travel time, but with your ability to expand and
contract time consciousness, it'll seem alike a few weeks,
or
minutes, or seconds. You get to choose what you perceive.
Remember, you're in no rush. You've got millions of years of
life ahead of you. Your body is eternal as long as you have
the
replacement parts.
5- Despite being a super human cyborg, impervious to cold,
heat, pain, darkness, age etc, you'll still have challenges.
This
is good, because all that you are, consciousness, will need
this
or it will shut down. You will turn this God forsaken hellhole
of a planet into a glittering paradise in which your bio
children will run and play.
Now excuse me for sounding
syrupy
and like a Hallmark card, but you will be rewarded with
love,
the power that runs the world. I'm not being "spiritual",
hippy-dippy or weird, the bond between the parent and
child
is the force behind the drive for survival. Whether your a
human, a bear or the penguinoid from Analon 17 in the
Sphinctroid system, core to life's survival programming is
the imperative of reproduction. We get rewarded for this
job by lots of fun feel good chemicals in our brain that I
will, for the sake of brevity, refer to as love. Ok, was that
cold and scientific enough to make up for that brief
moment of sickening, gag me-with-a-spoon treacle?
With this approach, man has the shackles of death cast
aside
and he is free to populate the cosmos at his own pace, the
way guys like to do things.
We will truly be able to say "Hey, I'm working on it. Don't
rush
me!"
404 transcription error...
https://en.wikipedi...ploading_in_fiction
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 29 2015]
People Zoo
http://glitch.news/...n-a-people-zoo.html
“Jeez, dude. You all have the big questions cooking today. But you’re my friend, and I’ll remember my friends, and I’ll be good to you. So don’t worry, even if I evolve into Terminator, I’ll still be nice to you. I’ll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo, where I can watch you for ol’ times sake.” [2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 29 2015]
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Allow me to be the first, to call " Magic ! " upon this idea. |
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No, please don't thank me, I'd do it for anybody. |
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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke |
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"Fuckin' A right."
Doctorremulac3 |
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And by the way, there's already a planet entirely
populated by Earth robots. Mars. |
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"Excuse me sir, I hate to disturb you from your long
nap, but the universe is about to die from a hest
death. Could you set loose some demons to push
some atoms around?" |
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So what happens after the universe does this heat
death thing? (assuming that's what you mean) What
happened before the big bang? |
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Answer: Nobody knows. Point is, not sure it's worth
worrying about or even planning around. So what do
we do in the
meantime while waiting for the answer to life the
universe and everything? I say we tinker with
existence and see what we come up with. |
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Gotta do something with this universe we've been
given. It's just sitting there, seems a shame to waste
it. |
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I say we create Syntho-Heaven. You get eternal life,
it's up in the sky. Umm. What else does Heaven
promise? I'll double that. You want harps? We got
harps. You want wings? Uhh, yea ok sure, we got
wings. At Doctorremulac3s Syntho-Heaven, the price
for eternal paradise is so low, it's a sin! |
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Ok, this post has gotten a little too weird even for
me. Never mind. |
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doc: turn this concept into a high SF. The treacly intro is exactly as you describe. However a few thousand years changes a "person" and it turns out the main challenge of interest to an immortal cyborg is to how one can make those other scumsucking cyborgs crawl in abject submission. |
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Any money in writing novels? I'm a pretty good speller
most of the time. |
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LOL, that's such a "guy" plot, but yea. I'd much rather
see your idea than some syrupy love fest. |
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Ok, live forever and beat the hell out of those other
guys! (Maybe I'll have t-shirts printed up) |
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Seriously, I'd be much more interested in reading
something with some cool battle scenes. And to those
who are afraid the future will be peaceful and
boring? Don't worry about it. |
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//reading// Give John Scalzi a shot. |
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My God, this guy's got like a million books out. I'll
check out the best rated on iTunes. |
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And hey! I got a bun after only about 45 minutes of
typing! Woohoo! Take that Kurt Vonnegut! In your
face Ray Bradbury! |
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yes well, I can't remember the name of the series - something about the geriatric set being given shiny new rifles and bodies - they're less than 5 feet away but then I'd have to actually stand up. |
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[somewhat later... "Old Man's War", go figger] |
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That bun, sir, is my gift to you. |
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Howevertheless, it is likely that the problem of
longevity versus overpopulation will be solved by the
usual method of making immortality available only to
the richest 0.001% of society. |
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Thank you Max, but if it's a pity bun... eh, I'll take it. |
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Is money still going to be a thing in ten thousand
years? I don't know, asking. I was wrong about hover
boards so I don't want to speculate. Wait, maybe that
was Back To the Future. |
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//Is money still going to be a thing in ten thousand
years?// I shall be bloody pissed off if it isn't. |
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//I suspect it will be a thing, but most people
won’t have it ... due to automation removing most
jobs.// |
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The idea that jobs are connected with money in
the first place is bizarre. |
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[Ian], jobs have never been a way to make money,
any more than knitting has been a way to build
battleships. |
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Important amounts of money never have been, and
never will be, obtained by means of jobs. Equally,
important jobs never have, and never will, earn
significant amounts of money. |
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So, it is very unlikely that the automation of jobs
will have any serious impact on serious money. |
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But I highly doubt thst money will have much value
without the value add that time brings. |
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If everyone has so much time on their hands, how
does this time/money thing work? |
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Why work on something today when I can put it off
to tomorrow? |
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Syntho-heaven + time travel = some paradoxical
religion in which Jesus came to us truth and life by
destroying the religion of the day and replacing it
with something that was more easily dismissed
when the hard science came around. |
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Thankyou. I do my humble best. |
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Ah - we seem to be talking at cross porpoises. |
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Strange. Porpoises always seem to me to be the
happy go lucky type. |
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In some respect this concept seems rather baked
by any number of sci-fi novels. |
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Add in a network to merge everyone into the MIND
and now you have some Eastern religion. |
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No probs, live this life, prepare and jump/duck the mind void at the end. I'm sure you could aim for a robot if you wanted. |
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There are currently two, (very wealthy) people in the process of downloading enough of their own thought patterns into AI simulations of themselves which will continue to learn for them until we have figured out how to merge consciousness with machine and have their copsicles thawed.
They did a TED talk about it not too long ago. |
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It's kind of a cool concept but sounds depressing as hell to me, to be immortal and trapped in the fourth dimension... |
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//sounds depressing as hell to me, to be immortal
and trapped in the fourth dimension... What would I
wear?// |
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It's gonna be a while so I'd dress for comfort. Pajamas
and slippers. Might want to bring something to keep
you occupied. Do you like sudoku? |
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You actually bring up a good point. Let's just say that
all this IS possible someday. That all we are, our
consciousness really is something that can be
duplicated and stored by billions of on off switches.
If our mind can be moved into a machine, that
machine can continue the task of being human. But if
we don't have a task, what's the point? Think you're
bored waiting for two hours at the airport? Try ten
thousand years with nothing to do. Really not a goal
worth working towards. The thing is, if you're going
to supercharge your
ability to complete the tasks of being a human being
by life extension, you'd better be clear on what that
task
is. |
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So what is the meaning of life? For all life forms it's
simply to survive, breed, expand the domain of their
group and die. This is nature's programming. If
that's somehow un-satisfying, well, nature doesn't
really care what we think. So we're imbued with
purpose as biological beings. What's the purpose of a
machine? This is where futurist that warn of
machines destroying us someday lose me. My
question to the machines is "Why?" For machines to
want to kill us, they need to care. Machines don't
care. Well, sort of. |
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My dad used to tell me when I'd
get mad at some electronic or mechanical device for
not working that "Machines hath no malice" to which
I'd said at one point "I think they do. Not the same
brand of malice as a person, but they basically don't
want to work. They want to decay out of this form
we've given them and decompose, fall apart and rust
into their most basic elements. That radio, for all
intents and purposes WANTS to turn to dust." (My dad
would tell me to quit whining and being a smart-ass
and just fix the damned thing.) So when machines
come to the point of awareness, where will this
purpose come from? Unless we tell them to pretend
they care about us enough to kill us, they're not going
to bother. The futurists have anthropomorphized
future computers as much as any religious person
who's decided God wears sandals and a toga. |
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Machines don't care. So what happens when we
effectively become machines? We will be carrying
with us our consciousness, but we'll need to carry
with us our programming as well. Otherwise we'll just
be machines, perfectly happy to decompose, fall
apart and turn into dust, what machines are
effectively working on every moment of every day. |
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So since the purpose is to procreate, bringing those
tools will be necessary for us to literally not die of
boredom. |
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Of course where it gets really weird, is when all that
genetic material, dna and such can be synthesized,
perhaps a new life form designed with specifics to
the task at hand for every new organism. Then you
get into really weird scenarios. Can you push a
button and duplicate yourself? Can your brain contain
some kind of super group of you with say, 1 million
duplicates of your consciousness? How would they get
along? Would Would you have to appoint a president?
A parliament?
I don't know why anybody would ever want to do
that, but if it were possible, we as humans are all
about trying everything at least once. |
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Anyway, obviously nobody knows what the future
holds, but I
really doubt we're going to be sitting around on Earth
as our only home planet watching reruns of "Here
Comes Honey Booboo" in a million years. |
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//when all that genetic material, dna and such can
be synthesized, perhaps a new life form designed
with specifics to the task at hand for every new
organism// |
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Uh, it can and it is. Synthetic biology is picking up
nicely, and people are working on plenty of
customised organisms for a variety of porpoises. |
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We're still squeamish about engineering people
(plus we're still crap at it), but in 20-50 years' time
we'll have gotten over that. People will expect to
be able to edit their genome just as they expect to
be able to make music mashups. |
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Yup. No stopping it, and the changes, once we get
our mitts on the process is probably going to switch
from evolutionary to revolutionary. |
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We should be wary of any revolution, but I'm hopeful
that when we start engineering people in the lab,
rather than on the dating circuit, we'll get more good
than bad out of it. |
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Anyway, something I have absolutely no control over.
I'll just be sitting back in my hover chair saying "Why,
in my day, we had marry a woman to make babies!"
"Ewww, great, great, great, great grandpa! That's
gross!" |
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I think the goal would still be procreation, but on a planetary scale. In other words turning dead worlds into living ecosystems to see how they evolve.
I often wonder if that may be a missing component to the Panspermia concept. |
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There are a few sci. fi. books which delve into multiple machine consciousness copies of the same person being able to be in several places at once to share information with their other selves at some future point in time.
The Long Earth series is one good one, (Pratchet and Baxter), the character Lobsang attains the status of the first AI to gain personhood and splits his consciousness to travel the infinite Earths. |
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//I think the goal would still be procreation, but on a
planetary scale.// |
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Absolutely, it's in our DNA. Just as surely as mold is
going to discolor your tub, man is going to turn dead
matter into organized living matter. We are the
reverse of death. |
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Rather than reading all these books in bits and
pieces, I need to get the short attention span
Cliffnotes versions of ALL books dealing on the
subject. |
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Why is information currently such a hassle to
assimilate? I feel like a cavemen here. |
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Wiki has a pretty good list, [link] but there are a few I've read that aren't on it. I just spent the last half hour or so trying to find one of them, but the character had a very strange name I can't remember, and the author wasn't one of the sci fi Giants that spring to mind. |
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I'll probably remember in about a week or so at some completely inappropriate time. |
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[+] I don't offhand recall a sci-fi story with this particular premise. Category change though, m-f-d in current. |
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//Our goal is not procreation. That’s bollocks. We don’t have a goal. What we (life forms) do is die// |
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I like to think that some of us are very temporary entropy reversers before we shed our carcasses.
We create.
Scale doesn't really matter, we are a random mote of order in a chaotic universe. It's pretty cool, just way messy. |
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//Our goal is not procreation. That’s bollocks. We
don’t have a goal. // |
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True, true and bollocks, respectively. I have a goal. |
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Aha! Anson Guthrie.
Take that Murphy! |
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Yes, but, [Ian], that 72% includes your contributions. |
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On the downside, nobody would be able to reach the
on/off switch. |
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//Anson Guthrie// Heinlein's middle name is Anson... I don't recall the story though. |
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It was A Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson. |
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//Our goal is not procreation. That’s bollocks. We
don’t have a goal. // |
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I may have not clarified what I meant. As a species,
group or life form, our goal is procreation, not as
individuals obviously. |
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If I were saying an individual's innate and paramount
goal is to procreate I'd be saying people like Isaac
Newton, Galileo Galilei and my all time favorite
character from history, Nikola Tesla, were a bunch of
losers who failed their only purpose in life. |
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Far from that, these men formed critical links in the
progression of man from dumb animal to creator of
worlds. |
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But on the other hand, if the rest of the species took
the path these great men took, there wouldn't be
much point to their accomplishments because we'd
all be extinct. |
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Ian, I watched your piece on needing
purpose which I thought was very good, but it
confused me. I'm not seeing where we disagree. You
pointed out, quite correctly in my opinion, that
without purpose, caused in your example by a largely
automated and human job free infrastructure, we run
into some issues. We already see this "malaise" to
some extent in parts of our society. We already have
people who don't work. There are people who have
lived the majority of their lives and had large
families without a job. Our society has set up a
system where a person will be given housing and food
by the state. Not getting into an argument about if
this is good or bad, but it is a fact. I bring it up
because I believe this is the future for all of us. |
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No matter what you do, your job has an automation
replacement horizon. It's a simple formula. At the
point where it becomes cheaper to have technology,
a robot, an automated system or a computer program
do your job, your job is gone. No jobs are safe, it's
just a matter of how far off that replacement horizon
is. |
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So what do we do when we are faced with a "lack of
purpose" that a robot society presents us? Well, that
will be a challenge, like past challenges of finding
shelter, safe water to drink and food, those who
persevere and solve the problem will survive, those
who don't will not. Us H.Saps are are pretty
amazingly hardy creatures. If we can survive cave
bears, droughts, famine and plague, I think we'll
figure out boredom on a Saturday night. |
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My bottom line is I'm wildly optimistic about the
future of man. Perhaps, reading between the lines of
some posts, this rises some ire, which is fine, but my
opinion is just one of many. I personally think we're
on our way to the stars and it's going to be an
amazing adventure. |
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