
Silicon Valley's Quest to Live Forever - caseyf7
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever
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igor47
I think that on this subject, I am most at odds with my Silicon Valley
friends. Most people I talk to seem to want to live forever if possible.

I think this would be a disaster. We would create a race of ultra wealthy
Methuselahs who dominate the world and prevent the very "creative distruction"
that Valley types claim to worship.

Talking about this subject is very like talking about vegetarianism. Many
people would admit the basic premises under the practice, yet find some reason
to ignore those premises and just keep doing what they're doing.

Are we doomed to destroy the world in our selfishness? Or is there a hidden
upside to everyone (or worse, a select few) living forever on a finite planet?

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blacksmith_tb
I agree there are significant political problems associated even with life
extension, let alone immortality. I suppose a charitable view might be that
either or both might drive us to colonize our moon, Mars, etc. But what
doesn't seem to get much attention are the psychological problems of living
hundreds of years (or a more extreme 'upload' of your mind). My instinct is
that there a whole host of psychological disorders waiting in the wings for
people who manage to live much longer than humans have lived before. Not that
there couldn't be treatment for those as well, but physical health is only
part of the picture.

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igor47
This brings up another subject where I find myself at odds with my hacker
brethren. Look, I'm a huge fan of science fiction myself, but the idea that we
are ever going to solve any of our problems by colonizing Mars is just that --
fiction.

Sure, I agree with Elon Musk that a disaster recovery plan for humanity seems
like a sensible idea. Also, technology developed for space has applications
down here in the gravity well we call home.

But we're never going to have a large-scale migration off-planet, or any
sizable off-planet populations. A Mars colony even on the order of your
average Antarctic research facility sounds incredibly difficult to accomplish.
We are having trouble figuring out how to keep Earth -- the planet we
literally evolved to live on -- habitable for ourselves. Why should we be able
to transform a barren, icy, radioactive, razor-sharp-dust-covered, dead rock
into a suitable place for us to live?

I feel like my thinking on this subject paralleled the work of Kim Stanley
Robinson. The Mars trilogy was very popular in Silicon Valley (and, relevant
to the original topic, that series introduced immortality as a plot device to
maintain the same set of characters across (even wildly accelerated) geologic
timespans). But then KMS went and wrote Aurora, which paints quite a different
picture.

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Pica_soO
The ultimate ponzi-scheme.. the young born after us, shall inherit the slavery
for not having grabbed early in history.

