Thanks for illuminating your perspective for me. Immortality seems to be a very hopeful ideal, and the vision of the future you describe points to a kind of utopia. I’d love to live in a future where all of our problems, both global and personal, have been solved.

I have just one new question: Are immortalists worried about achieving the capabilities for extended lifespans, before we have the chance to have unlimited wealth, resources, and energy? Aubrey de Grey takes the position that immortality will be available for our grandchildren, whereas scientists tackling those issues are continually admitting that their work is a much longer term process. As I was asking before, what if the assumptions can’t be made?

(As an aside, there’s an article on Aubrey de Grey in the current AARP magazine, but it’s not readable online.)

>>I wonder where the idea of “a society of unlimited resources, energy, health and wealth” comes from. It seems like those things would be continually depleted rather than unlimited,

1. That big ball of gas in the sky produces enough energy to support trillions of human beings. I’m not exaggerating. The universe has billions of billions of stars just like our sun. Today we only harness a very small fraction of 1% of the suns energy. Even harnessing 10% would provide enough energy for the next 30,000 years at current energy consumption.

2. e=mc^2. Technology will eventually reach a point where we can recycle all energy and matter we can get our hands on.

Regarding health. Eventually we will be able detect and cure all diseases with extraordinary efficiency. Cancer, heart disease and diabetes will be gone within decades. Aging is just biochemical process that breaks down over time. Rejuvenating this process will be quite easy once we untangle the complexity of biology. This is happening at a very rapid pace now that biologists are applying supercomputing and high-throughput automation to the genomic and proteomic data. A few decades from now the average age will be 100 years old and those 100 year olds will be as vibrant as 50 year olds. A few decades after that those 130 year olds (yes the same ones) will be indistinguishable from a 30 year old thanks to our increasing ability to intervene in the process.

Wealth? The concept will eventually vanish once (nearly) unlimited energy and resources are available.

>>Another drawback would be the slowing of progress - if all the same people stuck around forever, so would all the same ideas and prejudices. Why would humans ever want to grow up if we were going to have forever to do it?

Progress will reach an inflection point where it will be simply “whatever we desire”. It might sound radical by todays’ standards but the future holds an infinite number of possibilities in regards to what we want to pursue as progress. Other than biology, most science has already reached a point where progress is simply obscure mathematics that only geniuses and artificial intelligence will be able to tackle.

I suspect that humanity will leave the planet and continuously splinter and regroup around different goals, believes, desires, etc. Some will want more progress, some less. Some will pursue spiritual goals, others technical.

>>I’m still puzzled by the assumption that unlimited life equals freedom.

Today we are not free because we are slaves to our biological needs and for no other reason. While we like to think we are in control we’re really not. We need to sleep, eat, reproduce, find food, maintain shelters and work on developing coping mechanisms. All of these go away in a transhumanistic world as our cognitive abilities and consciousness will far exceed what we’re straddled with today.

>>Why would the prospect of living forever give you reason to change your nature? It seems it would give you more reason not to change.

By gaining mastery over our own biology we will be able to enhance and improve things we don’t like about ourselves. Even those annoying biological underpinnings like fight or flight, fear, depression, anger, jealousy, hatret, etc. will be manageable. Changing our nature will be simply a matter of, yes, changing our nature
Much of this is very far off but that’s where things are heading. The health benefits will lead to longevity. Longevity will lead to longer engineering cycles that can tackle even more challenging problems. Progress is happening on so many fronts that it we couldn’t stop it if we wanted to. For me, that’s a good thing as we need to reclaim the world from the fundamentalists who are looking forward to and actively working to bring about humanity’s destruction.

(JEmerson, that is definitely true!)

On topic, I’ve always imagined immortality as a way to allow one to do more in life. I’ve read sci-fi books (e.g. “Boat of a Million Years”) and watch TV shows (e.g. “Highlander”) and dreamed of going places, meeting people, and doing things. Now, I feel rushed. For me, staying a week in another city never really cuts it. I’d like to live in a place for a year and then try another. But with such little time…

On the practical side of things, I see no reason humanity cannot live on reuse, recycling, and conservation. The problem is one of motivation. There are still so many non-renewable resources to take advantage of. And we’ve fine-tuned the engineering and market to make it cheap to do. If we could design things to be reused and recycled (even computers!) and change society to not throw everything away, it would simply work. But that’s a big IF, of course.