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[Parsely]

I guess not many crazy ideas are so crazy that nobody else had them before..

Learn everything you can from real life first so you can start having those ideas no one has thought of before.

[Tack]

On the subject of cooling rotary space-guns, covering the whole barrel cylinder in a liquid cooling shroud that moves with the rest of the thing, and putting the fluid ports along two points of the axle. Kind of like a spinning Maxim gun.

This should be a minimum of moving parts, keeps the fluid exchange further away from hard vacuum and allows the ammunition feed some room.

I actually completely forgot the thing had an axle. Although it still carries the issue of spinny-thing to non-spinny-thing liquid transfer.

[Tack]

Well it does kind of presuppose that we're all the respective center of our own universes.
Whenever someone dies, it's kind of easy to go 'Well, they may be dead here, but they'll never know it.'

Plus, even injuries could be a cause. Maybe I'm the only version of me who has been injured in the exact ways I have.
Which means somewhere there's a me who'd never been injured. Meaning they'd be the 'dry run', and I'm just a set piece in someone else's universe.
Or not. it's 4am. Philosophy gives way to Chunder.

[Tuxfanturnip]

If you're talking about injuries, there's not longer anything to make any universe "yours." There isn't with death either, but the only universes you can observe are the ones where you're alive, a sort of anthropic principle afterlife...

[Culise]

Actually, there's a disturbing side to it as well, beyond just ending up in a disturbing timeline, if you make two particular suppositions.  First, let's presuppose that a particular branch under the Copenhagen interpretation exists for every possibility, regardless of probability.  Next, let's presuppose that death is a probabilistic distribution; it's not really a guarantee that you'll die at a particular point, but rather that it's simply close enough to certain that it's effectively impossible to avoid it forever under ordinary circumstances.  As such, if you maintain continuity of consciousness through any number of quantum branches (for lack of a better term), you will continue to skate past death in more and more improbable ways, because *some* branch somewhere will have such a possibility of survival.  Your heart or liver might not fail, your cancer might be treated or go into indefinite remission, your stroke might be debilitating but not lethal.  Senescence does not lead into absolute death, as cells spontaneously mutate in a vanishingly improbable circumstance to continue to divide even after their telomeres are trimmed to naught.  Even if you attempt to commit suicide, your gun might misfire, or the noose might break, or your cyanide may prove to be denatured.  You end up trapped in an eternally ageing, eternally dying body, without even the promise of an actual death to give you release. 

Quantum immortality is a fiend.

[i2amroy]

You end up trapped in an eternally ageing, eternally dying body, without even the promise of an actual death to give you release.

At least until such a point that you end up in a universe where medical technology has evolved to the point of being able to treat the damage and causes of the aging process, in which case you then end up in an eternally youthful, eternally healthy body, enjoying the remainder of eternity.

[Tuxfanturnip]

So your anthropic principle "soul," as an entity capable of observing its own existence, is by definition immortal. But the universes they inhabit will tend toward one law of probability: Whatever happens, ____ survives. The older you become in such a system, the more probability simply becomes irrelevant from your perspective: you reside in a non-probabilistic universe. Because there's no communication from these "necessarily improbable" universes to our own probabilistic one, it's just as nebulous as any other afterlife. There's no difference between believing that there's a universe in which I woke up at 4 am on a particular night from a nightmare and knocked on a neighbor's door... and simply believing that that neighbor is in Heaven. The quantum immortality just becomes physically and probabilistically irrelevant. Of course, improbable narratives are the best narratives, to a point...

[Tack]

Actually now that you mention it, if every heart attack or stroke is averted, then it is true that you could potentially live well past the 'standard' death age.
But I feel like there'd have to be some kind of cut-off before you are a ball of pain and rheumy.
Except quantum doesn't care. So I guess not.

[Rolepgeek]

Actually now that you mention it, if every heart attack or stroke is averted, then it is true that you could potentially live well past the 'standard' death age.
But I feel like there'd have to be some kind of cut-off before you are a ball of pain and rheumy.
Except quantum doesn't care. So I guess not.

At a certain point, the probability of immortality being invented and you winning the lottery and getting it is the more likely scenario.

[Tack]

Man, could you imagine if that was the new lottery?
As in, no money, just immortality. Buy a ticket, maybe live forever.

[Jimmy]

The process for preventing or reversing ageing is still unfortunately a long way off, since the biology underlying he ageing process itself is still poorly understood. I'd ballpark us being able to stop you ageing naturally to be somewhere in the range of 200-500 years of further scientific progress. Sadly outside the realm of current living humans, but we'll get there eventually. It's pretty much the holy grail of medicine, after all.

[Tack]

I'm pretty sure it's closer to 20...

[Jimmy]

Nah, as someone who works inside the medical system I can honestly say that we really have no clue yet how to stop people dying. We can fix a lot of things that used to be fatal, sure, and there's plenty of ways to prevent a lot of stuff too. But now most of the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of medical science, and it's going to take a hell of a lot more work to figure out the rest of it. Medical science is extremely squishy, prone to giving conflicting results and relies as much on luck and intuition as anything else.

In twenty years we'll probably have developed a theoretical new treatment for a specific type of genetic disease. In fifty years, it will be in common use. In a hundred years, gene therapy will be commonplace and safe enough to use for both fatal illnesses and minor diseases. Two hundred years will probably have given researchers enough insight into experimenting with the human genome to safely and radically alter it to prolong life, and from there it's just a question of when the ideal treatment is developed. Right now our understanding of the human genome is barely enough to know you really shouldn't fuck around with it too much.

[Bumber]

A gun that interacts with the "god experience" section of the brain, specifically to cause a religious experience in the targeted enemy. The opposing combatant will in an instant realize that all humanity is one family and that our petty squabbles are but a fleeting shadow on the face of the deep unfathomable ocean that is the cosmos. He or she will, through the nerostimulative mechanism of the weapon, see in his or her enemy a human being with both flaws and nobility, endowed with a desire to live, someone who is in a very real way an equal, even though ideologies differ. In fact, through the use of broadcast neuroamplification, even sworn enemies will have the presence of mind to reconsider their prejudices and deep-seated philosophies. Fear of superiors, ideological brainwashing, earnest nationalism, it all washes away, leaving only the innocent core of personality, unclothed in hate, trembling before the universe. To the subject of the primary mode of this weapon, truly will every human being be a shining, divine child born from the majesty of the cosmos.

Thus disoriented, the targeted individual will be susceptible to stumbling out of cover, and the wielder of the weapon will be able to engage the secondary mode of the weapon, which lights the target on fire.

God gas.

[Grimlocke]

To be honest, the only thing I could hope for is that they create a treatment that makes you basically forget everything if that were to happen. Keep life fresh.

According to some philosophies, dying does just that.