Whoah! While I was getting my sleep on, this thread received an overwhelming number of replies. No matter.
Yeah, I'm mostly with Team Eagleon in this. Technological progress probably isn't going to automatically solve all mankind's problems, but it's still pretty sweet. I'm kind of assuming that in the distant future, all the current ones will eventually be solved, but this is just unfounded optimism, and not really related to technology.
Class differences can be solved right now. It's a purely organizational problem. We don't need technology for it. World hunger is trivial to solve by stabilizing population under what the current food production can support. Yet, for some reason, they remain problems. There is absolutely no theoretical reason these issues couldn't be solved overnight, and therefore no simple problem to tackle. A flock of magic flying unicorns descending from the skies is really the only solution that technological progress can offer, because the problem itself isn't technological. This is a job for politicians, not scientists.
Death, now, is different. You can actually do something about that. Granting life everlasting is still beyond our ken, but advancing the human lifespan a little bit further is not. We've been doing that for a long time already, and I see no reason to stop. I earnestly believe that people in the future will live longer than they do now. And that this trend of eliminating potential causes of death one by one will continue until clinical immortality is achieved, assuming that something better doesn't present itself in the meantime. It often has.
But there is literally no physical law stopping us from letting every human on Earth now live until the sun dies, if we had the right tools.
Yeah, there are. The very limitations you say "the right tools would fix" are the very limitations of reality itself. We could make rocks exist forever if we coated them in some magical substance that prevented wind erosion, abrading, and all the hundreds of other micro processes that contribute to decay. I know, maybe if we made a field that just stopped proton and radiological decay altogether.
No, Eagleon's right. You don't have to make rocks exist forever if you can repair them. Someone brought up Theseus' boat, which I really think is a great example. If you keep replacing parts, you can make something that is made of wood and is partially immersed in water for long periods of time
last indefinitely. Is it still the same boat? Is there a point to doing this? That isn't really relevant to this. You have a boat, and it's seaworthy, and there is no physical reason it couldn't stay that way forever. We can't repair brains in the same way we can repair boats, but there is no "natural law" saying that.
Technology doesn't treat reality as an inconvenient obstacle. When the bomb went off, Oppenheimer went straight to religion as his first reaction. That's, I think, the real approach technology has to take with manipulating reality. Not "oh man, god will be pissed if we do x" but "what are we fucking with? What are we unleashing? Do we have the right? Is it sensible?"
That's respect for the natural laws, even as we push the boundaries. What you talk about is so laced with contempt, it's like you've got a grudge against the fact you were born as a thing with rules you've got to play by. You act as though death is a problem that has to be solved, completely ignoring the fact that maybe, just maybe, all things are meant to die, because that's one of those rules that makes it so we even have a reality to begin with.
This attitude I really disagree with. Why should we respect the "natural laws", as you put it? If something turns out to be flat out impossible, sure, that's fine. But you don't know it's impossible before you actually try. And you SHOULD try. Striving for the impossible is not the same as toiling in vain. Should you stop designing more efficient combustion engines just because physics says that you can never have a perfectly efficient combustion engine? Are you suggesting that scientists could SUCCEED in reversing entropy, and break the universe in the process? I really don't think that is something that could be achieved purely by accident. Or at all.
And you really haven't shown yet that death would be some kind of natural inevitability. Most things in nature do that, yes, but most things in nature do a lot of silly things. And all the things that do die usually do it against their will. Humans have really been striving to live longer for most of their existence. Organizing in groups and cooperating to achieve things and endure threats lone humans could not. Discovering food sources beyond hunting. Medicine. Workplace safety regulations. Overcoming death completely is pretty much the most human thing we could do. Perhaps it is possible to transcend our human limitations and overcome our biological desire to not die, but there's going to be some evolutionary pressure against that happening on a larger scale.
You seriously sound like you have Stockholm syndrome for death or something.
Author
Topic: The Transhuman Ozymandias - Realistically Creepy (Read 11064 times)