X-Message-Number: 22897 From: "webmaster" <> Subject: re: living forever? Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 14:25:41 GMT original message: ------------------------------ >I don't know that I want to live forever, and you don't either. One of the cars in our department parking lot has the following bumper sticker: Militant agnostic: I don't know whether there is a God, and you don't know either! I feel the same about living forever. I cannot fathom how you know that you will want to live forever. The most that you can tell is that you don't like the idea of not having the choice in the near and intermediate future. I am pretty sure that I would not want to die in the next hundred years. I cannot tell if I won't get tired of living after, say, one billion years, or whether I will have some other good reason to prefer to cease to exist by then. So when I talk about cryonics, I simply state what I am sure about, which is that I would like to live at least another hundred years. Rafi Haftka ---------- end original message Forgive me if my logic doesn't fit the 'real world', but I am thinking in terms of a future where today's 'real world' will seem like a joke. I am willing to bet on the fact that someone(at least a transhumanist) would probably not object to living for a long time. It may seem hard to imagine as of now, but we can't know for sure what the future will hold in terms of technology. Civilization has been quite consistent on improving quality of life as time moves forward. I am optimistic that these improvements will not only continue indefinately, but will also improve at an increasingly accelerated rate, resulting in a singularity. I don't know about the billion years, but perhaps we won't need to worry about time someday. If you want to understand a bit more, visit http://www.orionsarm.com. This is a hard science-fiction (not too unrealistic like Star Wars or Star Trek is) site with a vast amount of information, which hold many great ideas for what the future may hold. I recommend that anyone who is interested take some time to look over parts of it. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22897