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
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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. 

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