On 8/7/19, John Newman <jnn@synfin.org> wrote:>
You think we'll be able to map the relevant structure of a human brain and convert and run it on a different substrate (e.g. a computer) BEFORE or AFTER we have biological solutions that let us live forever
Ignoring law, ethics, religion, risk, government, etc... Depends on the extent of what needs modeled, tooled, and solved, and in what domains, to reach one or the other first. Biological Forever... 1.1) Seems perhaps a matter of hacking in a patch to general aging symptom, or reengineering the root cause. It seems doable, especially on massively parallelizable early stage test platform such as at sperm meets egg... twiddling bits testing theories until something works. Together, 5 male and 5 female researchers could privately finance and quietly do it in a communal workspace if need be. 1.2) Rewiring any animal that has already hatched may be a harder task... viral, prion, etc. However the tooling and knowledge in 1.1 is likely to have general applicability. Digital Forever... 1.0) Even if you had a brain computer (whether digital or analog), which few are even suggesting any ideas yet how to do (even with digital being easy to test on emulator, FPGA, ASIC) 2.0) You need to upload the brain consciousness and memory to it, which no one has any idea yet how to do, certainly not while alive in nondestructive fashion. Answer: AFTER currently seems much more likely, and much sooner.
copies ... solar system heat death [external] disease (where not an as yet undiscovered cause of aging) threats accident (irrecoverable physical splattering)
These all the same... off topic external to the problem of solving aging itself. And today other than disease, all are negligible causes of death before aging. At least until you get to 1000+ year spans, wherein accident rates start registering as taking their toll.
The Earth is being ravaged
Solving life extension probably doesn't require 8 billion humans from which to draw odds of finding the right talent and odds at doing so. Nor likely does solving anything else.
other shit slows us down. it's all a big race really.
True. Which is why society needs to seriously start picking apart the legacy ignorables above, discarding the bullshit, and proceeding with what isn't. The chance that the bulk of it is some protective feedback circuit breaker built into the genome to prevent suiciding ourselves, as opposed to being utter bullshit FUD impediment, seems low.
It makes for good sci-fi.
Only if you sit on your ass doing nothing about it. Instead of reading it, ignore shit and try creating and living it.