alt Hacker NewsI remember a quote from Bruce Sterling in Wired some years ago:
"Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love."
The sufficiently distant future is a place where you (and they) won't be. Time capsules can be seen as a cry into this abyss.
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I'm disheartened that the immediate first response to you is basically "no, humans will be immortal soon enough."
Of course, nothing is immortal. All matter in the universe will eventually be subsumed into supermassive black holes, then spend the next thousands of quadrillions of years slowly evaporating into nothingness via Hawking radiation. I would very much like for my life to be longer than it is, to possibly witness the entire arc of all human civilization, but I sure as shit don't want to experience eternity as undifferentiated non-baryonic matter causally disconnected from all other matter. Death may come very far into the future for certain types of life that don't yet exist, or certain types of information sinks that can act but would not have been considered "life" by existing biological definitions, but it will still come, and if you live enough, it will be welcome.
Personally, I take a lot of comfort in this. Not a single one of us, not Charlemagne, not Khan, not Elon Musk, matter any more than an amoeba in the truly grand scheme of the cosmos. Even a hypothetical type III civilization is just as much dust as the Mayans in the long run. Conversely, within our own little sphere of influence, we all matter as much as a god.
I get why life has this ambition. I feel it, too. It's the reason we exist in the first place. But we're able to recognize it for what it is, the illusion of an imperative handed down by semi-random behaviors selected for no better reason than they made it more likely for their associated genes to proliferate. There is no actual imperative. That frees you to live within the confines of a tractable life of tractable ambitions. Be the absolute best person you can be to a small group of sentient creatures you happened to exist alongside for somewhere between a few decades to a century. Don't set the planet on fire and neglect your own family in an attempt to become a comic book hero.
That's a temporary state. Eventually humans won't die. Consciousness will be uploaded, memories preserved.
We aren't that far away from being able to decode thoughts, memories, and the visual cortex from brains. That's going to leap forward quickly.
Maybe the future will reverse the light cone and revisit everyone and everything that has ever lived. Maybe we're in their simulation.
Maybe the reason we don't see alien AI swarms is because they don't travel in spatial dimensions.
All sci-fi conjecture and fantasy, but brain scanning will get good.
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Edit because HN rate limits me:
> And then in 10^33 years you'll fight viciously for the last pockets of negentropy.
Our physicists claim to have models of how time began and will end. They don't concretely know. With the new observatories, new models are being suggested and old ones discarded. Will Lamda CDM hold?
We still have infant eyes. So much lies beyond the limits of our detection. And frankly, projections of the end of the universe are doomer-coded because society is looking for it to be that way.
Yet we remember the name and works of Homer, almost 3000 years old.