Would Techno-Utopia be Hell on Earth?
August 12 2008 / by John Heylin
Category: Other Year: General Rating: 5
An editorial on the human condition.
“I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one.” -The Joker, The Dark Knight
Imagine a world where you are free from death, danger, and poverty. You are able to download your entire mind into any computerized device on the planet (or planets) and live forever. You can talk with the greatest minds of the last million years about everything from baseball to lunar cycles. An android body allows you to visit Yosemite where it’s been painstakingly put back into near-perfect shape with the help of nano-bots and archived photos. You cannot die and the universe is your oyster. Wouldn’t you get bored after 
a few million years?
One day I was imagining what Heaven, if it existed, would really be like (in the view that Heaven is a place where people hang out, surrounded by Greek and Roman architecture). You could do anything you choose, even explore the ocean depths or visit other planets. But how many times could you talk with Einstein before even he got boring? The same can be said for Utopia. Without fear of death, things like skydiving, river rafting or sailing the open ocean don’t hold the same fear. You could skydive without a parachute and it wouldn’t matter, you’ll still be fine.
Now imagine living forever. You’ve seen millions of solar eclipses. Heck, you’ve even seen eclipses in other galaxies with binary suns. You’ve visited so many different worlds that they all start to look the same. In fact, the only interesting thing to do is to meet lifeforms that have a short life-span. There are constantly new creatures, they feel the thrill of jumping off a high dive, and for some reason find their existence just fine and want nothing to do with immortality.
There’s a reason books, TV shows and movies depict immortal beings as uninterested, bored and frequently suicidal. Living forever would be Hell. The great thing about being human is the fear of dying and of course actually dying. We live every day like it’s our last whether we know it or not. What would happen to us if you took away the very thing that makes us human?
The lesson here is this: We keep clamoring for a better life for ourselves and those around us. We want to live longer and have the ability to experience things that we haven’t yet been able. We want to walk on the moon, we want to see active volcanoes, and we want to visit other worlds. But I don’t think anyone has really thought about living forever seriously. We might clamor for immortality, but I don’t think we can imagine what that means. It means in order to die you’d have to have someone erase you, wipe your memory banks and remove you from existence.
Granted, you could willingly go through a brain-washing every thousand years or so thereby making everything new to you, but what kind of Utopia is that?
Image: mollyali (Flickr,CC-Attribution)
Comment Thread (5 Responses)
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Living forever is actually harder than it might sound, for a couple reasons I can think of:
1. The observable universe seems to have a finite life span. Eventually we’ll reach heat death and we’ll have to be pretty clever to be still living at that point. Of course, maybe we could access and project into parts of the universe that are not yet observable (some might call it other “universes” in the “multiverse” but I dislike the terminology).
2. Mathematically, to have a non-vanishing probability of living forever, you must increasingly diminish the probability that you will be killed in specified future intervals of fixed length. I.e. if P(M, N) is the probability of death between times M and N, then for all probabilities p>0, no matter how small, we must find a way to make P(M, M+1) < p for all sufficiently large M. In other words, we must take increasingly greater precautions over time to hedge against our own death. It seems to me this process would reach a limit, thereby making it impossible to have a nonzero probability of living forever.
Posted by: gremlinn August 13, 2008
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I suppose death-defying activities would become frighteningly boring but I’m not sure that I agree with the idea that a techno-utopia would be able to eliminate all deaths. Unexpected accidents that kill instantly would still exist, even if it’s a small and almost impossible act. Such as skydiving without a parachute. I’m not sure if even technology could save you from that. And for myself, I’m not a death-defying person. I enjoy mundane activities. I would get bored, but I’m sure that with our increased brain capacities, we would find something else to amuse ourselves.
Posted by: fantasywriter August 13, 2008
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Maybe the fact that you could live in a robotic body and, in case of malfunction or a skydiving accident, you could just reboot your old identity. Living forever might indeed be possible (maybe until the Sun explodes in 10 billion years) but I don’t know if I want any part in it.
Posted by: martymcfly August 13, 2008
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I think this is one of your best posts, Dick. Sometimes when I think about all the possibility of the singularity and the “magical future,” I think what’s the point of all of it if everything I have ever known and loved changes so dramatically, I can’t even recognize it. If infinite knowledge makes everything I hold dear: love, conversation, learning, nature seem small and obsolete, do I want it? I think not.
Posted by: Mielle Sullivan August 14, 2008
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Death is always going to be a scary subject just based on the sheer idea that it’s death. And while the idea of living forever may be a great idea, I have the feeling that it could get boring really fast. Unless life in the future is anything like futurama, I may want to live forever in that case.
Posted by: christinep October 20, 2008
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