John Varley plays with this a lot in his fiction, where the technology to take snapshots of human brains and reload them into force-aged cloned bodies is ubiquitous, although hardware adequate to actually run the snapshots is not available. On the one hand, people behave as though they are effectively immortal… if they die, all they lose is the experiences since the last snapshot.
On the other hand, when they think about it, his characters agree that if they die, they die, and the existence of a snapshot-clone-whatever doesn’t change that fact in the least bit. (Though many of them don’t care.)
I find that a pretty convincing version of how humans will react to that technology. Consistency is not our great psychological strength.
Peter F. Hamilton has similar technology in his Commonwealth novels. It’s used in the worst-case scenario when someone’s body is destroyed, because the technology to rejuvenate human bodies to a youthful state is the main form of immortality.
Actually, Varley’s world has that too, though it’s a near-future enough setting that it hasn’t really sunk in.
That is, nobody has died of old age except voluntarily in the last few decades, but everyone is still used to thinking of themselves as living a few score years.
The narrator in Steel Beach has just turned 100, and this is a recurring theme… she/he/it doesn’t feel old, and in fact isn’t old by any normal understanding of the word, but “turning 100” nevertheless has cultural associations with being old.
John Varley plays with this a lot in his fiction, where the technology to take snapshots of human brains and reload them into force-aged cloned bodies is ubiquitous, although hardware adequate to actually run the snapshots is not available. On the one hand, people behave as though they are effectively immortal… if they die, all they lose is the experiences since the last snapshot.
On the other hand, when they think about it, his characters agree that if they die, they die, and the existence of a snapshot-clone-whatever doesn’t change that fact in the least bit. (Though many of them don’t care.)
I find that a pretty convincing version of how humans will react to that technology. Consistency is not our great psychological strength.
Peter F. Hamilton has similar technology in his Commonwealth novels. It’s used in the worst-case scenario when someone’s body is destroyed, because the technology to rejuvenate human bodies to a youthful state is the main form of immortality.
(nods)
Actually, Varley’s world has that too, though it’s a near-future enough setting that it hasn’t really sunk in.
That is, nobody has died of old age except voluntarily in the last few decades, but everyone is still used to thinking of themselves as living a few score years.
The narrator in Steel Beach has just turned 100, and this is a recurring theme… she/he/it doesn’t feel old, and in fact isn’t old by any normal understanding of the word, but “turning 100” nevertheless has cultural associations with being old.