With transhumanist technology, what is the probability that any human alive today will live forever, and not just thousands, or millions of years? I assume an extremely small, but non-zero, amount.
If you mean literally forever, I think the odds aren’t good. Admittedly, physics is somewhat in flux, but there doesn’t seem to be any guarantee that there will be a universe which which has continuity with ours trillions of years from now, though millions shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Also, I’m not sure what survival means for the very long haul. You might have a consciousness which has continuity with yours millions of years later, but I suspect there would be so much change that your current self and your far future self would have little or nothing in common.
If you mean ‘forever’ literally… well, the amount of energy inside our cosmological horizon is finite, and is becoming increasingly unreachable. If you stipulate that there’s some means for humans to reach outside of our light-cone, then you have to confront with the possibility of time-travel (as far as we know). The conclusion is that ‘forever’ is either unreachable or loses its meaning once you consider sufficiently advanced tech.
With transhumanist technology, what is the probability that any human alive today will live forever, and not just thousands, or millions of years? I assume an extremely small, but non-zero, amount.
If you mean literally forever, I think the odds aren’t good. Admittedly, physics is somewhat in flux, but there doesn’t seem to be any guarantee that there will be a universe which which has continuity with ours trillions of years from now, though millions shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Also, I’m not sure what survival means for the very long haul. You might have a consciousness which has continuity with yours millions of years later, but I suspect there would be so much change that your current self and your far future self would have little or nothing in common.
If you mean ‘forever’ literally… well, the amount of energy inside our cosmological horizon is finite, and is becoming increasingly unreachable.
If you stipulate that there’s some means for humans to reach outside of our light-cone, then you have to confront with the possibility of time-travel (as far as we know).
The conclusion is that ‘forever’ is either unreachable or loses its meaning once you consider sufficiently advanced tech.