One of the great goals of transhumanism is to achieve immortality through science, and indeed some futurists like Raymond Kurzweil and Ian Person think we are close, citing advances like nanotechnology and mind scanning by artificial intelligence as being close to granting us this by the middle of this century. As an arch-anarchist I support overcoming any obstacle to the will of the individual and that includes death(1). But even with the predictions of Mr. Kurzweil(2) and Mr. person(3) we would not be totally free from death, even with the emergence of technology to transfer our minds to synthetic bodies in the event of death as person discusses we would still have to deal with existential risk scenarios. for example an asteroid or comet impact event, a supervolcanic eruption, a natural pandemic, a lethal gamma-ray burst, a geomagnetic storm from a coronal mass ejection destroying electronic equipment, long-term natural climate change, hostile extraterrestrial life or the Sun turning into a red giant star and engulfing the Earth billions of years in the future.
Logically, being an anarchist, I do not advocate statist solutions to any of these problems, but rather that individuals solve them through free association.Now if we really want to be immortal and not live “only” billions or trillions of years, we have to look at long-term scenarios, really long term.Most scientists believe that the Universe will end in some way in the very, very distant future. Various hypotheses have been put forward, from proton decay to a false vacuum, but currently the most widely accepted theory is the heat death of the Universe. Basically, the tyrannical law of entropy (a measure of how disordered a system is) will reach a maximum, meaning that all the energy in the Universe will be unavailable for work. There will be no more transmission or conversion of energy or reactions of any kind. Stars will burn out, everything will freeze and go dark, and eventually all matter and energy will be sucked into Black Holes, which will eventually evaporate.Of course as discussed in arch-anarchy of “A” the so-called natural laws are not absolute and indeed some scientists such as Max Planck have expressed skepticism. (4)
Of course, this does not mean that the Universe will not have a natural end, but that we can discover that the natural end of the universe will occur through another event still unknown to science.but my point is that even with the advances in medicine and cybernetics predicted by our futurists, we will not actually achieve immortality, only hyper-longevity, as we would still have to deal with existential risk, if not in the near future or in the distant future.If we want to achieve true immortality our best path is to embrace arch-anarchy and overcome all restrictions of the laws of nature and become post-human gods with total mastery of the laws of reality. It may seem like an impossible path, but as “A” made clear in his article “arch-anarchy” the laws of nature are only observable constants and not absolute laws.
Notes
1.Arch-anarchy by A, published by extropy magazine in 1990 , edition #5. (I republished it here in a previous post).
2.Kurzweil,Ray(2015) in noema magazine.published by KATHLEEN MILES.
3.pearson, ian(2018) in my modern met. Published by Jessica Stewart.
Arch-anarchism and immortality
One of the great goals of transhumanism is to achieve immortality through science, and indeed some futurists like Raymond Kurzweil and Ian Person think we are close, citing advances like nanotechnology and mind scanning by artificial intelligence as being close to granting us this by the middle of this century. As an arch-anarchist I support overcoming any obstacle to the will of the individual and that includes death(1). But even with the predictions of Mr. Kurzweil(2) and Mr. person(3) we would not be totally free from death, even with the emergence of technology to transfer our minds to synthetic bodies in the event of death as person discusses we would still have to deal with existential risk scenarios. for example an asteroid or comet impact event, a supervolcanic eruption, a natural pandemic, a lethal gamma-ray burst, a geomagnetic storm from a coronal mass ejection destroying electronic equipment, long-term natural climate change, hostile extraterrestrial life or the Sun turning into a red giant star and engulfing the Earth billions of years in the future.
Logically, being an anarchist, I do not advocate statist solutions to any of these problems, but rather that individuals solve them through free association.Now if we really want to be immortal and not live “only” billions or trillions of years, we have to look at long-term scenarios, really long term.Most scientists believe that the Universe will end in some way in the very, very distant future. Various hypotheses have been put forward, from proton decay to a false vacuum, but currently the most widely accepted theory is the heat death of the Universe. Basically, the tyrannical law of entropy (a measure of how disordered a system is) will reach a maximum, meaning that all the energy in the Universe will be unavailable for work. There will be no more transmission or conversion of energy or reactions of any kind. Stars will burn out, everything will freeze and go dark, and eventually all matter and energy will be sucked into Black Holes, which will eventually evaporate.Of course as discussed in arch-anarchy of “A” the so-called natural laws are not absolute and indeed some scientists such as Max Planck have expressed skepticism. (4)
Of course, this does not mean that the Universe will not have a natural end, but that we can discover that the natural end of the universe will occur through another event still unknown to science.but my point is that even with the advances in medicine and cybernetics predicted by our futurists, we will not actually achieve immortality, only hyper-longevity, as we would still have to deal with existential risk, if not in the near future or in the distant future.If we want to achieve true immortality our best path is to embrace arch-anarchy and overcome all restrictions of the laws of nature and become post-human gods with total mastery of the laws of reality. It may seem like an impossible path, but as “A” made clear in his article “arch-anarchy” the laws of nature are only observable constants and not absolute laws.
Notes
1.Arch-anarchy by A, published by extropy magazine in 1990 , edition #5. (I republished it here in a previous post).
2.Kurzweil,Ray(2015) in noema magazine.published by KATHLEEN MILES.
3.pearson, ian(2018) in my modern met. Published by Jessica Stewart.
4.Planck, Max (1903). Treatise on Thermodynamics.