Talk-Polywell.org

Taken over from this tangent..

TallDave wrote:

Stoney3K wrote:Thrust by itself does not mean power.

Why not? You can always turn one into the other.

However, I'm not doing any work on it (the floor doesn't budge), since neither me, nor the floor are moving as a result of the gravity acting on my body.

That's only because you've reached an equilibrium state in which the floor prevents you from moving, your tissues hold each other together, etc. But you can get power from gravity; hydropower generally works on this principle. It's actually the cheapest way to get power.

It will certainly be very interesting to see what the upper bounds of N/W efficiency actually are, assuming the effect is real.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. We'll know the Singularity is here when empiricism doesn't take so damned long. Maybe this willl help.

Betruger wrote:Don't need singularity if we can reach some less extraordinary interim like biomedical aging equilibrium. From then on the waiting is a formality and not a race against time anymore. From that day on the world will have not just a sequence of March's and Woodwards, and Feynmans and Einsteins, contributing for only for a few decades before exiting stage left for their successors to pick up where they left off, but a cumulative.. ever growing population of people investigating.

This is where the "paradigm paralysis" argument crops up (a few people camping at the top) and .. I think it's not quite accurate. If you have effectively indefinite lifespan, indefinite time ahead to develop anything, then it's not so crushingly urgent for anyone to "have the floor" so to speak. You have instead the luxury of waiting and seeing if their hunch was right and if their work delivers. (Not just as far as research goes, but also socially. What's to be concerned about with town hall meetings if you have everything you need - Mr Fusion + Drexler, etc?)

Unlike now where it's basically a crime to not pursue only the most promising avenues (scientific but also political etc) because it wastes that precious commodity - time. Which is curious in an ironic and almost comical way, given how adverse are people in general to admitting that aging must be cured. Ironic because the driving force behind all the conflicts of the world, at all scales, all come down to that same thing: everyone wanting a piece.

And indefinite lifespan pretty much hands you that on a platter. Provided you have patience. But that virtue ought to come to people much more easily, naturally, once aging is cured.

TallDave wrote:It would certainly help, though there's still the Coefficient of Impatience.

Honestly though, aging is such a horrifyingly complex problem to solve. We've barely made the slightest dent. I think the one may only come with the other.

Betruger wrote:I don't know about singularity and curing aging being interchangeable.. In the specific definition of curing aging beginning on the day we treat as fast as we age.

TallDave wrote:I agree they aren't interchangeable terms. I just look at the problems of SENS and sometimes feel like we're trying to move a mountain with shovels and spoons. I think our tools will need to advance considerably.

That's why things like Polywell and M-E and Rossi fusion are so fascinating, if they work out they could greatly facilitate our progress.

Betruger wrote:SENS might not be the only path.. What if we can regenerate organs on demand? Whether in vats or by finding how to "turn it on" like it is for simpler animals.

It's pretty disingenuous to cheer for only pet fave paths to post scarcity and singularity and whatnot, but any way I look at it, curing aging is mandatory. Whereas the singularity can wait, if we have aging cured.

I personally don't disbelieve, but also don't believe at all in "uploading" and so on, so that's probably why the singularity's not so exciting here and now, to me. I'll believe that one when I see it...

IMHO curing aging buys us all the time we want. The sky's the limit as soon as we have that. Everything else adds up to a horn of plenty that we'd still have only limited lifespan to enjoy the fruits of.

GeeGee wrote:I think if we are going to cure aging, we need to take the idea of colonizing space more seriously. If people think resources are being strained now, imagine what it would be like if almost everyone had an indefinite lifespan.

This is where the M-E would help, assuming it works as advertised.

I personally don't disbelieve, but also don't believe at all in "uploading" and so on, so that's probably why the singularity's not so exciting here and now, to me. I'll believe that one when I see it...

I agree. It's perhaps one of the biggest hopes of transhumanists. I dearly hope it comes to fruition in my lifetime, but as far as I'm concerned, the only way you can upload a human mind into an artificial substrate without destroying the original consciousness is by replacing every brain cell gradually. This can only be accomplished by Drexlerian-like nanotech, and that seems to be several decades off at best (if possible at all).

Is the resource picture really that hopeless?

Right now we're spending very little on space access and transport. But, unless the cure for aging happens overnight, without (e.g.) a decade or two of precursor research heralding in plain sight of the whole world the imminence of everything it entails, there should be enough time for at least a crash program to reform legislation to accommodate gradually ageless population and off-planet colonization.

What if today NASA and space industry and all supporting concerns had ten times their budget and a new "mission" - to work out colonization infrastructure in time to accommodate all that extra population? And would it really only be ten times more?

Because you would probably have reason enough to shrink a lot of the current social programs.. If people have basically eternity to educate and work themselves to wealthy-enough life, and if you don't have the current burden of old people who don't work (too frail) and require assistance, for a net negative $$$ contribution to society, then there ought to be a lot lighter budget (if any) for those things.
Instead of money pits, old people would keep on contributing - ceteris paribus

Parallel to all that.. You have what's IMHO as fundamental a shift in culture and state of mind in people the world over, as there was from the influence of Antique Greece's great thinkers. The consequences of having an indefinite lifespan in the near future, where technology is probably within just a few centuries of post-scarcity, which is just one or two old-school lifetimes away - ie not long at all, are just revolutionary.

It dwarfs Civil Rights and easily tops Enlightenment. Even if it will at first be felt to only compare with these historical developments. Indefinite lifespan means the stars are ours and provided there's no cataclysm to match the scale of our expansion into the immediate neighbourhood, the stars are ours at the mere cost of patience and what Man was made for - work.

The developed world has already reached a level of technology where, absent social and political disincentives to production, acute scarcity is an anomaly.

I do not see mineral resources issues on this planet.
We have to consider that till now we just scratched the surface of the earth to extract resources.
As we start to move to ocean mining and deep crust mining we will find plenty of resources to collect.

Same goes for oil and gas as deep field research is starting just now.

I strongly believe that moving out of this rock should be done mainly to preserve our specie and technology in case of planetary disaster.

The thing is though, would those new resources be enough for an ageless population? Given no-aging, moving off the planet is inevitable, very quickly. Or at least.. Until we get to a point of nanotechnological-like recycling efficiency.

IMO we can't really call it post-scarcity till you can not have a job. That's as concise a threshold as I can think of in real world terms.

That's one of the points that is making me wonder. With an ageless option in front of us, will we retain the urge of exploration or will we loose it?

And same issue goes for reproduction. We already know that an increase in span life and economic welfare is proportional to a decrease of birth rate.
Could a near infinite life bring the birth rate to near zero?

Give us agelessness and people like me will, right now, this instant, get to work on getting off the planet and doing the craziest SciFi stuff possible. Because all of that's doable with enough time.

And that's the externally explicit achievements.. Without aging it means you can go totally nuts with learning. Probably anyone can literally make themselves into polymaths. The possibilities are just staggering. The dimensions involved just flatten what's considered large in space and time today like cheap pop-up books. And then you have all of these things adding up together. Just being able to indefinitely earn a living ought to have a huge positive effect on world economy, and that's without adding the effects of cumulative wisdom and knowledge.

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Tiny birth rate is probably what it'd tend towards for lots of people. I mean, just myself, as an enthusiastic and fairly impulsive but otherwise average guy, I'd almost certainly only have kids many decades later than in an old school life. Both from a financial and maturity POV.

Overall you'd still have the dread of accidental death. And with effectively eternal life at stake, maybe that would be the new inhibitor keeping people from going too crazy with exploration and whatnot.

Personally I'd tend towards trail blazing. Right now the odds are that I'll never even see low earth orbit. The day aging is cured, I have suddenly got the odds to see LEO, the solar system, and with some luck the stars. I'm not gonna wait around for what's still unavoidable given enough time.

Betruger wrote:Give us agelessness and people like me will, right now, this instant, get to work on getting off the planet and doing the craziest SciFi stuff possible.

If that will ever happen, you can count me in.
Seeing humanity leaving earth is really one of the few things that could make me die with a smile on the face.

Agelessness and singularity are both acceptable to me, but not aging is preferable - I would rather remain human and take all the time I need to learn more stuff than end up as part of some collective mind in a machine.

I think we've discussed a related question on this forum before, though: assuming you can prevent the tissues from aging, is there still a finite limit on the amount of information that can be stored in the human mind? Will we encounter some new neural disorder - some sort of dementia when people reach a certain point of learning - say after several phds in different subjects after 3 or 4 centuries? Will the mind basically get "filled" and go catatonic? Or will it simply bump out older information, meaning that you completely lose all your memories from a few centuries ago?

I don't think that we understand the formation of memory pathways quite well enough to be certain if there's a hard limit and, if so, what happens when you reach it.

If there is a limit, you might be forced to eventually choose between "uploading" or death. At least as an uploaded consciousness, you can still explore - as a sentient spaceship, for instance (as has been discussed on this forum before).

While daydreaming I have occasionally considered how many phds I would probably do if I had unlimited lifespan: subjects in history, political science, economics, classical relativity, quantum physics, and historical linguistics would be at the top of my list.

I reckon 3-4 centuries would be enough time to figure it out. Worst case scenario, we hit a limit around then. 350 years is not bad

On bumping out information.. If you consider how many average people do it, it might not be too problematic: you retain only the essentials and fill in the rest as you go. And.. There's always computers to help out with those kind of minutiae, as we use them already.

Once we do have popular acceptance of major new conventions like curing aging and synthetic neuroprosthesies, even with e.g. 50% of the population accepting it should make for mountains of R&D funding. In such circumstances, 3-4 centuries of progress should be very substantial.

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My interest would immediately be joining the efforts to establish basic manufacturing and other industrial bases out there. Put that chicken/egg problem to bed once and for all.

I agree that a 350 year lifespan would be ok - I'd prefer indefinite, but you could accomplish a lot in 350 years. 80-90 years is just too short...

Also, I suspect that birth rates would continue to trend lower with longer lifespans. Also, even with "immortality" from the point of view of aging and the ability to cure all cancers, etc., there would still be a low-level death rate from accidents where people get too mangled/burned/poisoned etc. to be put back together, murders, and suicides. So over the short to medium term of a century or two, you might have near population equilibrium. However, even if you have an average of only one child per couple every two or three centuries, you start to run into major overpopulation when you get up around 1000 years. You should have time to develop your colonization tech, but if you sit around and are lazy for several centuries, then you will hit an overpopulation wall.

If we find a hard limit somewhere around 350 years (maybe 200, maybe 500, who knows?), and people end up having a child on average once every 100-150 years, you'd probably have a fairly stable population.

Only problem I foresee with being essentially ageless is that the people on top will stay on top and there will be a much greater class divide, especially if access to the agelessness is controllable. Human's are flawed and inherently selfish, we tend to always seek what's best for ourselves and those closest to us, not necessarily in that order. Suddenly becoming ageless wont' change that. Instead of having 30~40 years to build and enjoy their empires, people would have hundreds of years to do the same.

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I think death keeps us in check. No matter how bad / evil someone is they will ultimately die and the world will no longer have to deal with them. Kim Il Sung is a prime example as is Kim Jung Il.

I can't picture it.

How would age therapies not be brought to most people by sheer democratic pressure?

How would people remain at the top anymore than they do now in legislated positions, and if they did why would it be such a big deal? Either they're doing it lawfully or they get removed. If they're doing it lawfully and having some negative influence (e.g. as Wall Street mismanagement nowadays), agelessness means people can boycott them and/or start their own thing. The worst case scenario is war, and that tallies up to no-worse than now.

Those "empires" would have to somehow nullify the decrease in scarcity that technology's progressing to. And without material scarcity, what power do people like Kim Jung Il have?
And they can still be killed. Someone I talked about this with recently said - imagine ageless Hitler! Hehe.. Hitler dug his own grave and promptly died; what's to imagine? A Kim Jung Il in a world that's cured aging would be an antique.

I don't see how having hundreds of years to build your empire is a bad thing, in a world without such power-from-scarcity. The only scarcity that remains when material scarcity's a thing of the past is creative scarcity.

And I don't see how indefinite lifespan in the context of today's and tomorrow's technology amounts to indefinite servitude. In reality, as opposed to in a "ceteris paribus" mind experiment, the rest of the picture is not fixed. Back in the days of Pharaohs, sure, agelessness would be bad news. But today? 50-100 years from now? I can't see it.

You speak purely from a "western" point of view. Look around and notice most countries don't have a democratic way to remove their leaders. That and if you think I was refering to elected officials when I spoke about the top then you need to look around. The "empires" are not physical countries, their companies, wealth and holdings.

And it'll be controlled the exact same way healthcare and everything else is controlled, through price. How much would you pay for another 200+ years of life? How much would your brother, sister, mother, dauther pay? How much would your neighbor pay or your boss? How much would the richest people in the world, the ones who sit at home and pay off politicians to get favorable legislation passed pay?

Supply and Demand says the value of something is based on what people would pay for it, something like your life is invauable. Thus any technology based anti-age medical treatments will go the those who can pay the most for it. And should we become a socialist country, then it will go to those with the power to acquire it. Human's have proven over and over again since we started recording history that we are selfish creatures and will only share if incentivised to do so.