[extropy-chat] Support your local transhumanist artist I

[Dan Clemmensen]

Damien Broderick wrote:

> At 11:46 AM 1/26/2005 -0800, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
>> I'd like to see a story that did the reverse: allowed a
>> person to travel forward in time, but only within their future real
>> natural life span, such that they can jump to halfway to their natural
>> death, then half again, etc. The story would follow this several jumps,
>> with views of society that demonstrate the power of exponential change
>> in technology
>
>
> Yes, I've been thinking along those lines myself. It's the natural 
> Vingean story-telling metric.
>
The problem with this is how do you construct a plausible universe with 
this constraint? The
concept of "natural death" seems to be very artificial, unless you are 
using predestination. If
exponential knowledge acceleration is real, then at some point in the 
(debatably near) future,
actuarial life expectancy will begin to increase more rapidly than one 
year per year. At that
point "natural" life expectancy goes to infinity.