[ExI] We need fresh ideas!

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Wed Aug 8 10:39:38 UTC 2012


On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 2:12 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote:
<snip>
> If I live to be old, I've paid my dues in lfe and in some sense
> "deserve" to see the future.  I might have some wisdom to offer, but
> only if I manage to stay aware of the limited domain of my life and
> the environment in which it was lived.  I doubt I'd have much wisdom
> to offer in my final years if I were transported to another part of
> the country/world/etc.  So imagine I'm just an old man with nothing
> useful to offer.  I doubt many people want to feel this kind of
> useless.  How do you convince me that 100 years of exponential
> acceleration in the rate of change in tech (and culture, etc) that my
> post-legal-death reanimated self has anything at all to offer the
> future?  I can't believe there's much need for "living" fossils or
> museum pieces and I also doubt that the future needs no-names from the
> past to make into celebrities.  If you can't convince me, who is
> sympathetic to this cause, how can you convince the so-called average
> prole?
>

Well, there is talk about recreating dinos from DNA. It might be fun
for posthumans to poke a reanimated Mike aborigine and be politely
interested in his weird beliefs and behaviour. You could probably
become a soap star on the lines of 'The Neanderthal in my house' and
do lots of comic things to amuse the public.  ;)

Perhaps research into human suspended animation or hibernation might
be more useful. Some work has already been done and it could be useful
for long space journeys or for medical reasons.
I can see that being more acceptable to the general public than
'reviving the dead'. initially it might only be for shorter periods,
maybe up to a year, for safety reasons. And you would probably want to
wake up regularly, to check that the bankers hadn't stolen your
finances while you were asleep.

That would be an acceptable method of time-travel for many people.

BillK



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