From: Terry Donaghe (tdonaghe@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Dec 08 1998 - 12:26:03 MST
I recently finished "The Engines of Creation" and I was thinking about
some of the things that Drexler said. He seemed convinced that
humanity won't find a way to circumvent the speed of light. One of
the things that always bugged me about travelling sub-light speeds was
the incredible time it takes to travel between stars.
However, if we find a way to indefinitely extend our lifespans this
means we could live a really, really long time. Further, if we find a
way to make our bodies much less fragile (through uploading or just
reengineering our bodies with nano), then we could potentially live
for millions of years.
I'm wondering if a human were to have lived a few hundred thousand
years, how much of a pain would it be to travel between the stars at
sub-light speeds. Would 5 or 10 years or even a thousand even be a
significant amount of time for a being who has lived many many times
that?
In other words, 500,000 years from now when I decide to travel to Star
X which is 1500 light years away, taking me, let's say 3000 years to
get to (conservatively of course), will I bother getting bored? 3000
years is .06% of 500,000 years. I'm about 30 years old now and .06%
of my life span is .18 years or a little more than two months -
assuming my math is right - is it?
My question is, would 3,000 years feel like just a couple of months to
a being more than a half-million years old? Is there any way to know?
I get the feeling that as our lifespans begin to get longer and longer
we, as a species, will become more patient and less impulsive. A
normal human observer looking at a community of long-lived posthumans
might even think they were immobile statues.
I dunno.
Any ideas, thoughts? Is this old territory?
Terry
==
----------------------
Terry Donaghe: terry@donaghe.com
Individual, Anarcho-Capitalist, Environmentalist, Transhumanist, Mensan
The Millennium Bookshelf: <http://www.donaghe.com/mbookshelf.htm>
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