What to do the day after tomorrow? Let's enter the realm of science fiction, and explore further out, building on our assumptions. Science fiction has been a magnificent tool for exploring the border territories between the plausible and the impossible. It has also become in the decades an unexpected blueprint as scientists and engineers inspired by the stories that they read worked to turn into reality the objects that appeared fantastic previously. It is not easy for a non-scientist to distinguish between a very hard engineering problem and the violation of a fundamental principle. For example, there is no reason to believe that it will be forever impossible to build a space elevator that will be capable of ferrying to geosynchronous orbit freight and people at a cost that will be close to zero, after its admittedly enormous construction costs, even if the details of materials, science, and construction are beyond what we know today. Or that it is going to be possible to build interstellar spaceships, even if the engineering problems of energy density for propulsion and life support systems or psychology of long distance travel (decades or generations even) in small closed spaces are still unknown and largely unexplored. It is very different, though, to tackle other ideas, chiefly faster-than-light travel, or time travel backwards in time. (The two are actually related: a faster-than-light traveler would be able to also travel backwards in time. And only that direction matters, since we are actually traveling forward in time one minute per minute, and we are also able to speed this up through the relativistic compression of time, which we are using every day in high energy accelerators to better study the features of subatomic particles.) A science fiction writer has no issue incorporating this into their stories, but there are deep reasons why, if this became possible, we would have to restart all our theories about the world from scratch. As a comparison, while they were revolutionary, Einstein's theories of relativity are not in contradiction and did not disprove Newton's theory of gravitation, which still perfectly applies at slow speeds compared to that of light, and in weak gravitational fields like those we experience on Earth. The various themes and examples that are explored in this section should fall in the first category, or, according to necessary uncertainty, saddle between possible and impossible. As usual, it is completely up to us to make them real, through our curiosity, creativity, and desire.
Compared to only a hundred years ago, the life expectancy at birth in high income countries has more than doubled, thanks to science. Antibiotics and vaccinations, chiefly, are responsible for this staggering result, as well as better nutrition, wider knowledge, and better overall health practices. There are many who are not only asking what are the limits of human lifespan given the lack of any negative external influence, but what are the possibilities to intervene to slow down, reverse, and eliminate the degenerative processes that lead to decay and death. In societies that promote healthy lifestyles, given that obesity and diabetes are negatively affecting the statistics of those that don't, life expectancy is still increasing at about 1-2 months per year, and this value itself is increasing too, in one of the most astonishing applications of the law of accelerating returns. When the increase in life expectancy is going to exceed 12 months per year, statistically speaking people will stop dying. Without getting into details on how this could be achieved, we can start looking into the consequences of a society that includes this radically new feature: the death of death. Contrary to other phenomena that can burst onto the scene with their full power and impact very rapidly, we have the luxury of time on our side in this issue. Even if we were able to eliminate all causes of death today, we won't have 200-year-old people around next year. Every year everybody will be exactly one year older, not more, not less. And this should enable us to design and implement the appropriate policies and adapt to the changes progressively. It is also important to note that what we are referring here is definitely an extended health-span, and not the prolonged decrepitude and dependency that often characterizes the last decades of the lives of the very old today. Even more than other similar arguments (why go to space when there is still so much suffering on Earth?), radical life extension elicits a lot of negative reactions. The misplaced argument that there should not be resources allocated to it, that a young or middle aged person's suffering is worse than that of an old person's. Apart from dogmatic positions that assume that there is a natural human lifespan that should not be tinkered with-is it 25 years that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had, or 35 years that up until modern medicine was the norm, and should this include all the children who died before reaching adulthood-the opportunity is there to strongly tackle remaining diseases, chiefly runaway programming disasters in our body's regulating mechanisms we call cancers, and the cardiovascular degeneration brought on by our lifestyles. The benefit of longer lives will vastly overcome any presumed downside. Yes, pension systems will be even more unsustainable than they already are, as they were designed to pay out just a few years before people would stop receiving benefits as they'd die soon enough. Hopefully nobody will advocate neglecting research in order to maintain a system based on people dying as soon as possible. The wisdom and experience accumulated and the rich long lives that can be lived will certainly transform society. They are not going to lead to excessive caution or passivity, but certainly the calculus of the opportunity cost of life-years lost will positively impact conflict management.
Death has been diagnosed through the cessation of breathing for centuries. In the last decades this has proven not to be enough, and cardiac function, then brain function, have been brought into the picture. Various kinds of coma and vegetative states have proven to be reversible, with physiotherapy and cognitive therapy helping to adapt around the degenerative muscular and neurological damage caused by them. A recent practice of using low temperatures to slow the metabolic functions of the body have been put to amazing use in 2015 when a teenage boy in Italy drowned and was dead, according to traditional definitions, for 45 minutes, was revived, and through a process that last months, brought back to normal bodily and mental functions (less a leg he lost in the drowning accident). If from a few seconds of lack of heartbeat, death can become so vaguely defined as being beaten back for three quarters of an hour, can we hypothesize prolonging suspended states indefinitely, where metabolic functions are suspended and the body and the mind don't decay? Cryonics is the study and the practice of this, with companies already offering their services to customers who get into the care of their services after being declared legally dead, but before natural cellular decay can destroy them. They do it without recourse to traditional freezing, which, through the formation of ice crystals, irremediably damages the organs, but to vitrification that substitutes the body's fluids with a solution that congeals like glass at low temperatures. Applying all the available treatments and progressive rejuvenation as available, a cryonic suspension policy can be seen as a bridge towards more radical options to be developed in the future. Policy is actually an appropriate term, as there is at least one insurance brokerage offering a package that includes in its payout the coverage of a cryonic service for its policyholders.
We were sitting around the dinner table, my wife, three children and I. Starting from another thread of the conversation, my oldest son confirmed that if happened that he ended up in an irreversible coma, a vegetative state, he wanted to be turned off, the machines disconnected. My youngest daughter chimed in that no, she didn't want to be disconnected, but wanted to be kept on even as a vegetable. I could not refrain from asking: "That's OK. But which vegetable do you want to be?" After thinking a bit she said "An onion, or a carrot", and we went around the table confirming in turn what vegetable eventually we wanted to be if in a coma. The choice of not being revived, of declining extreme and invasive medical procedures that may prolong life a bit but at a very low quality, is a freedom that is spreading now. It is likely to embrace the concept further, generalizing into the right to choosing one's moment to die. The reason for wanting to avoid being powerless and unthinking and only kept alive by machines is altruistic: we want our relatives to be able to move on. If they are there with us indefinitely, they are also as good as dead, locked in a system that is hopeless and useless together with us. (I am not disparaging the efforts that are sometimes fruitful of dedicated relatives that are able to revive those who are not in an irreversible coma. And the medical diagnosis is often not clear-cut, which contributes to making this topic especially complicated and emotionally fraught for those who make the decisions after the fact.) Cryonics, as a consequence, is for an individual to be able to voluntarily contract a service that is relatively simple and cost effective if compared to what a patient in deep coma needs, while unlocking a future for the relatives that is unencumbered by the presence of a person that can't actively participate in it, at least for the time being.
Obviously the best efforts of science, health and medicine can't still stop the proverbial bus. Accidents will still happen, and will interrupt the trajectory of any life sooner or later. In many of these cases that outcome will be such that the cryonic suspension emergency team won't be able to get to the scene in time, or find remains that are not worth preserving. The solution for successful data recovery in the case of computers is a reliable backup procedure, and there are now teams of researchers working on the ways that the human brain, its neurons, synapses, and any other needed structure that gives rise to the mind could be imaged and preserved. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a process that creates a three-dimensional image of the brain, not only recording its geometry but also the firings of the neurons, the activities of the synapses. Its resolution is increasing at an accelerating pace, and is one of the candidate technologies for being able to record and reproduce in a sufficiently detailed manner what happens in the brain to preserve it. Any backup procedure is only as good as the ability to access and use the data after it gets restored. And restoring a human mind would require another human brain into which to restore it, likely to be impractical given the ethical implications, even if there are already steps towards one of the most hair-raising operations that traditional procedures can design: a full head transplant. An alternative is to actually complete the restore step onto a medium that is different from a biological brain, a support that would not only be able to store but also to execute the brain functions giving rise to the experience of the mind. The eventual successful execution of this would definitely respond to both the Turing test and the feasibility of AGIs, as a restored you in silicon, or whatever else the necessary support would be, certainly would profess to be truly thinking and self-aware, as well as possessed of the capacities of general problem solving of humans.
There are many kinds of backups. Those that require the system to be frozen during the process, or others that are continuous while the system is running. And there are also many ways to test the integrity of the data, for example executing a restore and running the system, without a disaster having destroyed the integrity of the original. When you get restored, even if the original is still around and this step is only to test that everything works, it is sure that you'll ask to please be kept around anyways. Living parallel lives, rather than a series of experiences one after another, is an additional variant that will be made possible by the technologies of mind uploading and restoring in different substrates. Of course the various instances of me (the word is likely to acquire a plural "mes"), will diverge per definition, by having different experiences. These individuals will than have the option to merge the experiences of one another into a single tapestry of multifaceted recollections. A ritual will emerge, even if this merging can be done remotely and in a continuous fashion, of a yearly meeting or once in a decade, to accomplish it in a formal setting, where the identities instantiated would be missing only for two reasons: either the then-privileged solitary choice of traditional unrecorded death, or the journey to the stars.
For those who care about humanity, the protestations from others of earthly obligations notwithstanding, space colonization is a must, starting with Mars. Unless we become a multi-planetary species, our future is imperiled by an extinction level event that makes our only home planet uninhabitable. Statistically, for example, a very large meteor strike is to be expected every few tens of millions of years. Similarly, interstellar travel is also a necessity. Much further out, in a few billion years, the Sun is also going to radically change, expanding into a red giant star that is going to swallow all the space from its current volume out to beyond the orbit of Mars. The traditional human form is very well adapted to living on the surface of a planet with atmosphere rich in oxygen, abundant liquid water available, and about 1 g of gravity. Well, not surprisingly, just like Earth. It is at the same time exceptionally maladapted to thriving in other environments, such as one with no atmosphere, no water, temperatures of -200 C° or thereabouts, and no gravity, i.e. space. In the middle, gravity yes, water frozen, atmosphere yes but thin and poisonous... is Mars, the only planet we know of as of today colonized by robots: ours. When possible, and the creativity, dexterity and problem solving ability of biological humans will be available in forms that are better adapted to space, whether we'll still call them robots or they will be practically and legally humans in robotic substrates, the true colonizers of space are not going to be meatbags in tin cans. There is also going to be a rapid process of miniaturization. As long as computational and operational capacities are preserved, in terms of propulsion the smaller an object, the lesser its mass, the easier it is to accelerate. Nanoscale thinking robotic humans smaller than a grain of dust are going to be propelled by the billions by laser beams to speeds that will be close to that of light to spread out in onion skin layers across the universe in spheres that initially centered on the Sun will soon start spreading out from other centers too, intersecting, interfering, like ripples in three dimensional waves in the continuum of space. Imperceptible to any technology less advanced than themselves, these waves are going to proceed and progress, building further instances of trillions and quadrillions of minds to swarm in the galaxy, crossing its perimeter in only a few hundred thousand years, and arriving to Andromeda in little more than two million years. The adventure of knowing the deep cosmos will have started, with billions of other galaxies ahead.
At the start of the mind uploading, merging, and restoring process very early on the questions of compatibility will come up. How far can the divergence of experiences go until a full re-merging won't be possible? Or the reverse, how close two separate individuals must be, in love maybe?, until they can attempt the process of merging their experiences and minds? The partial process is going to be explored and used more and more widely, both among different instances of the same individual and among the groups of friends, lovers, diplomats, and co-workers that feel the need of a close understanding and collaboration. With the digitization of the identity, and the instantiation in further substrates, the question of the origin of one, whether human or AGI, will be quickly moot. Humans in alternative form will immediately take advantage of the new opportunities of introspection and constant upgrading. AGIs will acquire human rights and duties in order to participate and make humans participate in the global civilization as equals. The very concept of individual will blur, to be more usefully defined by the needs of a given challenge that could require the temporary merging of minds and pooling of resources of dozens, thousands, or billions of people. These organizations, we would have called corporations, governments, and societies, are going to be able to negotiate the complex arrangements of inputs and outputs that such a situation will imply. The galaxy faring clouds of lightspeed explorers that are our descendants will live very different lives than we do, and it is going to be hard for them to identify themselves with us. Looking at the limitations in time, space and opportunities of what we could do both as isolated individuals, our unavoidable fate spares the feeble attempts at communication we achieved, and as groups in coordinating our actions, with all the indications of conflict being witness to how bad at this we were, these entities will reflect and consider how astonishing it is we are connected, how unlikely, improbable or maybe even impossible. The deniers of evolution amongst them will ignorantly point to our radical differences to claim that indeed, whatever they will decide to call their community of species and civilization, they are not human, but we know they will be.
Formulated by Nick Bostrom in 2002 the Simulation Argument says that one of the following three statements must be true: 1. We are the first and only advanced technological civilization in the universe 2. When the technology is available, advanced civilizations choose not to simulate universes 3. Our universe is a simulation and we are living in it. The simulation argument can be used as an ontological tool. Do you want to maximize the probability of living in a reality that is not simulated? Try to prove that we are alone in the universe. Do you think that the Keplerian revolution of abandoning the idea of a fundamental reality is a worthy achievement? Try to design an ethical system that allows the responsibility to simulate universes containing advanced intelligence. An interesting question arises from the combination of the "AI getting out of the box" issue described previously and the simulation argument: if a universe is a simulation and contains AGIs, are these going to be successful in convincing the simulators to bootstrap them onto the lower "realer" plain of reality?
Goedel's theorem is a profound mathematical result. Originally a response to a challenge to show mathematics complete, it achieved the opposite, proving that no formal system can be complete, as it will always contain statements that are undecidable, and consistent, as it will always contain statements that are contradicting each other. The philosophical and epistemological implications of this are staggering. Science will never be complete, based on mathematics, and our exploration of the universe will never be complete, being able to observe systems that are built on phenomena that can be described only through a formal language that includes new elements beyond those already used, in order to account for them. Deciding what to do, where to go, and how to think about the world in this sense shapes not only our understanding of it, but gives rise to different languages to describe it, to alternative complementary maps of reality.
Extending Goedel's results in the '80s it was proven that even taking into account the undecidability of certain classes of statements, for any formal system there is a class of statements that are true, but for which there is no finite countable number of steps that form a path from proven ones. And that the number of these unprovable truths vastly exceeds the statements in the other classes of statements accessible from the given formal system. Once again these results reshape our understanding of reality. Not only the choices we make about what language to use give rise to microscopes and telescopes, tools to explore, interpret and understand the world that guide us in different directions. Regardless of the direction, we are only bound to catch a sliver of the reality that is vaster than we can ever encompass at any moment. What are the boundaries of those maps of reality that we can weave with our mathematics and science? How do the tricks of incorporating undecidable statements and extending our formal systems play together with doing the same with a chosen set of unprovable truths? How will science evolve to tackle these realms, huge swaths of reality that we may at one point think are beyond its grasp? What will the world that we design through our continued exploration, this new reality, look like? Speculating about this at this point in time may be fruitless, and it is going to be the task of a human-AGI hybrid civilization to continue the adventure.