From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 21 2002 - 12:52:47 MST
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> Funny you should mention that.... I've been thinking about the "long view"
> of my life. It very well could happen that immortality never becomes
> mainstream. Even if it does, it could take a very long time. Or even if it
> comes quickly, we will be the founders or the originators with everyone else
> being some sort of late-comers. A small group of us will be all that
> remains of the original transhuman generation. We will be the only
> survivors after an entire generation is wiped out or saved. In any case, we
> will be an odd minority with a different history and background than anyone
> else.
>
> It is almost as if we are aliens here, just passing through. Or we are
> immortals for whom a brief flash of a single generation seems less
> important. While the rest of the generations come and go, we may be the
> only long-term relationships we have in the future. Or if a whole
> generation becomes immortal, we will be the oldest or the first of that
> generation. We may be more advanced than the rest of the world, or left
> behind as a future evolves off in an unexpected direction.
Harvey, you have a *very* strange way of looking at the world -- speaking
numerically.
Right now, there are six billion people alive in the world. Even if the
Singularity is delayed until 2025, I doubt there will be more than seven
or eight billion people alive at the time. That's less than one
pre-Singularity human for each star in the Milky Way. In a billion years
there will *still* be, at most, six billion entities who were uniquely
alive before the Singularity. When the Afterglow of the Big Bang is over
and matter has stopped gathering in clumps and burning by fusion, there
will still be only six billion of us.
Do you really need to postulate that we are a small group among that six
billion?
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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