Digital Immortality In A Dyson Swarm
Do you want to live forever? Just build a Dyson swarm around the Sun made from a giant fleet of solar farms, put a nice, happy super-intelligence that will love people, and gives them an awesome posthumous life as a digital being.
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The one thing all humans have in common is death. It’s inevitable for us and our loved ones. But what if it wasn’t as inevitable? So far this was only fantasy but you can’t stop progress.
Russian transhumanist and life-extensionist Alexey Turchin got famous for his proposals that could give immortality to humans. At least in a digital form. But his ideas come in various different forms from the ability to raise dead through technology, life-extension through cryonics, quantum technologies, or ever super-smart artificial intelligences.
One of Turchin’s ideas is that one day a Dyson swarm will be created around the Sun. A Dyson swarm is an incredible megastructure that will have the Sun’s full energy available to it and this energy will provide it will more computational power than anyone ever imagined. A super-intelligence will live in this megastructure and its power would be close to the powers of a god. Hopefully a benevolent god.
This super-intelligence would gather data about every single moment of every single person's life. Thanks to this data it would create a digital copy of the person living essentially a digital version of the original's life. And at the moment of the original's death, it would be moved into an amazing posthumous life where it could live forever. And that’s just the beginning. The Dyson “god” could create many different scenarios or perhaps even create physical clones based on the digital copies of memories and the original’s DNA.
All these ideas certainly make your head spin. If this would become a thing many people do this would quickly drain all Earth’s energy reserves. That’s why Turchin proposes to us to build the Dyson swarm around the Sun. This swarm could have many different forms such as a mega-fleet of black colored solar farms or perhaps several layers of rings. This would also likely show any other potential intelligent species that we are here.
But there is also something quite dark about the idea of a posthumous life. Even if we forget about the idea that it might be better to be an inconspicuous observer rather than market ourselves to the rest of the Universe the concept itself has a few possible problems. For example, the gathering of all that detailed personal data just screams abuse me. Even the super-AI itself might think humanity isn’t worth keeping around or perhaps even worse that humanity needs to be punished turning eternal heaven into eternal hell.
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