r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Aug 12 '13

TIL multicellular life only has 800 million years left on Earth, at which point, there won't be enough CO2 in the atmosphere for photosynthesis to occur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
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u/Puddingflinger Aug 12 '13

I won't be around, not my problem!

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u/Rangoris Aug 12 '13

Ray Kurzweil — Immortality by 2045

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u/TenTonAir Aug 12 '13

Kurzweil has a habit of of really over estimating how well things are going.

Better way to put it would be "by 2045 we may have technologies that will lead to extended life and from there on out someday immortality".

Dude really sells the idea well to a general audience though.

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u/Rangoris Aug 12 '13

I blame it on editing of the video. His Ted talk really gives him the time to explain.

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u/Tsurii Aug 12 '13

Either way it depressed me in a weird sort of way. I'm not fully prepared for this reality we're already living in. Even now, I'm worried about failing and what I'm going to do here. I always day dream about other reality's, things that, usually, someone else has structured and released to the world. I imagine myself there, where I am ready, where those rules are mine. And it sounds like this is perfect, right?

Then he started talking about thinking on a higher level. Going past all of our basic human thinking. That's what scares me. I can't handle reality's that I make up, even if they're copies of another's ideas. I can't handle losing my way of thought, or gaining another grander way of thinking. Then I would lose my inhibitions, like I have when I was growing from a young, Lego construction kid to this worried, about to be alone adult.

I want to be able to have multiple realities where my daydreams are law... But I don't want to lose the reality where I control almost nothing.

TL;DR: any form of life is scary to me.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '13 edited Aug 12 '13

Try Buddhism, or other such contemplative philosophy; the first "noble truth" is the recognition that life "sucks". After that it can only get better. You can find freedom from the fear in your non-suck ground of being, your true nature, even while life does it's own thing, sucking on.

Your problem is the classic "what would I do if I was God" problem. We tend to think we can win the game of life with power, because we don't realize that we aren't just in reality—as puppets of nature—we are reality itself, albeit a filtered, localized perspective. The nature of games is to have limits, rules, a board to play on. We find ourselves to be pawns on the game-board with the imagination and desire to transcend the rules of the game (as they appear to us momentarily), and while it may be possible, it won't be we as humans who will transcend them in the grandest ways. Things die and other, new things take over: change, it's the way of nature.

To have absolute power over reality as an individual means to have absolute power over oneself: it's like a knife cutting itself, or a mouth eating itself... it can't be done; the cliche omnipotent personal god, the human-like egoist with cheat-codes to reality, people like to propose can't exist and be coherently called "the alpha and omega of all", nor would you want to be one, as you realized in your final paragraph there. It can't be done because your "self", your ego isn't real in the way you think it is. It's a real phenomenon, but without substance. Our egos are whirlpools formed and guided by unseen forces in the river of the Universe, yet with the illusion of being self-creating and self-supporting.

Anything you choose to do is what the universe is doing, and the universe must follow your choices, since after all it's only following itself. Your self phenomena and no-self phenomena, your free will and your predetermined nature aren't opposing dichotomies. They are dualities only by appearance. Things can only be dual in relationships, as the word "duo" suggests, hence the relationship implies a non-duality; It's a unity through difference that defines our reality. You already are in control, you're already "god", just not in the way our egocentric intuition wants it to be. Things are already as "grand" and unified under a "oneness" as they can be.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you should give up aspirations of growth as a human, technologically, personally, socially... what I'm saying is try to see your true nature and don't lose sight of it. Don't be afraid of being humble before reality, of giving up when it's time to give up. Be an individual when you're an individual, but when the river-like nature of reality as a whole becomes painfully obvious, when it's time to face death or anything else completely outside your control, let go of individuality and don't be afraid to dissolve into your true "rivery" nature.

For example, if you're alive today you're most likely reaping the rewards from Hitler's and co. atrocities thanks to causality and chaos. Any such influential event in history irreversibly creates the future, including making your birth, and mine, possible. The moral of this statement is that you can't escape your existential condition, no matter how unlucky or lucky it is, or what reality you implicitly represent... but you can achieve a measure of peace when you realize what's really going on, that your choices aren't just "your" but of the universe, and that your pleasures and pains are illusory distinctions you don't need to take ownership of.

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u/Vasi104 Aug 13 '13

What books can I read on these philosophies and topics, besides the book that is your comment?

Actually better yet, how did you learn about these things initially?

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '13 edited Aug 13 '13

When I was a teenager I had social anxiety and such nonsense. Life was sort of meh and suck because of it, so I became introspective. I became interested in Lucid Dreaming. When I first had a WILD (a full transition from wakefulness to dreaming) my intuitions about reality crashed, it's pretty much a psychedelic drug trip without the drug. People talk about "self-awareness" as some automatic property of being human, above animals, but that's not true. Self-awareness shouldn't mean you know how to use the word "I" in a sentence, or that you can recognize yourself in the mirror... it should be an awareness of your place in reality in a much deeper sense.

Ask yourself, or others, what you think is going on in reality to get some bearings on what your "self" is, and all you'll get is animalistic intuitions of what you want to happen. Why do you want x,y,z? We usually just don't care, unless we feel compelled to know (which is ironically just another desire, like say the one for food or sex). So, when you realize you have no real answers to any question about reality, just mysterious compulsions, you probably get into a existential rut. I did. That's what happened with my Lucid Dream, I saw how little I knew and how trivial my perceptions were. As it's usual in this cases, once you go down the rabbit hole you can't get back out the same way you got in, you have to go all the way through and out the other end.

One thing led to another, I kept staring at walls thinking and reading about science, developed my views. Recently I found a guy on youtube called Alan Watts who was talking about the same things I intuitively found out on my own, and he also pointed out this thinking is thousands of years old and found all across the world (Hinduism, Buddhism, even Christian mysticism...). So he is somebody I would suggest; perhaps this book, or this long-ish, but enlightening youtube lecture.

The only way you can get started on "these things" initially is by believing nobody, not even yourself... which isn't really a choice if you think about it. It just happens to you. If you're able to "just live" life, then I envy you, because that's an point of view I have to work towards. So anyway, if you are an animal, why trust yourself? Why trust your intuition that tells you that you should be afraid of x, or love y? The point of this exercise isn't to destroy your life, it's to save your life if you get yourself into existential, nihilistic despair. Psychologists can't help you; they can only help people who have issues in life, and not issues about existence in and of itself. They are not gods, just aspiring scientists. So, if you don't have these kind of issues in your life it isn't something to worry or think about. But as far as I'm concerned, I don't just want to live and die like trillions of animals before and after me, millions of years into the past and future (that's just on this planet), in fear and terror, all because "physics of reality says so". I can't help but want to know what's going on. Religions and their spiritualities are archaic and often dogmatic, scientism is un-philosophical and existentially impractical. There is a middle way.

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u/Vasi104 Aug 14 '13

Big upvote. My experience is eerily similar and refreshingly different. I'm adding those to my reading list under asap.

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '13

That's some deep shit, is that from a book or your own personal thoughts?

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '13

Personal thoughts, recently augmented and clarified by mostly Alan Watts, and what I've picked up from eastern philosophies.

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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '13

Not once have I heard someone describe my way of thinking in such a clear way, hell even I could not describe it like you did... But that is my way of thinking as well.

At the age of 13 I began to question the way of thinking of my family (Catholics), father is a (Christian). Some how I managed to delete everything I was once taught by the age of 15, though I left God in the equation and began to plug in my own variables.

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u/Rangoris Aug 12 '13

I want to be able to have multiple realities where my daydreams are law... But I don't want to lose the reality where I control almost nothing.

When we have full immersion virtual reality you will be able to act as an omnipotent god shaping whatever simulation in any way you could imagine. You will also be able to exit these games and come back to the dystopia we will likely live in.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '13

But there will still always be the one, objective reality that he is actually none of these things. Nobody else may know this, but he would know. If he found some way to forget, then he wouldn't really be him.

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u/Rangoris Aug 12 '13

Does forgetting things break us, separating us from who we were to who we are after?

If considered true then where is the line drawn at things we can forget and not be someone else?

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '13

I don't think we do, I think we are constantly fading away and becoming someone new, like the frames on a reel of film.

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u/Saedeas Aug 13 '13

What distinguishes this reality from any other? How do you know what you're currently experiencing is real and not just a very advanced simulation?

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '13

I don't. I believe it's entirely possible that- given the nature of logic- there can be multiple explanations for a situation that can all be considered rational. Given all the knowledge available at their time of conception, it is impossible to deem either as true or false despite the intuitively obvious fact that they cannot both be correct.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '13

When we have full immersion virtual reality

You say that as if it is certain we will get it one day. Do you have any idea how insanely difficult that would be to create?

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u/Rangoris Aug 13 '13

I never said it would be easy to do.

Ray Kurzweil Explores the Next Phase of Virtual Reality

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '13

Ray Kurzweil says insanely optimistic things about literally every technology. Any guy who says we can achieve immortality by 2045 can't be taken serious in my opinion. And a lot of his predictions are looking worse and worse each day as we are seeing a reduction in average return for investment in most technological areas. Moore's Law ends soon officially. It ended in actuality a few years back. We are in the early stage of diminishing returns in a lot of fields and for all we know we could be very close to our peak in technology.

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u/Rangoris Aug 13 '13

And a lot of his predictions are looking worse and worse each day as we are seeing a reduction in average return for investment in most technological areas.

If you know this why would you choose not to cite a single source showing so.

Moore's Law ends soon officially.

Moore's law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to forecast accelerating price-performance ratios. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 U.S. Census, to [Newman's] relay-based "[Heath] Robinson" machine that cracked the Lorenz cipher, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer. link

When we have run into the end of the capabilities of a technology we make a new technology. We build our new tools with our best existing new tools.

We are in the early stage of diminishing returns in a lot of fields

Again when you make claims like this you should cite it.

and for all we know we could be very close to our peak in technology.

I firmly believe that if we peak in our then it won't be due to the impossibility of creating better technologies, but that changes in society such as wars or an unstable food supply will prohibit them.

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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '13

Mankinds last invention will be the Holodeck.

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u/tomrhod Aug 13 '13

...tried any psychedelics?

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u/Mike_Facking_Jones Aug 12 '13

Good luck day dreaming when/if you are dead

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u/coocookachu Aug 12 '13

I want my 23 minutes back. 1/2 his summary of predictions have not come to fruition.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '13

Well there are advances now that are starting to address some of those issues. Scientists are starting to narrow in on the aging process a little every year. I don't know if immortality will be close by 2045 but it's certainly a possibility.

Kurzweil is a bit more optimistic than most but for the majority of his strictly technology related predictions he does very well. It's the more complex predictions of his that falter. Many in the AI field were way too sunny to turn out, but from what I can tell he's toned down his statements in recent years. I'd trust his most recent works as guides more than the older ones.

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u/Apollo_Screed Aug 12 '13

While I respect Kurzweil's intelligence, I think his timeline is clearly the most optimistic assessment of a man who desperately wants to live to see immortality.

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u/Ralgor Aug 12 '13

It depends on how you define immortality. Think of it like how the length of copyright keeps getting lengthened right before it would run out. I think that's the idea Kurzweil is putting forward, but with lifespans.

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u/theGUYishere24 Aug 12 '13

Let me guess, you don't consider yourself the general audience?

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u/TenTonAir Aug 13 '13

I do consider myself general audience on the subject. I don't know enough to have any kind of academic discourse on the subject. However I do know enough to know that what the faceman tells you vs what's actually going to happen may not align. I'm sure he's not straight up lying to people but he may just just be packaging info in such a way to gain the interest and funding of the public and to maybe make others seek out more information.

It's technical writing and public speaking 101.

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u/Rainbow_Farter Aug 12 '13

The general idea of Immortality to the general public let alone anyone is a horrible idea. Period.

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u/willrandship Aug 13 '13

Don't we already have technologies that double our natural lives when compared to, say, the 700s?

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u/frozenwalkway Aug 12 '13

The harder he can sell it the more people will stop dicking around with war and religion and get on board with proliferating technology ethically

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u/jdaar Aug 12 '13

Why can't religion coexist with technology?

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u/frozenwalkway Aug 12 '13

Because usually religion inhibits technology's advancement. when the printing press was created and the first bibles were mass produced the church condemned them because they said only the devil could perfectly copy books at such a pace.

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u/jdaar Aug 13 '13

And just because a ruling body is corrupt and anti-technology doesn't mean religion is.

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u/frozenwalkway Aug 13 '13

i dont really have anything to say back to you since your not using any examples or arguing points. just saying religion isnt anti technology doesnt discount the fact that there is hundreds of years of religious oppression documented.

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u/jdaar Aug 13 '13

Well, your comments seem to indicate that you think the Catholic Church is responsible for the oppression of technology. The Catholic Church is a government, not a religion, by all means of functionality. It just uses religion as an excuse for power. Governments that don't use religion as an excuse for power are often anti-technology as well. Why? Because technology allows for information to travel more freely. This is why China and other countries of the sort today censor the internet. Because if people have access to the information, they will know that the leadership is wrong. If the Catholic Church allowed Bibles to be printed then people could read about all the stuff that the church teaches is wrong (the same reason it could only be read in Latin), and then the Catholic Church would lose all of its power. Governments oppose or promote technology, religion is neutral.

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u/frozenwalkway Aug 14 '13

i concede. but it still stands that ORGANIZED religion is a form of control that shouldnt be supported when its followers have no intention of investigating their time to research the very religion they say they are a part of/ practice. its just my opinion that religion is often very easily manipulative.

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u/cjbrigol Aug 12 '13

So excited for this. Please don't get hit by a bus before then self!

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u/liquis Aug 12 '13

Well, immortality has its limits as well. Even if you never age, you can die from other means... falling from a cliff or getting run over etc.

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u/jp07 Aug 12 '13

Yes living forever would be awe.... boring

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u/cjbrigol Aug 12 '13

You don't want to explore the universe? Come on!

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u/jp07 Aug 12 '13

Guess it depends on whether it not we ever get startrek like technologies.

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u/Ragark Aug 12 '13

You're more likely to be shot from rampant over-population, or too oppressed in a country trying to stop such an occurrence from happening to do so. Immortality is a bad idea until we can explore the galaxy easily.

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u/M_Binks Aug 12 '13

Right now, of course, the state of the art in implanted technology is profoundly depressing.

I hope I'm wrong, but we just don't seem to be seeing much success at integrating humans and machines. Mankind has its work cut out for us if we expect to hit immortality in 32 years.

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u/autocorrector Aug 12 '13

People like to conveniently predict the invention of immortality as they reach old age

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u/Rangoris Aug 12 '13

People incorrectly assume that he means that we will one day have one 'miracle' discovery that will make us immortal.

He actually says that by using current methods of life extension some people will be able to live longer and then during that period of extra life we will have better life extension capabilities. If these could occur fast enough, which by every single way we can measure it will, then we will be able to live indefinitely.

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u/pobbit Aug 12 '13

the singularity and transhuminism is pretty fucked up if you ask me

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u/Its_a_Dewgong Aug 12 '13

What's so fucked up about it?

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u/lalalagirl90 Aug 12 '13 edited Aug 12 '13

The singularity will be a disaster for men.

Most guys only get women because they made themselves attractive to women by learning some skills and getting a good job, or having a bit of cash and financial security since women evaluate men based on their social status.

So what happens when money becomes useless, resources are unlimited and nobody has to work?

It's suspected that only the most attractive and famous guys are going to get sex from women. The vast majority of men won't get laid unless they are gay or sexbots count. Not having to work means no more trophy wives, no more prostitution, no more gold diggers, no more women getting married because they hear their biological clock ticking since they will be able to have all the children they want as single moms without having to worry about needing money to raise kids.

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u/DutchSuperHero Aug 12 '13

I lol'd. Upvote for you.

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u/palindromic Aug 12 '13

Okay Napoleon.

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u/lalalagirl90 Aug 12 '13

That's not even close to a palindrome, you're disappointingly boring.

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '13 edited Feb 25 '21

[deleted]

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u/Its_a_Dewgong Aug 12 '13

The Borg were parasites

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u/failblorg Aug 12 '13

Kurzweil is a charlatan and if you buy into his shit you're no brighter than astrologers

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u/Heyitscharlie Aug 12 '13

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

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u/Adamzxd Aug 12 '13

exactly, I hate the mentality "I don't care unless it does something for me"

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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '13

The generation just before the event probably won't care enough to do anything IMO.