Letter To Myself 10 Billion Years From Now

by phil on Nov 17, 2014 8:52 PM

I'm in a unique position. I'm not old enough to die before cryonics becomes viable, and I'm not young enough to live without it and see the dawn of non-cryonics immortality. It is my belief that the viability of cryonics will happen before the end of aging. In other words, a thousand years from now, the world will be populated mostly by people who have never experienced cryonics, but simply live forever. I will be in the minority who successfully cryopreserved themselves without any damage to their connectome.

Next up will be the promised merging with machines. Whether this manifests in mind-uploading or in some kind of merging with cyborgs, remains to be seen. My sense is that humans will be the operating system and that the next higher-order of intelligence will be nested with humanity. An example of this could be the Internet becoming self-aware. However, old school humans will have a chance to merge with the greater intelligence, leaving their flesh behind. This won't be an overnight process, but a gradual one, kind of like the transition to immortality, with some, more adventurous, types taking the plunge with beta versions of mind-uploading.

I will most likely be one of the oldest people living (as will most people who have done cryonics), and so I will be the most reluctant to merge. I may experiment with mind-uploading here and there, but I will probably be too nostalgic about my human body. During this age, humans will not only be immortal, but have the ability to remove all suffering from their lives, while enhancing all happiness measures, in addition to fitting into the chain of creativity in the most self-actualized ways possible, with an ever-expanding increase of perceptions and experiences. My day-to-day existence will be like an unending holodeck^2. I will not be willing to leave this behind.

The population of humans, which will peak in the middle of the third millenia, will decline to ultimately 50,000, roughly the same cohort size of Mitochondrial Eve. Most of these 50,000 will be my cryo cohort. I will be one of the eldest of this group.

Perhaps people will leave the human world to completely free themselves from hierarchal thinking and achieve complete oneness. Younger generations will desire this, but I will probably still have a soft spot for the striving I had growing up. It is, after all, that striving that make holodeck^2 experiences even mean anything. The generations after me may not even care about the unending series of nirvana that I am experiencing.

The third, final phase I can forsee has the Great Mind overcoming the Heat Death of the universe. I will still be one of the museum humans, though. Since rank will have some importance to me, I will want to hold onto this blog post so I can show it off to my cohort that I saw it all coming.