Tag Archives: immortality

Here’s Some Real Stuff to Worry About

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5 Things Really Worth Worrying About

—By

| Sun Dec. 9, 2012

From a million-foot level, what are the biggest problems we have to worry about over the next four or five decades? For no real reason, I thought I’d toss out my short list. Here it is:

  1. Climate change. Needs no explanation, I assume.
  2. Robots. Explanation here. Even Paul Krugman is tentatively on board now.
  3. Immortality. Laugh if you want, but it’s hardly impossible that sometime in the medium-term future we’ll see biomedical breakthroughs that make humans extremely long-lived. What happens then? Who gets the magic treatments? How do we support a population that grows forever? How does an economy of immortals work, anyway?
  4. Bioweapons. We don’t talk about this a whole lot these days, but it’s still possible—maybe even likely—that extraordinarily lethal viruses will be fairly easily manufacturable within a couple of decades. If this happens before we figure out how to make extraordinarily effective vaccines and antidotes, this could spell trouble in ways obvious enough to need no explanation.
  5. Energy. All the robots in the world won’t do any good if we don’t have enough energy to keep them running. And fossil fuels will run out eventually, fracking or not. However, I put this one fifth out of five because we already have pretty good technology for renewable energy, and it’s mainly an engineering problem to build it out on a mass scale. Plus you never know. Fusion might become a reality someday.

These are the kinds of things that make the solvency of the Social Security trust fund look pretty puny. They also make it clear why it’s not worth worrying too much about whether it’s solvent 75 years from now. We might all be rich beyond our most fervid imaginations; we might be in the middle of massive die-offs thanks to spiraling global temperatures; or we might all be dead. Kinda hard to say.

Image: April Cat/Shutterstock; Arcady/Shutterstock; Neyro/Shutterstock; Vladislav Gurfinkel/Shutterstock

from:    http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/12/five-big-things-look-forward-or-worry-excessively-about

Studying Immortality

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US Philosopher Given $5M Grant To Study Immortality

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

A University of California at Riverside (UCR) philosopher will be placed in charge of a new project analyzing the concept of immortality after receiving the largest grant ever presented to a humanities professor at the school, various media outlets reported last week.

According to a July 31 UCR press release announcing the grant, the university announced that philosopher John Martin Fischer would oversee research on all aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact that believing in life-after-death has on human behavior.

The $5 million grant was presented to the school by the John Templeton Foundation, a Pennsylvania-based organization founded by the late businessman, philanthropist, and stock market pioneer that is dedicated to studying the deepest, most complex questions about the nature of life and the purpose of mankind, Los Angeles Times blogger Larry Gordon said.

“We will be very careful in documenting near-death experiences and other phenomena, trying to figure out if these offer plausible glimpses of an afterlife or are biologically induced illusions,” Fischer said in a statement, according to Christopher Shea of the Wall Street Journal.

“Our approach will be uncompromisingly scientifically rigorous. We’re not going to spend money to study alien-abduction reports. We will look at near-death experiences and try to find out what’s going on there — what is promising, what is nonsense, and what is scientifically debunked. We may find something important about our lives and our values, even if not glimpses into an afterlife,” he added.

The research, which is being dubbed the Immortality Project, will be a collaborative study involving scientists, philosophers, and theological experts. The inclusion of that last group has led to some criticism of the project, Business Insider’s Adam Taylor said.

Opponents are arguing that the religious aspects of the immortality issue have no place in serious scientific research, he said, and atheists have long been critical of the Templeton Foundation’s handling of the interaction between science and theology, Shea added.

Fischer, who is a member of the Templeton Foundation’s board, describes himself as a man who is not religious but has a great deal of respect for religion. Regardless, he told Gordon that his personal views, the inclusion of religious experts and the source of the grant “doesn’t mean we are trying to prove anything or the other. We will be trying to be very scientific and rigorous and be very open-minded.”

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

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