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The anthropic principle states that this is an a posteriori necessity, because if life were impossible, no living entity would be there to observe it, and thus it would not be known. That is, it must be possible to observe some universe, and hence, the laws and constants of any such universe must accommodate that possibility.
Hugh Everett did not mention quantum suicide or quantum immortality in writing; his work was intended as a solution to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Eugene Shikhovtsev's biography of Everett states that "Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: his consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death". [5]
Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore, a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality.
The universe should thus achieve, or asymptotically tend to, thermodynamic equilibrium, which corresponds to a state where no thermodynamic free energy is left, and therefore no further work is possible: this is the heat death of the universe, as predicted by Lord Kelvin in 1852.
In a new book, molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan raises critical questions about the societal, political and ethical costs of attempts to live forever.
Technological immortality is the prospect for much longer life spans made possible by scientific advances in a variety of fields: nanotechnology, emergency room procedures, genetics, biological engineering, regenerative medicine, microbiology, and others. Contemporary life spans in the advanced industrial societies are already markedly longer ...
But Kurzweil says one crucial step on the way to a potential 2045 singularity is the concept of immortality, possibly reached as soon as 2030. And the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is what ...
Cohen emphasizes that living longer in the future is certainly possible: over the course of the 20th century, human life expectancy rose from around 50 to more than 80. But living forever is not.