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pianoforte611 comments on Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is avoiding death possible is principle? In particular, is there a solution to the problem of the universe no longer being able to support life?
None currently known. But I suggest that this is not a very high-priority problem at the moment; if you solve the more pressing ones, you'll have literally billions of years to figure out an escape path from the universe.
Or billions of years of despair knowing there isn't one...
Because obviously the only valid response to knowing death is inevitable is despair during your non-dead time...
Of course not... You can also wirehead yourself to avoid thinking of the impending doom!
I hope you didn't saw my comment as a real proposal for regulating billions-years-in-the-future civilization :)
It was more on the spirit of a Lovecraftian side note...
Although I think, more seriously, that a civ heavily invested in preventing death would be reasonably crippled if it suddenly find another, inevitable source of death. E.g. once anti-aging is widespread, a deadly virus that targets those who have been treated.
I'm always confused when people talk about 'avoiding/conquering/ending death', as if death were one thing. It's rather emphatically not. It's even worse than the stereotypical-by-now adge that theres no such thing as a 'cure for cancer' because every type of cancer and indeed every individual tumor is unique and brought about by unique failures and internal evolution.
I understand that cancer is more than one thing, but I don't see how death is more than one thing. Ceasing to exist; a state such that there is a prior conscious state but no future conscious state. There are many ways to define it, mostly equivalent.
If you mean that biological death is caused by multiple processes then sure, but I mean avoiding all of the causes of death.
I think that a solution might be possible. According to string theory our universe is likely to be only metastable since its cosmological constant is positive. It means that eventually we get false vacuum decay and the formation of a new universe. If the new universe has zero or negative cosmological constant, its asymptotic temperature will be zero which should (I think) allow avoiding heat death (that is, performing an infinite computation). Now, I think the half-life of spontaneous nucleation within a cosmological horizon is usually predicted to be much longer than the relaxation time. However, this leaves the possibility of heterogeneous (induced) nucleation. Now, I'm not aware of any research about artificially induced false vacuum decay, but I don't know of any physical barrier either. If we manage to induce such a decay and find some way to transmit ourselves into the new universe (which probably requires the new universe to be physically universal), avoiding death is a possibility.
Uh oh...