Seniors Search For Virtual Immortality

Hugh Pickens writes "Most ancestors from the distant past are, at best, names in the family records, leaving behind a few grainy photos, a death certificate or a record from Ellis Island. But J. Peder Zane writes that retirees today have the ability to leave a cradle-to-grave record of their lives so that 50, 100, even 500 years hence, people will be able to see how their forebears looked and moved, hear them speak, and learn about their aspirations and achievements. A growing number of gerontologists also recommend that persons in that ultimate stage should engage in the healthy and productive exercise of composing a Life Review. In response, a growing number of businesses and organizations have arisen to help people preserve and shape their legacy — a shift is helping to redefine the concept of history, as people suddenly have the tools and the desire to record the lives of almost everybody. The ancient problem that bedeviled historians — a lack of information about people's everyday lives — has been overcome. New devices and technologies are certain to further this immortality revolution as futurists are already imagining the day when people can have a virtual conversation with holograms of their ancestors that draw on digital legacies to reflect how the dead would have responded."

Revelation space

[j1976]

This theme has been investigated extensively in the revelation space [wikipedia.org] books by Alastair Reynolds, if anyone is curious about reading fiction about how it could look. Here, a full dump of a person is called an alpha-level simulation and is essential a living digital copy of a person, capable of continuing to "live", learn and having conversations with their descendants.

Re: Sounds alot like

[Gumpu]

Yes lets move it too the cloud! Your life's history data will be as eternally accessible as your google reader data :)

Re:Yes, it's wonderful!

[timeOday]

Accounts of average people throughout history were valuable because they were rare. Now they are billions of times less rare.

Re: Sounds alot like

[loneDreamer]

Actually, I know from a very reliable source that data historians are looking to virtual machines to solve this specific issue. It is a viable way to store complete, working computing environments for the future including not only the files but the programs able to work with them.

A few weeks ago I saw a demonstration of the first version of the mosaic web browser (the first that ever existed) and the first Macintosh. This last one by running it in a VM that run on a hardware emulator, that run in another VM that run in a VM. Don't ask me to remember the detailed chain of OS and such, but the point is that you are good as long as you can emulate a pretty recent version of something, and that version can emulate the previous one, and so on...

Related research about this is being done here: http://isr.cmu.edu/ [cmu.edu]