Seniors Search For Virtual Immortality 209
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."
that would mean... (Score:3)
putting names against the people in those millions of digital photos
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft has already invented this (sort of), no-one really used it because it was slow, buggy, and made your entire computer run like shit. But that didn't stop them from patenting it. So rest assure, Bill Gates will get the money anyways. And now you know why Microsoft is still in business and will always be in business as long as there isn't any patent reform.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft has already invented this (sort of), no-one really used it because it was slow, buggy, and made your entire computer run like shit.
That's certainly not uncommon for MS wares. Actually, most commercial software, not just MS.
But that didn't stop them from patenting it. So rest assure, Bill Gates will get the money anyways.
You can't patent a concept, just its implementation. Viagra's patent didn't stop their competition from patenting Cialis. Plus, MS's patent runs out 20 years after they filed it.
Social Semantic Desktop (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop [wikipedia.org]
I've been working on some related stuff myself (the Pointrel system) -- but is is all free and open source, so no Bill Gates lifestyle. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft has already invented this (sort of), no-one really used it because it was slow, buggy, and made your entire computer run like shit.
What was it called? I'm not finding anything from casual googling.
Re: (Score:2)
WinFS?
Re: (Score:2)
At best, they're likely to have it synopsized by some AI which is tasked with going through it, and through the better records left by intermediate descendants. The synopsis is likely to be short: "dude lived, had kids, then died". Another likelihood is that most of them won't care at all.
500 years hence (Score:3)
Folk will be foraging for themselves in a post-nuclear/bioweapon apocalyptic wasteland as the ice sets in for 100,000 years.
Maintaining family photos will not even enter their minds. Nor should it. They'll be about finding a way toward the equator if they're smart.
Re: (Score:2)
Or towards the poles, depending on whether global warming or nuclear winter comes first.
Yes, it's wonderful! (Score:4, Insightful)
Add a couple pedestals with appropriate video clips of the deceased appropriately cued, and you have the basic setting for the Max Headroom classic episode, "Religion."
My question is twofold - who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance, and who assumes that the massive amounts of this generated data will be taken care of indefinitely? Is this what a legacy amounts to these days and how much money can I charge for this service?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yes, it's wonderful! (Score:4, Insightful)
who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance,
Spoken like someone who has never studied history. Detailed accounts of average people (or average members of a demographic) are immensely valuable in attempting to reconstruct an accurate picture of a particular time in the past. If anything, uninteresting people are more valuable: they provide a representative snapshot that can be used to extrapolate others. If you have a few hundred of them, you can do very detailed comparisons and discover the common details. The historian in me cringes whenever I see someone delete an email.
Re:Yes, it's wonderful! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Valuable to historians perhaps, not really anyone else. And if a modern historian volunteers to go to the effort and expense of maintaining my digital archive I'll consider letting them. The thing is though that historians are typically interested in, you know, *historical* stuff, not building and maintaining archives of modern data for the convenience of their future counterparts. And without archivists taking active steps to maintain digital data it will vanish far faster than even crappy photographs a
Re: (Score:2)
The joke about it is that those stone tablets and papyrus scrolls are way more durable than 18th century paper written on with acid containing ink.
Wouldn't it be hilarious if we found out the reason why we have so few records of the "dark times" between 6th and 10th century is that they invented that quick rotting crap back then, too?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, yes, we're incredibly interested in the average life of a medieval peasant. But one is enough, thank you. When we have Joe Shmoe, we don't need Bill Blah anymore.
Historians are interested in average data. So don't worry, having a few emails of you left will do. They'll get thrown in with Joe's blog, Bill's Facebook account, Jacky's browser history and my porn collection and historians of the future will distill the average Joe of the 21st century out of it.
Re: (Score:2)
My question is twofold - who is arrogant enough to assume that they are interesting enough at all times to warrant 24/7/365 sousveillance
The answer to the first part of your question is anyone with a twitter account...
Nobody will care (Score:5, Insightful)
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, all of which are less than 1% me. Even if I had the complete records of what their lives and ambitions were in the 1750s or so, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care what my mother's father's mother's mother's father's father's father was doing, I doubt I'd even get around to checking out 128 people before I was bored stiff. At best I'd print out a nice family tree where you could have about three bullet points to describe yourself and that is it. Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.
Re: (Score:2)
People seem to feel that they have to have some kind of lasting impact on the world of their lives to matter. Actually what matters is the affect you have on your contemporaries, those whose lives you come into contact with directly. That stuff may seem small but it's what's important.
Re:Nobody will care (Score:5, Insightful)
People seem to feel that they have to have some kind of lasting impact on the world of their lives to matter.
And this sums up the philosophy behind twitter users completely...
Re: (Score:2)
RT
And this sums up the philosophy behind twitter users completely...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Nobody will care (Score:4, Insightful)
This will appeal most to the boomers who refuse to get old or die.
Anyone wanting to get old and/or die is insane.
Re: (Score:2)
Supply and demand at work! After all, given all those wrinkles, there's gotta be plenty more old skin, so younger skin is in shorter supply.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually what matters is the affect you have on your contemporaries, those whose lives you come into contact with directly
I'm guessing that most grandparents would prefer to spend time talking to their living descendents now, instead of lecturing to unknowns of the future. A two way conversation is much more natural than a recorded monologue or rant.
Actually, what I really believe, is that older folks should do whatever they damn well please. They are old, time is short, and they don't need anyone to tell them how to spend that time.
Let 'em spend their days telling me to get off their lawn, if that what brings some minor j
Re: (Score:2)
A two way conversation is much more natural than a recorded monologue or rant.
True in theory, but the way my grandpa talked to me usually it wouldn't have made much of a difference...
Re:Nobody will care (Score:4, Funny)
Most people however are like ants one, ten or hundred get stepped on and nobody even notices as what they churn out still gets done by the thousands of other ants.
Re: (Score:2)
You grouped DaVinci and Einstein with Steve Jobs?
Did Apple Marketing do that good a job at the hype?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I've taken some time to trace back my family history. My grand aunt (unwittingly) helped a lot, but then, she needed to, it was "that time" when tracing your family line was in style for some lines of work (hint: the year was 1938).
Judging from the people I found that way, I'm pretty confident that talking with them wouldn't have been a lot more interesting than the average pub "discussion". And I guess that would hold true for most people. Remember that before 1900 or at least 1800, nearly all people
Re: (Score:2)
If you are old right now and do this thing, you might be one of the few out of your generation who has made these records available.
That should set you apart from the other 127 not so tech savvy grandpas and grandmas.
Being the most ancient entry in the digital family tree will surely draw you some attention. So grab the chance.
Us younger people will just be another record in between.
Re: (Score:2)
I knew there was a reason for having a low UID here! (Pity my kid isn't tech savvy despite using Apple laptops).
Re: (Score:2)
Should that be "despite" or "because of"? Apple makes very nice computers, but they specifically do everything in their power to maximize ease of use = minimize the incremental benefit of tech-savyness.
Re: (Score:2)
If you are old right now and do this thing, you might be one of the few out of your generation who has made these records available.
That should set you apart from the other 127 not so tech savvy grandpas and grandmas.
My grandmother was born in 1903, and I found her baby pictures on the internet. The difference today is we take a lot more pictures and movies because now we all have movie cameras all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Taking a picture was a huge event back in the last century, shortly after it was invented. I have a photography of my great-great-grandfather (who happened to be the local forester for the local royalty back then) and my great-grandmother who was a child when the picture was taken was able to tell me the story behind it a few years before she died, or else it would just be a "storyless" picture for me. She remembered the day because it WAS such a huge deal that they now could also get their likeness immort
Re: (Score:2)
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents
Possibly not - as you go further up the tree the chances of you finding some inbreeding increases. These days people move around a lot, so aren't so likely to inbreed, but previously that hasn't been the case, and with a relatively small population of partners to choose from, inevitably you'll get inbreeding (even more so for people who lived in small villages).
Re:Nobody will care (Score:4, Funny)
640 relatives should be enough for anyone.
Re: (Score:2)
Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
Never has a truism been more applicable.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.
As a historian, let me just say this: no, I really wouldn't want to dig through that crap. What people WANT to say about themselves--their pre-packaged, self-conceived advertising--is rarely the most interesting, reliable, or relevant material.
Re: (Score:2)
Interestingly, when my father past we found a journal, or at least a life review, that he had been writing. His writing was very detailed and not some kind of self promoting but very factual in both the good and bad of his life. I've felt the need to do a similar review, with the idea of it not being read until after I am gone and I would like to have an accurate account of my life, warts and all.
Re: (Score:2)
You're ignoring the people in the American south. They typically only have 4-6 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents
Re: (Score:2)
I thought we were going for the 'put their talking heads in a jar' solution.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course this would create a problem. Imagine if American politicians could use holographic projections with programmable answers of the Founding Fathers...
That would be pretty crazy. Actually I find this persona cult built up around the "founding fathers" in the US quite fascinating, even though these are people who lived in a time that is very different from ours and during very different conditions, some Americans still seem to have this obsession about what this founding father or that other one would have thought about a present-day issue, one they could likely not even comprehend. We have no equivalent in Sweden, I guess the closest to a "founding father
Re: (Score:2)
My fear would be that the really wise and smart people would opt to forgo that chance while self absorbed airheads would jump on it.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I had a grandpa that was in WW2. He didn't really spend a lot of time talking about it. In a nutshell, his main comment about it was "Son, if you notice a draft, start running so you don't get in the same shit I was in". Grandma wasn't much more talkative about it either, it wasn't really a "glorious" time. Mostly it was a couple wasted, horrible years for both of them.
And before that, chances are that your ancestors didn't even notice that it happened, unless they had been in the area where it happen
Revelation space (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
Even a relatively static personality/experience dump seems pretty interesting to me. Imagine having the collective wisdom of the past to draw on.
Re: (Score:2)
Even a relatively static personality/experience dump seems pretty interesting to me. Imagine having the collective wisdom of the past to draw on.
If we still keep failing to learn from history (continue using fiat currencies for one example*) then it really would make you feel hopeless.
* All of them, without exception, have ended with hyperinflation. Perhaps we think we're special?
Re: (Score:2)
If a fiat currency ends, then it has become worthless. How else would that occur except through hyperinflation?
Re: (Score:2)
That has been invented already. It's called an encyclopedia. I've heard a rumor that someone put something like that online, too.
Re: (Score:3)
Also try Dark as Day by Charles Sheffield. He has a somewhat different take on personality simulations. Excellent book.
Oh great. (Score:2)
Imagine the future - trying to read 21st century data storage.
Can you imagine trying to read beta videos, cassette tapes, Zip drives, etc even now - let alone in 100 years?
They will be using totally different data storage technology - imagine trying to watch a VCR in a house that only has Blu-ray?
Eternal Porn Habits (Score:2)
So, not only is every action, every message, every visited website recorded. But it's also going to persist forever and will, ultimately, be probably be the most concrete mark made by your existence on this planet.
Though I'm not sure it'll be much use to future historians; I'm sure the information will be heavily paywalled as some deranged capitalist is bound to think the porn habits of people who've been dead 200 years still has commercial value.
Unhealthy and egotistical (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people have some minor interest in their ancestry. However, with few exceptions, our ancestors were people just like any other, with lives interesting only to themselves. Those few exceptions are people who will be in the historical record, and have no need of this kind of service.
And that's the point: my life is interesting to me, but I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.
The other point to take issue with is the idea that this is "healthy". As one gets older, there is a danger of living more and more in the past. The happiest and healthiest elderly people I have known are the ones who avoid this: they live in the present and have plans for the future. Spending your time producing a "life review" would seem to be exactly the opposite of a healthy activity!
Re: (Score:2)
An individual ordinary life is not interesting in terms of the big picture, but ordinary life itself is of great interest to historians, since it's not the same as ordinary life in another period or another place, and it's the context in which extraordinary lives were lived.
We don't need *everyone's* lives, just a representative sample, but, given that technology makes this easy, it doesn't take a great deal of interest to justify it for the people doing it Compared to 'reality' TV the life of an ancestor
Re: (Score:2)
I am not egotistical enough to suppose that - in a hundred year - anyone will care how I looked, moved, and spoke. Anyone who thinks that their distant descendents will care about such a "life review" is, imho, pathetically full of themselves.
I know right? The market for this "virtual immortality" is HUGE! It can't miss....as long as the business plan involves collecting money from those who want to be preserved (content providers) rather than billing the eventual consumer.
Re: (Score:2)
What makes the deal even sweeter is that there's a lot of old people who have money and who know that they can't take their money with them when they die, so they don't give a shit what it costs. Whether it costs 10% of my fortune or 50% is moot, when I die I'll have to leave 100% of what's left behind.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're totally wrong. I think it would be fascinating to be able to find out what my forebears thought. I hardly know what my parents think, because we have differences that prevent us from engaging in meaningful conversation.
Re: (Score:2)
Having a similar father and having had a grandfather who was also not much different (I wonder if it's genetic that my family doesn't like talking with each other... ohwell), I don't know whether my great-grandfather would be much more willing to inform me of his thoughts.
Re: (Score:2)
Historians would be interested in having information about a few average and unexceptional people from an era. That's because they want to know how people lived in some era; they don't want to know about a particular unexceptional person. Once they have a couple from each different social group, more will not provide more information.
Re: (Score:2)
...but today you can milk money from it, that's all that matters today.
It is a vain age. Take art, or what passes as art today. I HIGHLY doubt that anyone will view the music of today with the same reverence that is paid to Mozart or Beethoven. It sure rakes in a lot more dough, though.
Revisionism (Score:5, Insightful)
None of this will necessarily mean history gets told any more accurately. It will just get revised differently. Since people are eager to "embellish" their resumes, these "life review" autobiographies will be chock full of all sorts of tall tales to make even Mark Twain grimace. What makes us think that behavior starts and stops with former Presidents? Facts have always been as malleable as Silly Putty in the hands of people with motives that make the raw facts inconvenient. That class of people just happens to include nearly every person that has ever lived.
Only good old "peer review" will straighten these Life Reviews out and make them truly worth preserving.
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to make a comment like the one you made. The stakes for historians is not overcoming a lack of information, tout court, but to overcome a lack of reliable information. Life reviews are not it.
Another problem is that, even assuming perfect reliability (which we both agree is unlikely), additional documents may have a very low signal to noise ratio. In know from experience that an overabundance of data is not a blessing when combing through it for relevant information has to be done by hand. Somet
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but if everyone does it we'd get to hear all sides of the stories for a change. Not, like we do now in history books, only the story of the one who won.
Wars never decided who was right. Only who was left. He was only right because, well, if the other side doesn't show up to the trial, you win by default. And dead guys cannot testify.
Yet.
Personality upload? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No problem, give it a few hundred years before that becomes available though. If ever. Computing and storage technology is currently exploring the limits of physics. We may be pretty close to what is feasible in this universe.
Feasibility (Score:3)
Not even close to likely. :) Where did you get that idea?
We don't know what our own genetics mean; we can't manipulate them hardly at all. Or those of anything else, other than in the most crude, ham-handed ways. Our medical knowledge is at the scratch-the-surface level. We can't control aging yet. Chip tech is still at the 2D level... when it goes 3D, which will require lower power tech or some new means of heat transfer, chip complexity will lea
Re: (Score:2)
My "idea" comes from close understanding of the technologies involved. From your comments, I gather that you barely scratch the surface but have listened to a lot of BS. For example, chip technology will not go 3D for a number of reasons, each of them prohibitive and fundamental.
The only problem: Nobody will care (Score:2)
I found some 120 year old newspapers a while ago. What was fascinating was the style, what people found important and that there was a Usenet-precursor (a column labeled "From anybody to everybody"). The people themselves were completely immaterial to me, as I had no previous personal connection. Looking at videos from a granny you actually knew as a child may be something people can understand, but personal stuff from 100 or 500 years ago is not going to engage anybody.
Side note: Storing data reliable even
no lack of self-serving BS in the past .. (Score:2)
Having some individual/organization concoct a flattering bio' is hardly a new thing. None of the "data" provided by these "services" is particularly useful to a historian, except as yet another example of vanity press, and, perhaps, as a record of what the "biographed" considered flattering.
I don't want virtual immortallity (Score:5, Informative)
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment."
Woddy Allen [wikiquote.org]
Challenge (Score:2)
the door of death (Score:2)
but you have to die — its the only way to live again!! :-)
safe passage — our cat, 'puck' goes today.. :-(
My choice: Aubrey de Grey (Score:2)
I will trade longer life for longer remembrance every day :).
I'm not that sure... (Score:2)
Future archeolisits will be able to see the text on stone tablets, but memory chips? All gone.
Re:Sounds alot like (Score:5, Funny)
Unrecognized file type .DOC
"D'Oh!"
Re: (Score:2)
"Oh, look, great grand papa's diary from the year 2013! Let's open it!"
Unrecognized file type .DOC
Exactly. And that is one of the things that makes me so angry with Microsoft - their attempt to scupper the non-proprietory Open Document format which stood a chance of becoming a standard for a long time to come. MS want to control any standard and keep changing it - so that people keep having to buy the latest version of Word to keep up.
But another problem is storage media. A few years ago I wrote some family history on an Amstrad PCW and saved it on 3" floppies. Now I cannot read them. Most people
Re:Sounds alot like (Score:4, Insightful)
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer. Don't worry - if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.
Re: (Score:2)
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer.
I thought it would be obvious that I was making the point that media and its reader hardware are changing so fast that you cannot trust a "standard" to last a decade, let alone two or more generations. If our great-great-grand-children find a 3.5" floppy in a box in the attic with our life story on it they are most likely to throw it away without a glance, even if they knew what a 3.5" floppy was and they could possibly find a agent somewhere who could read it at some cost. OTOH, there is a chance they wi
Re: (Score:2)
Certainly long-term digital data storage requires periodic storage updates - good luck getting your data off a floppy disk or DVD after even one generation, even if you have a perfectly functioning drive and can read all the data formats - the medium itself degrades much faster than the stone tablets or even papyrus scrolls of yore. Heck, in most cases it'll even be drastically outlasted by fast-degrading high-acid paper or crappy chemically unstable polaroid photographs. Unless you store your data on som
Re: (Score:2)
"Most people cannot even read 3.5" floppies any more."
That should be, "Most people can't be bothered to mess with a 3.5" floppy any more."
The technology to read the data on those floppies is readily available. Hell, for a small fee, I can send you an external floppy drive to plug into your computer. Don't worry - if you run any operating system that either used floppies, or has been developed since floppies came into style, your operating system will read them.
Hmm, I tried sticking a floppy disk into my Android phone and it couldn't read it...
Re: (Score:2)
Can you read Amiga format 3.5 floppies? They're not recorded the same as the ones used for Windows, you know. Can you read Burroughs 8" floppies? 6800 Flex 5" floppies? CP/m floppies?
I'm asking as the author of a Flex emulation that runs under Windows; my finding was that Windows could not, in fact, read Flex floppies. No comprehension of the filesystem, you
Re: (Score:2)
Actually it's not the filesystem that's the issue - if it were you could simply feed the raw data into an emulator, which presumably *does* understand the filesystem. The problem is that even though the floppy disk itself was the same between many systems, the drives that used them were often physically different, using different physical layouts on the disk to store the data - the disk itself was after all just a big oxide-coated disk, things like tracks and sectors were imposed by the drive itself, so an
Re: Sounds alot like (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more likely than you think.
Microsoft formats are designed to be as hard to reverse engineer as possible and the way software licensing and forced upgrades is going nobody will be able to run today's Windows 100 years from now so it will be impossible to run today's Word on any combination of emulators.
This might be solved if we move everything to the cloud, but all those Word documents out there, 200 years from now? Not a chance.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes lets move it too the cloud! Your life's history data will be as eternally accessible as your google reader data :)
Re: (Score:3)
"Yes lets move it too the cloud!"
Why not? Grandpa moves to the clouds, his data moves to the cloud.
Re: (Score:3)
This might be solved if we move everything to the cloud
Just make sure Zynga isn't in charge of the servers.
Re: (Score:2)
No problem, we get it.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
I dunno about that. How many file types from the 1970's are you unable to open today? We don't need to completely reverse engineer MS Office to get the data contained in the files, after all. Linux and Open Office manages to read them reasonably well.
I suspect that .doc files will be accessible for quite a long while, and that they can be converted to other formats before they are entirely obsoleted, and the emulators forgotten. Those that aren't converted probably have very little value to anyone.
Face
Re: Sounds alot like (Score:5, Interesting)
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]
Re: (Score:2)
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
"Like, whatever, dude".
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously dude. Like, I lived my life already, why do you keep waking me up and harshing my mellow?
Re: (Score:2)
As opposed to now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If the copyright craze continues, it's pretty much certain that YouTube in 10 years will contain very little content, since everything will be copyrighted. I'm pretty sure someone will copyright "showing a black screen in utter silence for 10 minutes" too.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. The only chance you currently have is some sort of partial re-incarnation, but probably not even in this universe.
Death will be vanquished within the next couple of centuries, I'm sure, but that won't necessarily be a blessing.
I really hope not. Now, you can at least toast the cretins when they die (well, those that die before you) and be sure that at some time you will be rid of them or they of you. With immortality suicides would skyrocket because people cannot take it anymore...
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm... I'd rather think homicides would skyrocket. I mean, today, if you're fed up with your parents, you can think "one day, you'll be dead", but what can you do when they achieved immortality?
Re: (Score:2)
Not really true. I'd love to hear my grandpa's story. He died before I had a chance to listen to it.
Problem is, I'd like to listen to it ONCE. The main problem people have with old farts' stories is the same they have with other sitcoms: the reruns and clipshows are so fuckin' boring.
Re: (Score:2)
Do as you want, but why does the rest of the world have to suffer from it?
For the love of $deity, at least close the blinds!