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by comrade1234 56 days ago
An interesting fictional book that has this idea as part of the story is Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan. Imagine if Elon musk and the other ultra-wealthy could live forever and they become even more out-of-touch with reality as the centuries roll on...

In the book almost anyone that has lived could live forever but that could never happen with limited resources/space so only the ultra-wealthy are able to.

I'd skip the tv show. Also, the books (it's a series) seem to be unfinished? I could be wrong, it's been so long since I read it but it seems like some sub-story about extinct aliens wasn't finished.

2 comments

The tv show is actually really good from someone who did not read the books. It is well done.
I don't know... I read the books so long ago and there are still things in my minds eye that I can picture from it, whereas with the tv show the only thing I remember is the naked sword fight.
Oh come now, surely you remember seeing James Purefoy's penis over and over.
It wasn't that kind of sword fight.
I saw the show first. I like them both. They’re wildly different.
elon is at least barely tolerable despitre being clearly POS, but maybe he has just pressure from stocks/companies he represents. Think more in the line of trump or putin, forever.

Such a person, upon becoming say potus, would on day 1 dismantle any option to be removed from power and basically did what trump is doing otherwise, and/or worse.

I keep saying this over and over - for greater good of humanity, we should be shooting these immortality scientists, all of them, regardless of horrible it sounds. 1000s vs hundreds of billions.

There is no conceivable way this will end in anything but catastrophe for mankind. One could theoretise that there could be Leto II Atreides type of situation (mankind needs to experience absolutely horrible things for millenia to go on a path which is overall better in extremely long term), but I am not holding my breath. We could also just die from our stupidity, and this is one prime example of it thats anyway still far in future.

We need to be at least multiplanetary civilization before achieving this, ideally in multiple solar systems so any catastrophe is not absolute.