What is immortality

Pieter van Lint - Allegory of immortality

Immortality is in fashion. Every few weeks, the media publish news or interviews related to this matter. In addition to the one I mentioned in an earlier article, let's look at two others, quite recent:

•         We will live 1000 years (Aubrey de Gray, May 1, 2016).

•         Man is about to attain immortality and artificial intelligence, which will turn him into Homo Deus (Yuval Harari, September 11, 2016).

But first we must define what we mean by immortality; otherwise, we will hardly know what we are talking about. As one reader pointed out in my previous article, living 1000 years is not the same as being immortal. If you live 1000 years and then die, you are not immortal, you have just lived longer. This applies, whatever the duration of life. Living 1000 million years and then dying would not be the same as being immortal.

Those who believe that someday we will be immortal do not put all the eggs in the same basket. In recent years, three different ways have been proposed to achieve immortality:

The final anthropic principle and the antiChrist

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In their popular science book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler define three different anthropic principles:

1.      The weak anthropic principle or WAP (this was offered by Brandon Carter in 1973): the simple verification that the fact that we are here imposes certain restrictions on the universe, such as having lasted long enough for intelligent life to appear.

2.      The strong anthropic principle or SAP: the claim that making possible the emergence of intelligent life was a necessary requirement for the universe.

3.      The final anthropic principle or FAP: The claim that, once intelligent life has appeared in the universe, it cannot disappear.

Are we alone in the galaxy?

Enrico Fermi

In their famous book of hard scientific popularization, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, published in 1986, the cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler offer a proof that we are alone in the galaxy by means of a variant of the Fermi paradox (if there are any extraterrestrial intelligences in the Galaxy, why aren’t they here?) which can be summarized as follows:

1.      In 100 years we will have succeeded in creating life in the laboratory. Not just life, we will also be able to build a complete human being from its chemical components and information about the human genome, which can be stored in a digital memory.

2.      In 100 years we will have managed to build artificial intelligences as intelligent as human beings, able to replace us in any place and circumstance.

3.      Our current space technology allows us to reach a speed of 0.0003 c (where c is the speed of light). At that speed, a spaceship would take about 50,000 years to reach the nearest stars.

The fine tuning problem

In two previous posts I dealt with the relation between the multiverse theories and the problem of fine tuning, noting that those theories do not solve the problem. This third post describes briefly what is the fine tuning problem.

Brandon Carter

In 1973 Brandon Carter formulated the anthropic principle, a name later deplored by its author, because it may be prone to misunderstandings. This principle is simply the verification that the universe must fulfill all the conditions necessary for our existence, since we are here.

Over a decade later, John Barrow and Frank Tipler published a book entitled The anthropic cosmological principle, which offered a stronger version of the anthropic principle, posing that the values of many of the universal constants are critical and minor variations would make life impossible. This finding raises the fine tuning problem, based on the analysis of the possible effects of changing the values of those constants. In other words, the universe seems designed to make life possible. Let’s look at a few examples: