So there’s this awesome futurist youtube channel that goes by the name of 2 THE FUTURE with Jixuan & Sebastian that I can only recommend checking out and consider subscribing to. They have refreshing views on space, technology and transhumanism, and a special kind of weird humor that I personally find endearing.

In their latest video, they describe a very optimistic fictional future, starting in the year 2050. You’ll find the video by clicking on this link.

I am very much in line with what is being said here, but it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t want to add my own biotech-skewed opinion to it. So I commented with a long youtube posting that I’ll paste verbatim below. See y’all in 2050!

Unfortunately, Elon appears not to be a big fan of life extending biotech. He’s on record saying he wants to have „a hundred good years, maybe a little more“. However, I think he’ll soon realize his self-sustained Mars colony project will take longer than that. I suspect he’s going to invest in the SENS Research Foundation or similar biotech ventures at some point, just to make sure he can see the Mars colony come to fruition. Investing in SRF now or in ten years may be too late, though, since Elon’s almost 50 now. While starting rejuvenation therapies between 50 and 70 may be perfectly fine, we don’t have such therapies right now, and it may take decades more. Taking rejuvenation therapies at an old age may indeed be relatively ineffective (but we can’t say for sure just yet).

Strangely enough, many space enthusiast seem to hate life-extending biotech with their guts for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. Personally, I’m invested and interested the most in a future that contains me… in a non-dissolved fashion, if you please 🙂

Mind-uploading, on the other hand, seems to be more accepted, but also a lot farther away technologically than rejuvenation biotech. I don’t think that Neuralink is up to the task even remotely. Nothing short of a molecular brain scan and a simulation on an — as of now unimaginably huge — supercomputer will suffice, and even then, we’d only have made a copy of a mind, not a transfer (what’s considered a copy or a transfer remains to be in the realm of philosophical speculation for now). I want to stress that I do think mind uploading is possible in principle; but so is moving our entire solar system to another place in the galaxy. Both is entirely possible, but entirely impractical, too, at least in the foreseeable future, and maybe forever.

And lastly: What I’ve been missing from this fictional future history is atomically precise manufacturing (formerly known as molecular nanotechnology), as suggested by Feynman, and proven to be possible by Drexler in „Nanosystems“, and described in „Engines of Creation“ and „Radical Abundance“ by the same author. To be fair, APM/MNT was all the buzz in the early 2000’s and we’ve not heard a lot about it since then, so the problem seems to be more difficult than anticipated. I’m pretty certain that AI will be able to crack it at some point, though. I don’t think it’s as impractical as mind-upload, but it might be a necessary step for mind-uploading.

Sorry for the wall of text. Didn’t have the time to make it any shorter 🙂