That statement alone betrays you. You aren’t thinking rationally, you are using religious malarky.
The heat death of the universe is hundreds of billions to trillions of years away, and we are not even certain it will happen like that. Your “mortal” death is at most ~120 years away. I would consider extending your maximum lifespan from ~120 years to ~100 billion years to be a smashing victory, an utter defeat of death for a near eternal length of time.
You could fit the entire binary state file for a human brain on prototype optical storage media that would occupy the volume of several dvds. That’s using today’s technology.
What religious malarkey? I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in gods, life after death, or any sort of soul not modifying music or food. When I wrote mortals, I was simply acknowledging the fact that death is the central fact of our existence.
As for fitting a human mind on optical storage: who gives a fuck? A recording of my memories is not me. Your proposal betrays your fear of death, and your desire to spend hundreds of billions yearly on research towards that end is horribly misguided. Such an outlay is better used on making actual conditions in the world better.
Furthermore, death is not all bad. Oh, surely it seems bad to each of us when we are dying, or grieving for those we love-- but it’s just part of the natural cycle. Our deaths make room for the next generations. The only immortality that is real, and the only one I covet, is the continuance of the human specie in general and, hopefully but not necessarily, my own descendants.
it isn’t irrational to not even attempt to stop death. Everything we know about science - chemistry and physics - tells us that avoiding death is probably impossible, and even if it isn’t, it’s so far above our technology there is no other approach to the subject than to wait over time as our technology gets better and better, and THEN maybe the problem is kind of tackle-able. But this could take as much as 500 years.
Except not really, because the brain is extremely complex, and far removed from any computer technology. Read what Francis Vaughan is writing in the “Can the brain be mimiced by a computer?” thread. To the extent that you can use transistor switches to mimic neuronal “switches”, a single human brain contains more switches than all the computer electronics in the entire world put together. Though, again, the problem is a brain isn’t a computer, and it’s wired completely wacky and different from computers.
honestly, why is death so bad anyway? You’re here, then, you’re gone. We have no idea what happens to your conciousness after that, so you can’t really know how bad that is.
Wouldn’t you get god damned bored of being alive for centuries? I sure as hell would.
It’s various forms of suffering as I approach death that scare me, like being isolated in some hospital hospice/death ward (My grandfather was in something like that when his bones completely conked out, and he went to some place like that in Canada, he lives in Canada, and it was all just like one long hall of old people waiting to die, and it was awful because he was just there with no one)
A person’s beliefs are what allows him to make sense of a complex world and be able to sleep at night. For example, if you believe that bad things only happen to bad people, or that it is someone’s fault that they are poor, depressed, unemployed, gay, got cancer, whatever, and they suffer because of that, then you can rest comfortably knowing that bad things won’t happen to you.
When that belief is attacked, then you are thrown outside your safety bubble and life doesn’t make sense anymore.