Tim Urban

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“There Are Over 300 People Hanging Out In Vats Of Liquid Nitrogen”

March 25, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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I don’t want to be in a box or an urn, because why? But what about a freezing tube? Cryonics is a long shot, a moonshot, but of course, steep odds are better than none if immortality is the kind of thing that matters to you. Even before science could make the gigantic leap to reanimate your remains, you would first have to “survive” eons of natural disasters, empire collapse, corporate malfeasance and plain, old indifference. It also assumes that humans of the future, supercharged by bioengineering, will care about waking the “cave people” for anything more than research purposes. They will have to value us the way we value ourselves, which is unlikely. So there’s almost no chance it would work. Almost.

In 1962, James Bedford became the first cryonaut, but the business has never boomed. In a Wait But Why post, Tim Urban looks at the philosophical and practical questions that attend the practice. An excerpt:

When Robert Ettinger was a kid in the 1930s, he read a lot of science fiction, and he assumed that with the world advancing the way it was, scientists would surely have a cure for aging at some point during his lifetime. He would live to see a world where sickness was a thing of the past and death was something people chose to do voluntarily, at a time of their choosing.

But thirty years later, aging and involuntary death were still very much a thing, and Ettinger, by then a physics professor, realized that science might not solve these problems in time for him to reap the benefits. So he started thinking about how to hack the system.

If, rather than being buried or cremated after his death, he could instead be frozen in some way—then whenever the scientists did eventually get around to conquering mortality, they’d probably also have the tools and know-how to resuscitate him, and he could have the last laugh after all.

In 1962, he wrote about this concept in a book called The Prospects of Immortality, and the cryonics movement was born.

The first person to give cryonics a try was James Bedford, a psychology professor who died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 73 and is doing his thing in a vat of liquid nitrogen in Arizona as you read this. Others slowly began to follow, and today, there are over 300 people hanging out in vats of liquid nitrogen.•

 

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“How Bad Is A World Where The Majority Of People Are Scientists?”

June 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a recent interview conducted by Wait But Why writer Tim Urban, Elon Musk discussed his misgivings about genetic engineering (e.g., the Nazi connection). But a hammer is a tool or a weapon depending on how you swing it, and modifying genes could cure or even end an assortment of horrible diseases, especially rare ones which never receive adeqaute funds to make a cure possible.

At her blog, biology of aging specialist Maria Konovalenko offers a riposte to Musk and other doubters. The opening:

When I hear that the conversation is about an ethical problem I anticipate that right now the people are going to put everything upside down and end with common sense. Appealing to ethics has always been the weapon of conservatism, the last resort of imbecility.

How does it work? At the beginning you have some ideas, but in the end it’s always a “no.” The person speaking on the behalf of ethics or bioethics is always against the progress, because he or she is being based on their own conjectures. What if the GMO foods will crawl out of the garden beds and eat us all? What if there will be inequality when some will use genetic engineering for their kids and some won’t? Let’s then close down the schools and universities – the main source of inequality. What if some will get the education and other won’t?

That’s exactly the position that ‪Elon Musk took by fearing the advances in genetic engineering. Well, first of all, there already is plenty of inequality. It is mediated by social system, limited resources and genetic diversity. First of all, why should we strive for total equality? More precisely, why does the plank of equality has to be based on a low intellectual level? How bad is a world where the majority of people are scientists? How bad is a world where people live thousands of years and explore deep space? It’s actually genetic engineering that gives us these chances. From the ‪#‎ethics‬ point of view things are visa versa. It’s refusing the very possibility of helping people is a terrible deed. Let’s not improve a person, because if we do what if this person becomes better than everybody else? Let’s not treat this person, because if we do he might live longer than everybody else? Isn’t this complete nonsense?•

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“If We Are Very Rare, We Better Get To The Multi-Planet Situation Fast”

June 13, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In an insightful and highly entertaining Business Insider profile of Elon Musk by Wait But Why writer Tim Urban, the technologist and journalist spend lunch discussing all manner of ideas: genetic engineering, superintelligence, consciousness, etc. Musk says he steers clear of genetic engineering because of its Nazi connection, and of course, he speaks of his desire to launch us into becoming a multi-planet species. An excerpt:

This guy has a lot on his mind across a lot of topics. In this one lunch alone, we covered electric cars, climate change, artificial intelligence, the Fermi Paradox, consciousness, reusable rockets, colonizing Mars, creating an atmosphere on Mars, voting on Mars, genetic programming, his kids, population decline, physics vs. engineering, Edison vs. Tesla, solar power, a carbon tax, the definition of a company, warping spacetime and how this isn’t actually something you can do, nanobots in your bloodstream and how this isn’t actually something you can do, Galileo, Shakespeare, the American forefathers, Henry Ford, Isaac Newton, satellites, and ice ages.

I’ll get into the specifics of what he had to say about many of these things in later posts, but some notes for now:

— He’s a pretty tall and burly dude. Doesn’t really come through on camera.

— He ordered a burger and ate it in either two or three bites over a span of about 15 seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it.

— He is very, very concerned about AI. I quoted him in my posts on AI saying that he fears that by working to bring about Superintelligent AI (ASI), we’re “summoning the demon,” but I didn’t know how much he thought about the topic. He cited AI safety as one of the three things he thinks about most—the other two being sustainable energy and becoming a multi-planet species, i.e. Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is a smart motherf—er, and he knows a ton about AI, and his sincere concern about this makes me scared.

— The Fermi Paradox also worries him. In my post on that, I divided Fermi thinkers into two camps—those who think there’s no other highly intelligent life out there at all because of some Great Filter, and those who believe there must be plenty of intelligent life and that we don’t see signs of any for some other reason. Musk wasn’t sure which camp seemed more likely, but he suspects that there may be an upsetting Great Filter situation going on. He thinks the paradox “just doesn’t make sense” and that it “gets more and more worrying” the more time that goes by. Considering the possibility that maybe we’re a rare civilization who made it past the Great Filter through a freak occurrence makes him feel even more conviction about SpaceX’s mission: “If we are very rare, we better get to the multi-planet situation fast, because if civilization is tenuous, then we must do whatever we can to ensure that our already-weak probability of surviving is improved dramatically.” Again, his fear here makes me feel not great.•

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