London Futurists: video conference on technological resurrection

Yesterday I participated in an online video conference on Technological Resurrection, organized and moderated by by David Wood, Chair of London Futurists.

The concept of “Technological Resurrection,” defined as the ability to bring back to life people who died centuries ago, and whose bodies have long since disintegrated, is explored in a recent book of the same name by Jonathan A. Jones, who participated in the video conference.

Besides Jonathan and David, other participants were Katie “Miss Metaverse” Schultz and Alexey Turchin. The video conference was streamed live via YouTube, and the viewers were able to comment and ask questions.

The book is a little gem that provides a short and readable first introduction to our ideas on technological resurrection. See my review of Jonathan’s book, and David’s review.

Here is the full video recording of the conference.

I finally discovered why there’s a kitten on the cover of Jonathan’s book: He hopes to be with his beloved departed pets in the afterlife. I totally understand that, and hope to find my own sweet Sacha in the afterlife. If she isn’t there, I plan to find and retrieve her, perhaps with techniques similar to those described in the book.

I brought these points to the table: I consider technological resurrection as physically possible, and therefore I am persuaded it will be achieved someday, perhaps with “quantum entanglement across time” (as Jonathan mentioned), perhaps by exploiting wormholes that connect to the past (If ER=EPR, entanglement and wormholes are essentially the same thing), perhaps by other means. I prefer not to speculate on the timeline though: A few hundred years, or a few thousand, or more, who knows, and who cares? The universe is still young, and the transition will be instantaneous from our subjective perspective.

I am totally open to the possibility that we’ll be resurrected by alien civilizations (the universe is big), or by system operators in a higher reality who run our own reality as a simulation, or by God (by any name). In fact, the simulation hypothesis is totally equivalent to traditional religion, and I suspect that supernatural and scientific theologies will converge.

Even if no alien super-civilizations are presently busy resurrecting their fellow sentient beings in the universe, even if our reality is not a simulation (perhaps we happen to live in base reality), and even if God hasn’t emerged yet, then well, we’ll be able to get something good done. Future technology will be able to copy the dead from the past to the future, and bring them back to life.

How? Jonathan’s book explores some possibilities, in a simple, readable, entertaining, and perhaps naive way. My own forthcoming book will make a lot of references to philosophy, theology, and advanced physics, but I suspect it will be equally naive. The thing is, we just don’t know enough. Future generations will know more.

Please watch the full video!

Image from London Futurists.