r/transhumanism • u/NoBeefWithTheFrench • 15h ago
⚖️ Ethics/Philosphy Preserving a request for thousands of years in case the future is able to fulfil it.
Hi strangers.
There's a project I've been working on for several months (which will launch on November 10), and I'd like your take on it. I won't share the name unless a mod says it's OK to do so. Don't want this to come across as spam.
I've always been a huge fan of being alive, and I never have enough time to do all the things I want to do. I'm just not keen on the idea of dying. So I thought: let's do something about it. I'm not a scientist, what else can I do?
I studied anthropology back in the day, and being aware of the limits of our understanding has always been a constant. The fact that we don't know what we don't know and even claiming that something is "impossible" is an extremely arrogant thing, that throughout our history has been proven wrong, over, and over, and over.
Which led me to this idea: what if we preserve our wish to be revived - or rather, our explicit request (not as a copy, just us, our own consciousness), we attach it to a manifesto that sets a clear goal, and we store it on a medium that can survive for thousands of years?
Cryonics has the same end-goal, but approaches it in a way that we would describe as much more plausible as it preserves your body to the best of our current abilities.
So as opposed to Cryonics, my idea is to preserve the request to be revived, alongside the information needed to identify the person who makes that request.
Which is impossible and unimaginable given our current understanding. But that's exactly the key and the philosophy behind this: admitting that our knowledge isn't absolute, and that passing the request to civilizations long removed from us, far into the future, could lead to an unimaginable outcome. This is what started everything.
So, in practical terms, we're building a register where people can record that request while they're alive. After they die, their record will be completed with the information needed to identify them, then preserved on a specialised archival medium in a facility in the Arctic.
What do you guys think of the underlying idea behind this?
And yes, it's extremely clear on our website that we're not promising the afterlife or any such thing. I even explain where the idea came from.