Exponential Advancement, The Singularity, and Eternal Life

Have you guys heard of Moore's Law?

Well basically it states that our technological advancement especially in computing is increasing exponentially.

Because of this it is predicted that between 2040-2050, and incredibly mind-blowing future-altering event will occur.

The Singularity

Basically, the singularity is when a species (in this case, humans) invents a machine with more processing power than its own brain.
Because of this it is expected that these machines will bring a HUGE explosion of technological advancement and information.

Exponential advancement is quite fascinating, and should play a HUGE part of game play.

For example;

It is possible that people born in the 1960's could live to be 200 years old. Mainly because life expectancy is increasing exponentially due to medical advancement.
Homo sapiens are designed/evolved to hit puberty at 12, have offspring between 14-17 and die at about 18-20 years old. Now we have people living to be 100, and life expectancy is increasing exponentially.

What will happen to society when a species is able to have an indefinite lifespan?

Sounds like Sci-Fi but believe it or not, this kind of advancement is expected to happen this century!

Crazy as it sounds, there is a chance that you (Yeah, you) May never die.

Now, stop burning your pensioning tax bills and back to the point. This kind of advancement is absolutely astonishing. We should expect to see a similar kind of advancement to our creatures on Thrive.

What would happen to a Generation who lives their entire lives with the concept of age and death and then all of a sudden it is no longer an issue?

Will it be devastating? Or not?
What would happen to religion?
What would happen to the economy, population?

When it comes to that its is just ONE issue presented by this kind of advancement.

When you are an organism, advancement in evolution is only observable over thousands of generations, through tribal and medieval it is only observable through hundreds, through industrial it takes a few generations to observe technological changes.
But when you hit the digital age technological advancements will begin to overwhelm you AND your species.


To better understand what I have been talking about here, check this site out. IT is amazing and will really help us out with many issues here. Best way to replicate anything in game scientifically is to look at the real world.

~Future Timeline~

Of course not everything on that timeline will be accurate!!

Discuss :]

This will be handled by the game with the mechanics already built in, no? I mean, if there is a Tech object that increases research output by something ridiculous (but realistic) like 100,000%, then we are going to see a huge jump in research rates.

You had me by the part where it we could develop technology basically smarter than us; I personally believe that should be implemented.

The part where we could extend our lives was equally interesting, but hang on a second:

Pezzalis wrote:

Crazy as it sounds, there is a chance that you (Yeah, you) May never die.

Ironically I've been browsing a site I recently found, but there's one page in particular that I'd like to bring up. And it's about immortality (spefically, 5 reasons why it probably wouldn't work.)

Here; link is very long.

There's some explicit language, here and there, but otherwise it's easy to get through and pretty self-expanatory. You can also get a good chuckle out of it and maybe waste a few hours of your life looking

However, gameplay-wise, this could be implemented without some of the problems listed, but #5 and #1 apply universally. I mean, if you're a klutz and you stumble into some obstacle that would normally kill you, you'll find that it doesn't kill you. Unfortunately, in some instances, you'll be stuck there, perhaps forever, and never get out, if not manage to break a hole large enough for you to fit through.. in the course of several hundred thousand years with your bare hands. Out-of-game, that's like a year you'd have to wait, assuming you don't start a new game and flush all that hard work and technological achievement down the toilet.

Then say the planet gets blown to smithereens by some alien race, or maybe a supernova, or some other reason. You'd be floating in space. Now, for the first bajitrillion years that's alright, because you're surrounded by pretty visuals every corner of your eye and you might land on a planet, you could perform swimming antics in the dense gas of a gas giant or something, but then afterwards, it's just a dark void of nothingness.

Of course, there's nothing a new game or handy savepoint can't solve, but imagine you having to start all over again. Otherwise, I say this be implemented.
..Did.. did that count as advertising?

There can be a research like Computers that gives you 100% of science boost. With twenty or so levels, you may get 500% science boost, and that would be a huuuge jump.

Alright, that's all well and good, but here's the issue.

Immortality is impossible.

Anything that is, as we would say, infinite or absolute, is impossible. Science says as much. Because the closer you get to the absolute, it becomes exponetially more difficult, requiring exponentially more energy and reasources, exponentially fewer mistakes, and so on. For example: It would take a machine the size of the universe to chill one atom to absolute zero.

Also, scienctists have predicted we'd have flying cars in the next ten years for the past hundred years. This stuff won't happen in our lifetime and we know it. Especially if we continue to pollute the environment to the point of no return.

Noitulove wrote:

You had me by the part where it we could develop technology basically smarter than us; I personally believe that should be implemented.

The part where we could extend our lives was equally interesting, but hang on a second:

Pezzalis wrote:

Crazy as it sounds, there is a chance that you (Yeah, you) May never die.

Ironically I've been browsing a site I recently found, but there's one page in particular that I'd like to bring up. And it's about immortality (spefically, 5 reasons why it probably wouldn't work.)

Here; link is very long.

There's some explicit language, here and there, but otherwise it's easy to get through and pretty self-expanatory. You can also get a good chuckle out of it and maybe waste a few hours of your life looking

However, gameplay-wise, this could be implemented without some of the problems listed, but #5 and #1 apply universally. I mean, if you're a klutz and you stumble into some obstacle that would normally kill you, you'll find that it doesn't kill you. Unfortunately, in some instances, you'll be stuck there, perhaps forever, and never get out, if not manage to break a hole large enough for you to fit through.. in the course of several hundred thousand years with your bare hands. Out-of-game, that's like a year you'd have to wait, assuming you don't start a new game and flush all that hard work and technological achievement down the toilet.

Then say the planet gets blown to smithereens by some alien race, or maybe a supernova, or some other reason. You'd be floating in space. Now, for the first bajitrillion years that's alright, because you're surrounded by pretty visuals every corner of your eye and you might land on a planet, you could perform swimming antics in the dense gas of a gas giant or something, but then afterwards, it's just a dark void of nothingness.

Of course, there's nothing a new game or handy savepoint can't solve, but imagine you having to start all over again. Otherwise, I say this be implemented.
..Did.. did that count as advertising?

The thing is that this article talks of individual immortality. If everyone is immortal, we won't have the reproduction problem. And i'm fairly sure that for the most part, this is immortality not invulnerability. So you would still die from being incinerated in the Apocalypse or getting crushed by buildings in an earthquake. Really, with the kind of technology you'd have inside you if you could survive these, you could use your built-in rocket thrusters to head back to civilisation or just bust out of the wreck like the terminator.

Ah, another Cracked.com reader. Yeah, I have read that and I agree with Alaska: imortality would likely be able to prevent death by sickness and age, but a bullet through your skull is still going to kill you unless you are either a: seriously lucky or b: the technology keeping you alive is advanved enough to fix everything that goes wrong with you within milliseconds.

That said, I think that this is an interesting idea, and one that likely should be implemented in some form in the game. Probably something with advanced medical understanding and biomechanics, etc.

I love cracked. This thread raises a good point. Although life expectancy is not really increasing exponentially, it is increasing rapidly, as is computing power, although Moore's law has basically been disproven, because we won't be making any huge advances until we hit quantum computing.

I read most of that link on a future timeline for Earth. Very interesting read. Does it give any ideas to anybody on things to do with Thrive? I'm sure the tech tree would be able to get a few new tech concepts out of that. It also gives some thought to inorganic life for the Machine Life thread.

Poisson wrote:

I read most of that link on a future timeline for Earth. Very interesting read. Does it give any ideas to anybody on things to do with Thrive? I'm sure the tech tree would be able to get a few new tech concepts out of that. It also gives some thought to inorganic life for the Machine Life thread.

I would just like to say that that was the most depressing thing I ever read. I would trade anything to prevent us from loosing our emotion and awe at the universe. What is the point of existance if you are unable to be inspired?

In any case, I felt some of this we'll really have to botch. I'm fairly certain that we need to make expansion far easier and loss of identity much harder. What would be more frustrating than watching all your races end up as the same electronic system, never seen or heard, all the same. *Shudders*

Let me hear a cheer for flaws, eh?

Tenebrarum wrote:

Poisson wrote:

I read most of that link on a future timeline for Earth. Very interesting read. Does it give any ideas to anybody on things to do with Thrive? I'm sure the tech tree would be able to get a few new tech concepts out of that. It also gives some thought to inorganic life for the Machine Life thread.

I would just like to say that that was the most depressing thing I ever read. I would trade anything to prevent us from loosing our emotion and awe at the universe. What is the point of existance if you are unable to be inspired?

In any case, I felt some of this we'll really have to botch. I'm fairly certain that we need to make expansion far easier and loss of identity much harder. What would be more frustrating than watching all your races end up as the same electronic system, never seen or heard, all the same. *Shudders*

Let me hear a cheer for flaws, eh?

Yes, kinda depressing that it depicted us becoming more and more logical and less easily amazed.

I agree, we shouldn't allow this to be something easy. I think the link made it sound like it was too easy. This requires extreme amounts of technological research before anything like this even can happen. But I don't think expansion should be much easier. Yes, things have to be messed with for gameplay purposes, but too easy and we get to being Spore whith people throwing down colonies on every planet they see with decent resources.

Yeah, it has flaws, but it is thought provoking at least.

It does have a lot of interesting points, but i don't think that it's effects on the game will be as profound as you guys think. This has researches far past the scope i've ever cared to imagine, and far past the end of the CIV mod research tree i've been working off of. But the research tree won't be all suddenly discovered at once, and just because all your people are 'wired' doesn't mean you are automatically safe from everything and have infinite research. There will still be plenty of problems occuring between and within nations. This will in no way make the game more boring or more narrow. Your race can still war if they so wish, despite what this timeline says about everyone becoming caring and charitable.

And as for all races turning into the same end-game race, well that's kind of silly. All races will have different view aesthetically, and so there's no reason that their "avatars" will all turn out the same. For instance, humans will always want to be humanoid shaped, even in their cyborg exoskeleton and robot avatars. So you will always have some sense of your race, even when they are all just stuck in cabinets and tuned into the universal power grid.

US_of_Alaska wrote:

All races will have different view aesthetically, and so there's no reason that their "avatars" will all turn out the same. For instance, humans will always want to be humanoid shaped, even in their cyborg exoskeleton and robot avatars. So you will always have some sense of your race, even when they are all just stuck in cabinets and tuned into the universal power grid.

what are you talking about! i want to be a Utah Raptor, not a stupid human body! :3

but a sort of neuro-electronic system where all of your memory is uploaded to a system, like an ethereal eternal wireless internet that other species could intrude on if they managed to get on the same frequency, but having a place where you could manipulate the world around you inside the area would effect your species, maybe by increasing happiness, and more complex reliable remote controlled robots? or anything that requires planning/thinking.

I don't personally think we humans are getting more intelligent, quite the opposite...

Do NOT necropost, this thread is 3 years old.

WilliamstheJohn wrote:

Do NOT necropost, this thread is 3 years old.

oh wow, it is, i will try to remember to look at the date of the last post before doing so