i recently have been thinking about the potential of sleep extension as a path to immortality
in the film Space Station 76 there is a grandma in a cryo pod being wheeled around as 'luggage',
this visual set my mind off:
(i) imagine a false future where cryo has become practical to the point that all people, instead of dying, simply cryo themselves at near death, the hope is to stunt any further aging, turning what would have been five years of living into 500 years of cryo in the hope that immortality will be medically possible by that time where they can then be woken and live forever, the comedy of it all is that it will fall on younger generations to tend to their lineage.. everyone will have huge warehouses full of old family members that you will have to protect and drag around with you, family as furniture: certain figures with interesting life stories will be stored in the living room as a mantel piece while the majority will be stored in the warehouse; the numbers increasing with every generation more that lacks medical immortality
(ii) then i was thinking.. what if sleep, a completely unexplained phenomenon, is an untapped resource? sleep seems to me a means of organising new information in the brain and healing the body, what if there is research that extends the time we sleep in order to optimise these procedures, what if instead of limiting our sleep with amphetamines and caffeine we looked to increase the time we sleep, another imagined future where we live for 70 years and sleep for 70, missing an entire generation, waking again for another 70, to sleep then for another 70, how interesting to lose our culture and find ways to symbiotically live in the new, what kind of infrastructure would be needed.. long term sleep rental space, protecting the sleeping
ideally, we will be able to achieve the health benefits of sleep in wakefulness, but it just seemed a new to me and interesting meditation to think on potential benefits by altering conditions and internal processes to sleep actively
I wonder if these suspended states they talk about later in the article would actually extend your life for the duration of the suspended state. I presume the aging processes also slow down or stop. Perhaps this is a more realistic option for near-death people wanting to come back to life in the future than cryogenics.
in the film Space Station 76 there is a grandma in a cryo pod being wheeled around as 'luggage', this visual set my mind off:
(i) imagine a false future where cryo has become practical to the point that all people, instead of dying, simply cryo themselves at near death, the hope is to stunt any further aging, turning what would have been five years of living into 500 years of cryo in the hope that immortality will be medically possible by that time where they can then be woken and live forever, the comedy of it all is that it will fall on younger generations to tend to their lineage.. everyone will have huge warehouses full of old family members that you will have to protect and drag around with you, family as furniture: certain figures with interesting life stories will be stored in the living room as a mantel piece while the majority will be stored in the warehouse; the numbers increasing with every generation more that lacks medical immortality
(ii) then i was thinking.. what if sleep, a completely unexplained phenomenon, is an untapped resource? sleep seems to me a means of organising new information in the brain and healing the body, what if there is research that extends the time we sleep in order to optimise these procedures, what if instead of limiting our sleep with amphetamines and caffeine we looked to increase the time we sleep, another imagined future where we live for 70 years and sleep for 70, missing an entire generation, waking again for another 70, to sleep then for another 70, how interesting to lose our culture and find ways to symbiotically live in the new, what kind of infrastructure would be needed.. long term sleep rental space, protecting the sleeping
ideally, we will be able to achieve the health benefits of sleep in wakefulness, but it just seemed a new to me and interesting meditation to think on potential benefits by altering conditions and internal processes to sleep actively