Immortality

Slashdot is covering another article about the immortality guy with whom readers of my LJ should be familiar. This justifyably excites me. Part of the fuss of this has been about the consequences, and my response is this: let the consequences come. Society refuses to change, so let us force it to. This will offer an opportunity to introduce sweeping changes to how humanity views and organizes itself, and I for one embrace that opportunity.

Another exciting result of this would be the unimaginable expansion of knowledge. As thing stand now, we humans are wasting precious assloads of time and deterring our progress immensely simply by our life cycle. We have to reteach ourselves everything every generation. This not only wastes time, but puts a cap on the accomplishments possible in one lifetime, and leaves everyone else to build off of those. By these means, progress does occur, but only in painful increments. If, all of a sudden, we had an infinite amount of time to learn, the results would be phenomenal. Knowledge, no doubt, is cumulative. This would be a boon to all of humanity and would speed us up on the progress line by unquantifyable amounts.
This is fantastic shit.