notes-moralityIfThePastEndures

What if it turns out to be physically possible to recover perfect information about past events? This doesn't seem to be possible according to our current ideas about physics, but we could always be wrong.

This suggests that sometime in the far future it would be possible, with sufficiently awesome technology, to "resurrect" dead people by methodically copying them from their state at some point in the past.

Time will go on for quite awhile after we are dead, so if this turns out to be physically possible at all, it may not be ridiculous to conclude that the probability of your being resurrected after your death (possibly many times) is very high.

With powerful future technology, it may also be possible to build a perfect police state, perhaps even one in which people cannot die without the permission of the authorities, and are kept alive indefinitely (and tortured indefinitely, if they disobey).

So, bearing all this in mind, if you die today, you might be resurrected into such a society in the far future.

To the extent that you think this is probable, you have a very strong incentive to try and improve the world, so that the probability of it going in that direction after your death is minimized.

(spoiler alert: some of these ideas were explored in In The Light of Other Days, by Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter)

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