Hello everyone welcome to the 2023 holiday message from the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

Every year we do this holiday message because basically I take roughly two weeks off for holiday time. So next week really will take off. There will be no

Mindscape podcast released on Christmas Day itself. But the previous week we do the holiday message, which is supposed to be a short, shorter

than usual anyway.

Little solo podcast, not quite a full-blown podcast, not something it deserves to be a solo episode all by itself,

but a little brief reflection on something interesting

that is either on my mind at the moment

or happened during the year, or many things happened during the year or many things happened during the year or whatever it happens to be.

So this year I thought that there was something interesting that I participated in this year.

Back in September I was a speaker at a workshop at the

Santa Fe Institute devoted to the topic of immortality. Yes you heard that

correctly. Immortality living forever. This was the topic and I love this fact about the Santa Fe Institute that they're willing to be that adventurous I guess maybe is the word to try something different

extraordinarily interdisciplinary so this is an idea that was actually hatched

by David Krakhauer previous Mind Mindscape guest, and Caitlin McShay, who is also at SFI.

And they brought together a bunch of people, scientists, but also literary artist type people, people from a variety of different humanities

as well as social sciences and physical sciences backgrounds and just said yeah immortality let's talk about it what

what does it mean what are the prospects would it be good or bad etceter

very specifically it was not about mortality. Mortality dying is something

that we don't want to face up to, but okay, we do talk about the prospect of it, and it's

very important to, and as I've said several times I don't think we do a very good job in our culture right now

But immortality we don't talk about that much

Probably because it's not very realistic to be frank, but would it be a good

...