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we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

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Benjamin Franklin once wrote,

In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Maybe he was wrong about that.

So today we'll be looking at resurrection, restoration, revivification, and various philosophical and technological approaches to these, including some concepts like quantum

reincarnation and some thought experiments like Roco's basilisk, a type of a causal event that

mimics time travel by threatening to resurrect people

to torture them.

Resurrection is the restoration of life to those who have perished, and it is one-half

of the solution to the immortality or radical life extension problem for any machine or system.

Part of keeping a body or machine alive is keeping it in good maintenance, reversing

or hardening it against decay, and the other part is fixing it when it undergoes catastrophic

breakdown, or in this case, when someone dies.

After all, life extension doesn't protect you from somehow getting a Darwin award.

The first thing we have to do in order to discuss resurrection is to define when someone

is dead.

That's no easy task, and it's in large part because we often move the goalpost.

Death is a bit of a gray area, but since life after death and resurrection are traditionally

...