premise: i currently work in a prospective sector within biology that still has to do with, on the most fundemental level, statistics. ML, or nowadays, AI, are merely extensions of statistics. in a broad sense, the baseline of what we have to dive in today is longevity. and longevity is the single best tool to preserve the most important weapon that we have against the greatest enemy of absolutely everything: intelligence.
by intelligence, it could be artificial or human intelligence. it simply doesn't matter which one it is as long as they coexist for the same goal. and that goal would be discussed later. what im trying to lay out here is a thesis statement on ultimately, why im doing what im currently doing. as to what im dedicating myself to do for the forseeable future has many small components that can be summarized into a single word: extend everyone's physical lives, with the hope that the "everyone" contains individuals who can themselves (biological thinking, ie humans) empower or create toolings (statistical thinking, ie AI) that empower what im about to talk about to a great extent.
the ultimate project is a physical project (derived through reason), not one of metaphysical (derived through faith and creation of axioms).
we can start from familiar concepts of second law of thermodynamics, heat death (big freeze), entropy, and the like that are familiar to the general audience. this is, supported by today's theory (which is grounded by today's technological advances), the default script for how everything will play out. we have a stack of cards that started from ace of spades that would end in king of diamonds. the big bang gives birth to entropy, causing the space between the cards to expand indefinitely. in between them are dead space.
my high school biology teacher claims to fight entropy is impossible, and therefore we should embrace it. let's see what happens if we embrace it. the cards will get farther apart from each other in random directions, causing the original deck to change into, in the end, a spatial state where they are almost infinitely impossible to be resorted back to its original state. these cards will be evenly distributed in an infinitely increasing volume of space. and time becomes meaningless, because they cannot converge back to its original order and distance between each other, originally at 0 as a "stack." but notice i said "almost" infinitely impossible, not infinitely impossible. because of probability. entropy could theoretically decrease. the cards could fly toward each other in outer space. and they could eventually re-become the original deck. but it's unlikely enough that it would never happen in the lifespan of roughly a trillion universes.
a trillion universes without life. without civilization, culture, love, intelligence.
just nothing. a state that can only be disrupted, after an insurmountable amount of time, a tiny quantum fluctuation strong enough to restart everything. and even if that happens, what we originally had would be infinitely less likely to repeat compared to a completely different progression of events, but are still events nonetheless. maybe cats will not be there in the next iteration of this incomplete "repeat." maybe they would be called something else. maybe they are biologically different. maybe the term "cat" in alphabetical order is different. maybe alphabets will never exist ever again. this is also what nietzsche's attempted logical backing for physical eternal recurrence under the scrutiny of entropy falls short.
my death is not a scary concept. and i've learned to not really cope against it, but on a more macro scale, not so significant compared to the life of someone much greater than me, who can, perhaps, with greater utility, live a much fuller life by my evaluation of fullness. what is scary, however, is the death of everything. and especially living things. living systems that possess reason, intelligence, culture, that separate themselves from helium or gold.
so in the second iteration, a likely case would be that iteration is very close to not being perfect, but almost perfectly crude and unsatisfactory, where nothing leads to the creation of meaning.
another damning factor lies in the fact that the poincaré recurrence theorem does not work in an ever-expanding universe. so each iteration, if there ever will be, shrinks exponentially. therefore, life's return will be infinitely closer to zero as time goes on. in fact, it already is. we are all dying. the we is not just homo sapiens. i mean every eventful thing that can be deemed meaningful.
but our biggest enemy isn't entropy, to which we can see. a deck of cards being thrown in outer space can be observed to go their own ways, never to become whole.
the enemy is what we cannot see. and our biggest ally is also what we cannot see. there is, at the most fundemental level, an observational limitation that impedes our progress toward completing this greatest ultimate odyssey.
we cannot see dark matter and dark energy. and this is not cliche. that deck of cards can fly indefinitely in a more desolate and growing universe. but if we can limit where every card within the deck can go by putting a closed container for them, they will have a infinitely higher chance of returning to their original state.
but observation is only the first challenge. and therefore the first step is the easiest of all steps. this require the preservation and continued creation of intelligence in every possible form. this depends on several factors: education, health & longevity, and time.
time is an ever changing constant. education and longevity (my domain of interest) are accelerators. perhaps a fourth factor, ethics, could morally bound the derailability toward the success of achieving the first step. and we are already making meaningful progress toward observability. and this is the most critical, 0 to 1 step of all steps.
but what about the second, third, fourth steps and so on after if we have accomplished the first? our ability to observe gravity helped us build bridges and airplanes. our ability to then observe electricity helped us build the digital age. the observation of dark energy and dark matter would lead to the ability to derive solutions through engineering. and this is not a scale problem. it's a thinking problem.
to engineer solutions, we cannot put feathers and wings on human back but to manufacture airplanes. the same goes to our main concern. we cannot control 95% (dark energy and dark matter) of the universe with the remaining 5% (matter) of it. in other words, we cannot move the ocean with only the foam.
now we are beyond concrete facts, but hypotheticals. we can talk further about phase transition (freeze the entire ocean with a seed crystal, my personal favorite since it is the most universally effective), topological defects (limited in a temporal sense, since we'd be borrowing from regions with concentrated energy and gravity), and finding exotic matter (limited in a spatial sense, since it could only theoretically work in a local area following the casimir effect but not the entire cosmos).
but with my gut i trust us. i trust humans. and we have thrived despite almost dying everytime something bad happened. and we can endure. and we are the greatest engineer. we didn't fly because we genetically engineered people to have them grow wings. we operated under the laws of physics on Earth to create airplanes. we cheated. and we are very good at cheating in a fixed system. that's what we do. and everything from observation to experimentation to finding statistically significant results relys on cheating. you can call it engineering if you want better conotation. but we have been, in the most respectful sense, cheated our way to today's glory.
and there is no universal truth but this project. because the truth can be changed. the truth we have been talking about is a default, without the intervention of intelligence, its own indifferent and increasingly meaningless and deathful state. the universe assigned a default as truth but today we know, by the studying of what we cannot see YET, the existence of potential solutions. and that is enough to indicate the potential of us, yes, us, to rewrite the script. to change the default, and create our own truths, not in a metaphysical, metaphorical, or philosophical sense. physically. yes. physically.
so... to sum everything up, this is the ultimate project once poverty, corruption, and all crude problems begin stand in the sideline, so the main path is wide enough and the destination is brighter without congestion, for everyone to embark on uniformly. but the first step requires temporal acceleration. and that is why we need education and longevity. and that is why i work in longevity. because i love the living. and i love culture, i love love, i love creation, i love movies, art, design, language, and i love reason.