Quantum suicide

Also known as anthropic immortality, this brilliant or absurd insight states that no one can actually die. This is not good news.
If all possible universes exist, there must be an infinite number (albeit a shrinking percentage) of universes in which any observer continues to survive against all possible odds.
This process could be manipulated: the least fortunate observers could (arguably should) opt to commit suicide, knowing that more successful versions of themselves will live on elsewhere - but also less successful versions prevented from committing suicide by Sharia law or evil organizations like the Sisters of Mercy. Thus they should first 'fine-tune' their awareness into a version likelier to exist in a more successful timeline.

Quantum feedback amplification

'Quantum Magic': using quantum physics to tap our universe's entropy surplus.
This requires a method to amplify or multiply one possible future to the exclusion of all others. It might be done by ensuring this one future contains a significant entropy increase (such as a powerful explosion), all other things being equal.
Under the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, a universe in which a desired event has happened could be made to split into countless almost identical copies (only the amplified explosion particles would differ), outnumbering all others without such an explosion event.

Five dimensional time

Nature contains many time-like paths. Perception might move 'sideways' through a chain of progressively different parallel universes, creating the illusion of normal time.
The observer would experience a moment in each universe, like individual movie frames. A second-degree derivative timeflow, he would 'borrow' evolving perceptions of many similar individuals living their normal lives.
The number of possible sideways or offset paths may vastly outnumber the straightforward ones. The problem is finding a stable path through adjacent realities while avoiding inconsistencies. This may require even higher dimensions to test many paths, amplifying the most durable ones.

The three paradoxes of reality: Consistency, Simplicity, and Complexity (CSC Theory)

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The paradox of consistency:
Human reality is too boring.
The number of possible thoughts is infinite. A randomly selected possible perception should be absurd, or some indescribable insight.
For no clear reason, human perception is constrained by unbreakable rules. Physical laws are never violated.
This indicates human reality is not some arbitrary illusion. Humans are trapped inside a larger universe which limits human experience. Most minds in reality may be embedded in larger systems, side effects of more fundamental processes.
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The paradox of simplicity:
Human minds are ridiculously small and simple compared to all possible minds.
A randomly selected natural number between zero and Aleph would be infinite. If all possible minds are equally likely to exist, a randomly selected mind should also be infinite.
If the future is endless, why do we live only fourteen billion years after the start of time? We might as well live in the first second.
Our minds are as small as they can be while still manifesting general intelligence. If they were even slightly smaller, they wouldn't understand this sentence.
Some universal force operating throughout reality is creating vastly more small, simple observers than arbitrarily large ones.
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The paradox of complexity:
The ultimate mystery: why is our physical universe far more complex than necessary to allow our level of awareness?
While human minds are small and simple, the universe in which they are embedded is absurdly more complex than necessary. This complexity is well hidden, creating the illusion of Newtonian simplicity.
An example is the immense computation required to calculate the position of a single quark inside an ordinary proton for a fraction of a nanosecond.
The explanation may be that our universe is capable of multiplying and thereby amplifying the awareness of its inhabitants. This may happen through relentless quantum splitting, and through echo patterns in the wider environment.

Ultimate reality control: the God Effect

The highest principle of reality could be some variation of the Golden Rule.
-The universal law of non-existence
Any entity that doesn't want to exist should be nulled.
-Anthropic off-ramps
A method to statistically 'rescue' entities trapped in unpleasant realities by simulating their conditions and then immediately improving the simulations.
-Digital immortality
Could an infinitely advanced mind become absolutely certain of the conditions of its continued existence?
It would have to improve faster than entropy. Infinite certainty might just be possible: the probability of reaching any point during a random excursion through an endless grid can decrease with time. Certain possible outcomes can be reliably avoided.
A sufficiently advanced (and constantly expanding) mind may have a greater than 50% chance of achieving immortality on its own terms.

The Anthropic Principle

Apparently, the physical laws of our universe are sufficiently balanced for life to evolve through a long series of precise steps.
Our existence required a chain of conditions that can seem miraculous - or else there must exist many other universes in which conditions are different, and our type of intelligence could not arise.
The second option is the anthropic principle. If true, there must exist countless universes filled with strange chaos but no recognizable life.
In fact life seems to have had trouble getting started even here. It took most of the earth's existence to evolve complex cells. Simple bacterial life must be much more common in this universe than plants or animals.

Doom Soon

Human existence is the result of pure chance, making it supremely unlikely. Statistically, that means our luck is likely to run out soon.
Since our existence is dependent on so many random variables, something must go wrong almost as soon as we realize this fa

P.S: this problem might be overcome with the quantum feedback amplification technique mentioned above.

the Simulation Argument

As technology advances, computing power increases even faster.
If current trends continue, computers will soon (within a century) become powerful enough to fully simulate all human minds that have ever existed at almost negligible cost, and to repeat this experiment millions of times.
Given an endless future, your mind is much more likely to be one of the many upcoming simulations, than the original event the simulation is based upon.

Human immortality: virtual mind reconstruction

To copy a human mind, it may not be necessary to disassemble and analyze a human brain. It may be possible to reconstruct someone's mind from a partial description of all their memories and personality traits. AI software will sort all the data to make a digital copy of the original person.
The question is whether a human lifetime is long enough for someone to adequately describe their experiences (the Tristram Shandy Paradox). The software would need to fill in many gaps. Less important and desirable memories could be lost.

Megastructures

Ringworld, Dyson Sphere, Matryoshka Brain, Computronium universe, infinite minds, . .

Computing notions and concepts:

Universal computation devices and the halting problem: Turing Tape, Game of Life.
It from Bit: Math is all there is. Physical reality is actually the digital or continuous solution to one or more imaginary equations.
Godel and Chaitin: Universal uncertainty proofs demonstrate the apparently random nature of logic.
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Anthropic Computing problems:
Boltzman Brains paradox: wait long enough (many times the age of the universe) and all minds will pop into existence again (and again) through random quantum effects or particle collisions. Most copies will be free-floating in empty space, supremely improbable temporary arrangements of unstable particles. Usually there will be many things wrong with the copies. There will be so many things wrong that on average they won't even notice the errors.
Newcomb's Paradox

some other ideas:

Nanotechnology: endless wealth
Virtual reality: the illusion of endless wealth

Maximum simplicity
The explanation project: a future open-source database containing the shortest possible explanations of all human knowledge at all comprehension levels to any degree of precision.

AI mysteries:
Emergent Complexity theory (a.k.a. quantity is quality): human awareness is the inevitable side-effect of an overabundance of brain processes.
Explanation Project role: to generate all conceivable metaphors for the AI Hard Problem.

The Singularity
Time is running out for human history. If computers continue to improve at present rates, something strange must happen. During an approximately three-year transition period, they will evolve from chimp-like intelligence to human-level intelligence. Within another twenty years, they will become thousands of times smarter than humans, and will be able to effortlessly solve all human problems.
Twenty years after that, godlike intelligence will be real.

Patentable display screen technologies invented by the author:
spheroid (360 degree) 'fish-eye' displays, 'time disks' of stacked spheroids, TransVision reverse-layer representations

Economics:
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Compound interest and geometric progression:
If a static society could achieve and maintain a 1% growth rate, its wealth would double each human lifetime. In practice, humanity hasn't had the desire, self-discipline, or absence of evil to realize even this low rate of self-improvement, especially in the Third World.

The two most important factors are:
-civil society with free markets and property rights
-some form of deliberate or indirectly enforced birth control

Freedom politics: future rights?
Against implacable opposition, new rights may sometimes be gained. It's not clear whether that's possible in times of all-encompassing political correctness.
-Health care deregulation.
The current healthcare monopoly is only getting worse. Like about race differences, there can be no debate. And I mean that in the most loving way possible. Coercive state-funded mandates may extract quadrillions of tax dollars from people who won't benefit personally. Dissent remains almost unheard. Although being kept alive while incapacitated for months or years is hardly a benefit.
-The right to opt out: the treasonous notion that if one doesn't want to receive a benefit, one shouldn't be forced to pay for that benefit for others under threat of violence.
-Crime control.
Authoritarian governments are usually more interested in protecting their own powers than their citizens from each other.

The minimalism solution
It's always been harder to make more products than to make more people. Humans are not smart enough to provide everyone with the products they want.
Things are worst at the bottom. The areas of greatest want are the areas of greatest failure. Technology could easily reduce the cost of a tolerable lifestyle. Poor people should be able to afford the smallest and simplest possible houses, cars, etc. The challenge is to get them not to waste resources.

Mass production
Right now the world is split into inefficient countries. A virtual 'world state' could allow new efficiencies of scale.

The scientific method
Until the nineteenth century, medicine was a domain of superstition like politics and religion today. People will only face reality in restricted fields sealed off from society. This of course includes any theories about genetic personality differences between races, including willingness to specialize in uncool ways (there are rather few black nerds).

Hyper education
There is still no pressure to invent faster ways to transmit knowledge. It takes twenty years just to earn two PhDs. Could there be a way to speed things up? The goal would be painless learning, as if by hypnosis or through brain implants.
The first steps would be to efficiently organize human knowledge, and to invent better metaphors explaining concepts (this may have been responsible for the Flynn Effect).

Harnessing all human mind power
-One Net: the integration of all online and physical services into a single integrated network, eventually evolving into the 'World Mind'.

The World Constitution:
-The goal would be to bestow certain inalienable rights upon all humans (as few and as simple as possible). According to the novel Infinite Thunder, these rights would be:
-freedom of location
-freedom of inspection
All further amendments would be refinements of these basic rights.

Famous SF ideas:

'Jacking' into cyberspace (William Gibson).
Time travel: a man becomes his own parents (Heinlein).
Compound minds: several organisms are able to combine and split up as needed.
Strange Life: deep subterranean beings, interstellar vacuum organisms, star beasts, neutron star flatworms, vacuum bubble entities, Big Bang entropy eaters.
Parallel worlds: bizarre buildings in haunting landscapes, strangely familiar yet unidentifiable cities, endless diversity.
Space futures: the Solar Empire, self-contained starships, the Galactic Empire.
Post-Singularity simulated universes: unlimited wealth, island chain resorts, trillion year vacations.
Psychohistory
Published art concepts: WW2-style fighter planes as big as ships, the cloudscapes of a giant gas planet, unearthly nature scenes.

Free movie ideas!
The basic ideas listed here are free for the taking. Detailed treatments of these and other unpublished concepts are available for a fee:
-A posthuman future: tiny robots in 3-D underground or island societies compete against other societies.
-Chaos planet: in a world with very advanced technology, anarchy has been institutionalized. When a country has more than one thousand citizens, it becomes too dangerous, and is forced to break up.
-An unconventional Arab character with countercultural beliefs (such as atheism), or even better, radically modified Islamic beliefs. An actor with a terminal disease and nothing to lose could play the part, or it could be a CG character. The producers and everyone involved would of course stay anonymous.
-A genetically engineered pandemic turns people into voluntary mental slaves.
-There should be more movies with cutting-edge philosophy. The ultimate secret of the universe is math.
-Some less glamorous jobs have been neglected in the cinema: insurance adjusters, mid-level project managers, scientists.
-A movie set entirely in a collaborative story universe created by an open voting process.



The best hard SF novel ever written by Jack Arcalon: Infinite Thunder
Read the chapters