Living forever in perfect condition with a suicide mode - damn right I’d take it. Things are gonna change so much over the next 50 years even (look back 50 years and think about it), imagine the next millennium…
Living forever, you could actually learn everything that you wanted to know. You could use that knowledge. You could live long enough to see the effects of that use.
However, I’d rather just go around a few times. I’d love to get another chance at living a different youth as well as doing all the stuff I won’t have time for in my current life.
Not that I have any regrets about my life that I would want to start it all over again, but I’d just like to try being someone else. Get some variety in your eternity!
I like the idea of inevitable death. I have always found that part of the deliciousness of just about anything truly enjoyable is the knowledge that it’s going to end eventually.
The way I have always thought of death (I’m referring only to natural death, and not tragically early or anything) is sort of like sliding into a hot tub at the end of a satisfying but exhausting day of skiing or something, if that makes any sense.
If you want to offer me a guarantee that I will stay healthy into my 90s or so, I’ll snap that up. But eternal life? Nope, nope, nope.
I will defintely look into that book. It sounds quite interesting. As for death being like sliding into a nice hot tub at the end of a long day… well… this is one hot tub I would just rather avoid totally.
No. I’d like a longer life span but eternity would suck. First everyone you had known in your ‘normal’ lifespan would die, and as the centuries rolled on the entire world that you were born in would die too. The language, values and culture that you were born with would change and die out in the wider world, and would linger on only in the living fossil that would be you. No one would understand you, and everything you had known would perish. People that you came to care about would be gone in a blink of your eye. All you would have is the novelty of the new and that would only last as long as it took you to realise there is nothing new.
I’d certainly like to try it out (as long as I could be stuck where I was before I threw my back out…eternity with a bad back…sheesh), although there would be much sorrow as mine and my surrounding generations passed. If it sucks, I ought to be able to end it. I wouldn’t want to be ‘doomed’ to live forever against my will.
It would be a bit cold after 10[sup]99[/sup] years after the last galactic black hole has evaporated…
no solid matter anywhere in the universe once the protons decay…
and eternity will only have just begun.
Eternal Youth and health with a suicide option whenever I wanted. Yes I would take that in an instant.
Eternal Youth and health without a suicide option…except for the end of the Universe…hmm Yea I would probably take that as well. If it was that or death, yea I would take the chance. But one has to assume in practicality…there is always a way to destroy yourself.
I don’t know about eternity, but a few hundred or thousand years of healthy and aware life would be wonderful. And I wouldn’t even care about a suicide option, as I am of the opinion that there is nothing that they human mind cannot adapt to if forced.
However, I can see very clearly why many would not want this option, and why many who would claim to want it would quickly grow tired of it. Paraphrasing, someone whom I can’t remember, ‘many people would ask to live forever, who cannot think of anything good to do on a saturday night’.
Again I turn to fiction for answers to these questions. (And yes, I will check out the one mentioned !)
In one of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books, our hero is approached by an alien who had immortality thrust upon him, and was so bored after exhausting everything he could possibly think of to do (laughing at his friends’ funerals, etc), that he made it his mission to insult everyone in the universe, alphabetically.
The vampires I have seen in my limited exposure to Ann Rice books and Buffy the Vampire Slayer seem rather unhappy with the whole immortality thing. Like watching everyone they could ever love, grow old and die.
Now, if we assume that if I can become immortal, then so can everyone else, the man to read is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, who has addressed this question many times. Read Welcome to the Monkey House for more details, but I will summarize what happens when everyone can live as long as they want to: there are too many people and not enough space/other scarce resources. So, everyone is
highly encouraged (but never obliged) to visit “Suicide Parlours,” where attractive women cater to their every need while they get their Final Injection
packed into ever-decreasing residential spaces, with their five hundred closest relatives, all with nothing to do but wait for the patriarch to choose to die so that one of them (the most favoured) can get his bed
You’re mixing up two different Vonnegut stories here, Welcome to the Monkey House (in which an ever-growing population is encouraged to commit suicide and discouraged to have sex) and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (in which the youth drug anti-gerasone keeps everyone young and healthy, leading to a huge population problem).
And a third good Vonnegut book is Galapagos. It’s technically the story of a ghost, a ghost who turned down the chance to go to “heaven”* and thus must wander the earth for a million years.
*I say Heaven to simplify. Vonnegut (I don’t think) refers to it as heaven, it’s more like a light that his father (I think) invites him into. Anyway, it’s topical.
Sheesh, talk about forgetting after a few years. A decade after I read that book I have to use qualifiers like “I think”…
I have pointed this out before, but given a long lived population the birth rate will have to fall to match the death rate or there will be severe overpopulation;
even expanding human territory into the universe at the speed of light could not avoid overcrowding if population continues to grow.
The end result of this is there would be very few children; only enough to replace the numbers lost to suicide and migration to distant stars.
Eventually you could go for years without seeing a child…