Well with my luck on the day I achive immortality would be the day WWIII starts and im left wandering a desolte and empty earth.
What I wouldnt mind is just a few hundered years longer…say to live to 200 with youth and my mind intact. I would love to see what happens at the end of this century and where mankind is at with space, technology and the like.
Well, someone could do that to you today. Would you rather be locked up for 50 years and have only a few years left when you get out or locked up indefinitely knowing that if or when you are released, you still could live several lifetimes?
Are we assuming that basically all other human frailties are intact (ie you need to eat/drink, worry about getting stabbed, shot, crushed, burnt, frozen, etc) and we just don’t age or that we are immortal?
How long would you live given that eventually, you will accidently get killed by something?
How many careers would you go through?
What happens in an economy where a significant number of people eventually save enough to live off the interest forever?
The whole idea of ‘until death do you part’ may need to be revised.
Yeah, but wouldn’t that be a funny story to tell our great great great great great grandkids in a few hundred years?
if death doesn’t result in going to hell, no.
if it does, yes.
but then, you’re an atheist who doesn’t believe in hell; so i guess the answer you’re looking fo is “yes”.
i meant “no.” but i have a headache, and the music i’m listening to isn’t helping.
A question that only one response, by my reading, has addressed: how would you handle interpersonal relationships? Would you refuse to fall in love with anyone, knowing that they’d die and you’d have an eternity to move on to? Would you just stack up the great loves one after the other? What about friends? Living contemporarily with your own great-great-grandchildren?
Even with all of the problems of friends/family members dying I would still take it. I cope with them dying without living forever so I think I could cope if I lived forever. I do see the major problem if everyone starts living forever so something would have to be done about that. Not that I have any idea in the slightest as how to fix it or anything.
Living “forever” in this physical world, only to be destroyed by its eventual heat death, gravitational collapse or proton decay? Naaah. I’ll take my chances on there being/not being “another plane” (if not, what the heck would I know/care?).
Now, extreme longevity, say a tenfold or twentyfold multiplication of my lifespan with full mental and physical capacities intact and full recuperation of any wear-and-tear or less-than-obliterative-injury, that would be a good deal.
People fully expect to outlive their pets, yet adopt them anyway. Plenty of people fall in love knowing it won’t last forever.
Of course I’d take it!
This sounds ridiculous. It seems to assume that nothing will ever change.
Just say you offered immortality to someone from the 1600s. Are you telling me that they’d be bored now? There are countries in existence now that weren’t even known to Europeans of the time! Styles of art, literature and music that had not even been concieved.
I want to be around forever. Sure, maybe I’ll visit New York in 2008. Doesn’t mean I won’t ever want to do it again. And even if I didn’t feel the need to go every few years, I could wait a hundred years and it woud be a completely different city. Don’t you want to hear the music that kids are listening to in a hundred years time? Don’t you want to know how today’s culture will be seen in a thousand years time? Wouldn’t you love to live on cities in Mars?
I also have a sneaking suspiscion that all the stories about how horrible it is to live forever are to comfort ourselves about our own mortality. It’s like how we tell each other that movie stars have all the money and fame, but aren’t happy and can’t stay married for any meaningful length of time. It’s the fox and the sour grapes.
Y’all can opt out. I’ll say hello to Bender in the year 3000 for you.
Only if it means I get to have my own robotic castle and hunt down normal humans for their skin.
I am with Gex: I totally want to live forever regardless of the consequences, fuck the suicide mode.
Since you guys are following science fiction why not try the counter argument from Larry Niven. In his Ringworld series there is a guy called Louis Wu. He is several hundred years old and every now and again (not often mind you) he sees or experiences something that proves to himself that he has been right all along: it is good to live forever. There is always something new to experience and even if there wasn’t just living is fun anyway. If you try to enjoy it.
And besides when I get old and crusty and finally stop enjoying life I can always enact my plan to be permanently high on ecstacy.
cheers
“Hang on by your fingernails and never look down”
-Hermann Rorscach.
I didn’t say ‘I could adapt to anything’ I said, “there is nothing that the human mind cannot adapt to if forced.” By that I mean that if the human brain experiences enough trauma, either it will ignore it, or it will collapse in on itself. Eventually, in your scenario, my mind would either accept the burial as reality, and cope with it, or (more likely) my psyche would eventually collapse into itself and most likely imagine that none of it is real, and likely create its own reality.
Besides, If I am truly immortal (which just for clarification, I feel is impossible), there would be little stopping me from getting out of whatever the predicament someone tried to put me in. Unless the antagonist is also immortal.
I’m with gex gex and MrAndrewV I want to live as long as I possibly can. Forever, a Millinea, a Century, however long I can choose to hold on to life I will. Why bother with a suicide mode. If someone wants to torture me, it’s much worse for there to be pain then death that for there to be pain, then pain, then pain. Eventually, you stop having anything to compare it to and pain just becomes normal.
Unless my family members joined in, I wouldn’t do it.
What is the purpose of living forever if the ones you love are gone?
Count me out as well.
Another implication of an immortal (or nearly immortal ) society is the fact that social change happens within a person’s lifetime;
you will still be meeting the same generation of people in three hundred years time as you are today. As I explained earlier, there will be few children…
so the social changes that do occur will be a consequence of alterations in attitude by the same population of long lived individuals.
If it is fashionable to worship Baal one year, you know that it is the same people who were all devout Elvis worshippers a hundred years ago;
one century’s vegetarian ecofreaks will be the same people a century later eating meat and voting Utilitarian.
As Charles Fort said,
“I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
Cite?
How does immortality help you get out of being buried alive?
You’ve never heard the expressions “wishing for death” or “a fate worse than death”? Again, I’ll ask for a cite.
The Only way this works, is with invulerability, (to survive say, an unexpected car crash), some form of enchanced strength (to dig or punch one’s way out of a cell or being buried alive) and an amped up healing factor (in case the advances of science, figures out a way to bypass your invulerability)…nothing worst than an open wound that can’t be closed…ever.
Not needing to eat, drink or sleep would be a big help too.
Without those things, any chance of immorality will most likely end up being a curse. Imagine being in a car wreak, body crushed and not being able to die…?
Not me, make me an uber-mensh or nothing…nothing’s worst than spending an enternity being afraid of an accident worst than death.
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That statement, was completely and totally opinion. I didn’t mean it to come accross as gospel, and apoligize if you took it that way. Perhapse I should have started it with “in my opinion…” which I believe my original post i quoted myself did start with.
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The same way it stops you from dieing, ever. I don’t think that it is possible, mind you, but for this hypothetical conversation I was assuming it is. If you cannot die, ever, then you cannot ever be contained, period, because your body would have to either be indistructable, replinishable, or unecessary. If youre either of the first two, you can beat the container until it breaks and free yourself, or beat yourself until your body is destroyed and the ‘immortal’ part of you can go wherever it wants.
Again, for clarification, I don’t think this is remotely possible. Ultimately, everything breaks down, and I don’t think it could ever be possible to extend the physical life of a human being beyond a few centuries. But the posts to which I was replying to were suggesting that they would still be around when the heat death of the universe takes place. If they can last that long, they can certainly outlast any container in which they are ‘trapped’.
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And again, this is only opinion, but I have personally yet to encounter any situation which I was not capable of coping with, and having known people who have gone through MUCH worse situations that I have gone through (some of which I would consider the worst possible), and yet they still managed to cope with it, I find it hard to believe that for a person like myself that ‘wants to live and be aware’ more than anything else that there is any situation in which I would find death prefferable; provided I have a choice in the matter. IMO No amount of mental pain, emotional pain, or physical pain can stop me from feeling this way. (I consider a perma coma, or vegitative state, or total loss of mental capacity the same as death as it is effectively the same thing to me, I also apologize for the horrid run-on sentence above, I am running out the door and in a hurry.)
I plan to live forever, if I can just find that cabal of vampires to turn me before I get too old…
Esprix
I have spoken to folks about this concept alot and, like the OP says, I am simply floored by the staggering number of people who say they wouldn’t want to do it.
As for boredom – there are more stars than grains of sand on all the world’s beach beaches – even if you and your big spaceship were chugging along at warp speed (using 2253 technology), visting a star a week, it would take millions of years to see everything … and by then things would have changed enough to start over. You would never be able to say trully “been there seen that”
If everyone were immortal, it wouldn’t be fun at all. But imagine the sheer, sweet power a half-dozen reasonably intelligent Immortals could accmulate over a thousand years or so. (I’m certain there’ve been science fiction stories about this, but I’m too lazy to look them up). Just the sheer knowledge of human nature you’d gain over that time would probably give you a remarkable ability to manipulate people - you’d learn all the triggers, all subconcious cues, master the art of rhetoric to a degree no other man or woman ever has or ever could. Oh, and you’d probably do really well in the clubbing/one night stand scene, if you chose.
And the other things you’d learn, there’d be no end to it. Art, literature, music, science - and to those who say eventually you’d know it all, nonsense. Are you familiar with all the works of art, all the stories and news and scientific discoveries that happened today? No? Then why do you think any given day a thousand years from now would be any different?
Imagine the experiences, the wonder of watching history unfold for century after century, understanding the patterns, seeing the complexity of all human behavior as a wonderfully intricate system. It would be glorious, I tell you, glorious!
Damn. Death sucks.
Um, sorry Satisfying Andy Licious.