I hear so often people say something to the effect of “Who would want to live forever? It’d get so boring!”
WTF? Sounds like sour grapes to me.
There is sooooo much out there just on this tiny planet alone I find definitely, and probably infinitely, interesting that I’d need at least 50 lifetimes to get just a shallow smattering of some of it.
Most discussions of immortality presume a consistent quality of life too, but, even if I were to suffer through forever with Locked-In Syndrome, with an active mind, there’d still be too much to keep me occupied through it all.
While I definitely believe I could make an interesting go of it for a HELL of a long time, forever is just, well, forever. If I really make an effort to think about filling up forever with stuff to do, it just seems that at some point it would grow tiresome.
With several billion women on the planet, I’m sure I could find something (or someone) to do with my time. By the time you finished dating every woman you could possibly want, it would be time to start over with your old flames.
Maybe I’m the only person who wishes I could be stuck in a Groundhog Day type situation for at least a couple thousand of years. I’d finally get to read all the books and learn all the languages I wanted to!
I’d love immortality. Would give me a chance to finish Lord of the Rings sometime. Might have a problem when all humans die out though. Would be quite boring waiting for super-intellegent dolphins to evolve and start their underwater civilization. But I could pass the time trying to make it through The Silmarillion or getting one of the Magic Eye books to work and so forth.
I don’t think it would be boring so much as tiresome. Been there, done that, why are kids today so stupid, and all my friends are dead. Letting myself love someone who will, in a very short period of time, get old, die and leave me would be very painful. Letting myself do that with every single person I meet would be awful. Watching the end of species I love would be even worse.
Finding people with whom you have life experiences in common would be rough, too. Face it, how long can you enjoy hanging out with teenagers once you’re in your 30s? Once in a while, it’s fun, but it gets old, quick. The passion, the ardent proclaimations of Truth, the bittersweet life-consuming drama that is adolescence. Bah. Glad to be done with it, don’t want to stay around it too long. It’s just tiresome now that I know how silly and unimportant it all is. And I’m sure that 60-year olds feel the same way about me and my 30something friends.
From the view of running out of stuff to learn? Not a problem. There’s so much of a backlog right now, and so many specialized fields growing every day, and no reason to believe it’s going to stop. Even given immortality, I don’t think I could learn everything there is to learn.
But from a social perspective? No thanks. I’ll do my duty as an elder when the time comes, and then I’ll die and leave it to the next bunch.
With imortality you would fairly soon come up against the limits of your brain’s memory capacity. It is not entirly clear what would happen, but probably any memories over a hundred or so years old would become indistinct and eventually be overwritten by newer memories. If overwiting of memories isn’t completely accomplishable then even newer memories would become less distinct as more synapse interconnections are associated with more differing memories. So either memory would eventually fail to work, or would only last a few hundred years max. Since memory is all you have to be bored by, then boredom will not get any worse after a few hundred years. If memory does not completely fail with age but is fully reusable, then you would simply seem to live again and again never being able to remember what you had done more than a few hundred years ago. Probably becoming surrounded by your writings and creations from pasts that you no longer have any memory or personal relationship to other than a knowledge that you must have created such things in essencially past lives.
It would only remain interesting if, in the future, humans have the ability to radically alter their bodies, essentially removing the traits we identify as human. At least, an immortal would need a drug or device that would provide sustainable euphoric happiness. There’s no way to escape eventual boredom, if you live forever. The OP is a little too optimistic; I expect that most people would find living intolerable after a few centuries.
Frankly, the fact that people don’t get bored now is telling. I mean, let’s be honest here: how many of us consistantly find anythign new in our lives right now? Humans simply aren’t wired to be easily bored. We quite handily place ourselves in a comfortable spot. We simply don’t need an interesting life, and if we had one, it would take centuries if not eons to see and do everything on the earth right now. And the rest of the world would keep growing, coming up with new things, and developing new ideas for you to use.
Boredom wouldn’t be the problem. Dealing with everything around you changing s damned fast would be!
Remember how long a day was when you were a kid? Remember how bored you got as a teenager?
Now, don’t the days seem to rocket past, now that you’re an adult?
When you’re young, every day is an appreciable fraction of your life. As you get older, that fraction gets smaller and smaller- and so time seems to pass faster.
I think an immortal would experience this effect, as well… but it would keep accelerating. I don’t think there’d be time to get bored.
Me too. There’d have to be certain qualifiers though, like being able to easily visit some friends and family and being in large city, like New York City.
I wouldn’t want it to be today though. Sitting at home with a broken leg, no friends, and living 2,500 miles from my family gets pretty boring after two months… I’d go insane if I had to to do it for more than a year, especially since TV programs and the SDMB would be repeating itself every day.
Seeing the future is something I long for and am vaguely depressed that I won’t get to see it unfold despite also seeing the appeal in a Groundhog Day situation. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Or maybe they are I’m just cognitively dissonant. Either, or.
I think you might be underestimating the time it would take you to date every woman you could possibly want. Even if you only want 0.001% of the women alive, that’s still over 30,000! I’m sure you couldn’t date women fast enough to ever be able to start over with old flames.
I agree with Aesiron. Seeing how the world (and technology) changes is one of the things I look foreward to. It saddens me that I’ll never be able to see any other planets up close with my own eyes. Standing on one of Jupiter’s moons would be the experience of a lifetime, maybe even an eternal one.
On the other hand, it might get a little boring floating around in empty space after the death of the universe.