Not even a thought. Since I don’t give a rat’s ass about being remembered NOW, I want to live forever in paradise.
:smack: Sorry, don’t know how I missed that. It makes it a harder choice, but I’d still choose to be remembered; editing out the memories of me from other people’s minds seems . . . not unethical, necessarily, but disturbing.
Is there internet? Because, if there’s internet, I’ll take live forever.
I’m not sure I’d rely on fiction to judge this issue. It would be a seriously boring story if Dracula lived forever as a happy, peaceful, well-adjusted neighbor who invited you over for BBQ on the weekend and made sure to mow his grass regularly. What’s chapter 2, “Dracula’s itemized deductions are questioned by the IRS”?
Since, as far as I know, we do not have any REAL eternal persons, we are left with the characters we have created.
The people who created these stories contemplated the enormity of eternal life and decided to represent it as a horrible condition.
When we have legends of happy, well-adjusted eternals, I will concluded that the human mind can think of eternal life as a blessing.
But, so far, all of them are represented as miserable creatures.
It’s debatable whether vampires and zombies are typically depicted as miserable, and whether their long lifespan is any contributor to that.
But anyway, since we’re talking fiction, I’m free to just invent my own counter-example for you:
The adventures of Oliver Oldster
Due to a genetic fluke, Oliver was born with a body that would experience negligible senescence. At the age of 55 for example, he began a successful career as a gymnast. By the age of 100 he had seen many of his former friends die, which was indeed painful, but anyone who lives more than a few decades must experience similar pain and continue to live a fulfilling life. He travelled a lot, and made friends all over the world.
He wrote on many topics and contributed to science, philosophy and the arts. He always felt he had no natural aptitude for any of these subjects, but he had plenty of time to learn and practice!
When people asked if he got bored, he’d just say he still had not seen a fraction of what the world has to offer. And that human memory is not infinite, so already some of his oldest episodic memories had become vague.
He saw many wonders as the world’s technology progressed; mankind traveling to the stars. And billions of manmade virtual worlds / experiences so unique that you or I could not possibly imagine them. His own mind became augmented such that he would have improved memory and yet be much more resistant to depression or boredom going forwards. And his body was improved such that negligible senescence became simply living indefinitely.
However, he arbitrarily picked an end date: he would die at the age of 20,000 years. So he did that, via a painless injection.
THE END
My entire life, all I’ve wanted to do is something that would leave a mark on the world so that years from now, people would remember me. I’m not going to give that up just so I can sit on a cloud and play a harp forever.
Yeah, but you cherry-picked the nasty ones. There are plenty of examples of happy, functionally-immortal people in fiction. The Elves in LOTR; many of the characters in Iain M Banks Culture series; most of the people in Ben Shaw’s novel One Million Tomorrows, for example.