Thoughts on eternal life

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

One thing I don’t understand about the desire for immortality…
Why would you want it at all?

I think that life would lose meaning and value if it lasted forever. There wouldn’t be as much reason to cherish and value, say, those one loved- unless those people weren’t going to live forever, in which case the immortal would have to bear an almost intolerable burden of sadness. Eventually, such a person might stop loving altogether, rather than risk the sorrow.

I also think that immortality would get boring after a while, at least for someone raised in today’s culture who wants novelty all the time. Surely a year would come when the immortal would realize that there weren’t any sincerely “new” diversions for him to try; the ones that existed would just be variations of the old ones. And then what would such a person do?

Yet somehow eternal life in Heaven is going to be glorious forever?

I don’t know; it sounds boring to me.

(This isn’t to say I wouldn’t like a few more years than I am probably going to get. But I wouldn’t want eternity).

2

I would like to extend my current contract for at least a couple hundred additional years than the current statistics allow. With an option to renew at the closing of each term, with no limit on the number of renewals available. If there should come a point where Eternity Boredom sets in, well then, maybe I’ll just decide against renewing the contract and retire.

3

Well, I don’t want eternal life in heaven - I’m an atheist/agnostic, and thus don’t believe in heaven. I want eternal life here on earth. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Because I believe death is The End - no continuation of consciousness afterwards. I happen to quite like existing, so I’d prefer to go on living.

  2. There’s never enough time for things. Given immortality I’d have time to become as proficient as I wished in whatever subject I cared to learn, see whatever I wanted. Patience is far easier once you’re immortal, so I could travel to other stars if I cared to - Sure, it’ll take me 10,000 years. So? I’m immortal after all.

As to running out of things to do, I’m of the opinion that there are always new things to do. For example, I’m a mathematician. There’s a theorem in maths which basically says that no matter how much you know about maths, you can always invent a new type of mathematics (Well, that’s one interpretation of Godel’s first incompleteness theorem anyway). There have to be interesting things lurking in there. There will always be new things to discover or explore.

Added to that, I tend to group augmentation in with achieving immortality. Once you can directly alter your own mind it opens up an incredible range of things you can do to entertain yourself.

4

I suspect the idea of immortality came from the reverse notion, not of need for the future, but need for the present.

Mothers would tell their children, “You mind me now or you’ll catch hell when Daddy returns from the hunt.” Then when his lion-slapped body is found, she has to go with “Well he’s still here as a ghost, and he says you should mind me or get a whupping when you die and join him”

5

Sometimes I think about the fact that if I spent all day, every day of my life, reading from sunrise to sunset (starting as soon as I learned how to read, with Dr. Suess, working my way up from there), when I died, there would probably still be thousands of good books (good books, mind you) that I hadn’t read yet. My mind reels.

If I was to live forever, then I would have time to read some trashy books, too, and keep up with subscriptions to Scientific American, The Economist, and National Geographic, plus take a day off now and then to go fishing or something, and I’d still get to read all the good books–and reread 'em as often as the fancy struck. I could learn every language in the world, and read every good book in every language, living and dead.
I’m assuming an eternal life of leisure, of course. If I could live forever, but never graduated from grad school, well, that’d be a whole 'nother kettle of fish. :wink:
To be perfectly serious for a moment, though, I don’t see why one wouldn’t cherish a loved one if the loved one would never die–or if we had to live forever after the someone died. If we were to live forever, I certainly hope that we would spend an eternity growing and changing. The people we loved would probably come and go from our lives, and that’s not a bad thing. And if we could stop loving to avoid the pain of loss, then I think we’d do it even during our brief lives on earth. . . and nobody I know has discovered that secret yet.

Confronting a truly infinite lifetime is a bit difficult for the human imagination, but IMHO the Universe must hold infinite delights. I really do not think it’s true that there’s nothing new under the sun. I think that after a while, we just lose our taste for novelty, and when confronted with a new situation, we are too eager to force it to conform to our old prejudices and preconcieved notions. Anyway, a few billion people with infinite free time would probably be a continuous source of new diversions. The human race has been around for (give or take) 100,000 years, and it took us this long to invent the Nintendo Gamecube, Xtreme sports and “reality” TV. What’s coming next?

But, then, what do I know about infinity? I’m not even thirty yet. :slight_smile:
p.s. If you want to work this from a religious angle, I always figured that part of being in Heaven would be a perfect joy that comes from being with God. Perfect joy could last eternally–and, heck, wouldn’t it have to? If a perfect joy every grew stale, it wouldn’t be perfect, now, would it? But that’s all in the realm of religion, where we can lob absolutes around like dollops of whipped cream. Quite foreign from the human experience . . .

6

To paraphrase Mr. Heinlein:

7

JLZania – that’s Marvellous of you – Andrew Marvell-ous:

Heinlein admitted to having used the quote as the source for the novel – the idea for which, the handful of Heinlein geeks around here might be interested to know, dates back to before WWII, when it was supposed to be the final story of his Future History, significantly titled Da Capo. (The musical “titles” of the segments are also a clue.)

8

I’m reminded of the space alien Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, who got immortal through an accident. His life eventually became so boring that he got himself a time-travelling spaceship and a hyper-intelligent computer, then proceeded to travel through space and time to personally insult each person in the universe…

…in alphabetical order.

(From Douglas Adams’ Life, the Universe, and Everything, natch)

9

I would like to visit all places on earth before death, but most likely will not. I could not get bored with travel.

10

“Many long for eternity who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon.”

I’m not sure who said that; maybe Dorothy Parker. Anyone know?

11

Music alone is worth sticking around for.

12

A probably inaccurate quote from a book I once read:

“To be immortal is to hear the heartbeat of the cosmos, and worse: to count it, and to remember the count.”