Immortality...

[Catfood220]

Yeah, I want to live forever. I want to see how it all ends.It could be something I could live to regret it (pun intended) but consequences be damned I want to see the future of this world, see humanity take to the stars, colonise other planets meet alien species and subsequently fuck it all up. I want to watch from a safe distance as the sun explodes and destroys the Earth, I reckon that would be something to see.

It depresses me that the world is going to go on without me one day, an incredibly self centered notion I know. I'm pretty sure that come the day I won't care much because I'll be dead, but just want to know what happens after I'm gone. If someone was to come to me tomorrow and show me the future of the world, then I could die happy.

 

[Aprilgold]

Why are people saying "if there isn't an afterlife..." An afterlife IS immortality so that's kind of a moot point. For myself I'd like to be able to live for hundreds or thousands of years but everything has to end eventually. I find the idea of living forever more frightening than the idea of death.

.... Are you high or something? Scientifically, after death is nothing, nothing. Immortality is not afterlife because you live forever among the living, difference.

What? Am I high? did you just read the first line? Either way, care too explain how an afterlife isn't immortality? In an afterlife the mind lives on after the body dies, but if the mind can live with the body you are just the mind so you didn't die. The afterlife would presumably be full of people who died in the past, so you get to live in another world but you continue living nonetheless.
If you want to think of Immortality vs death it's fairly redundant if there is an afterlife, assuming you get to do whatever you want in the afterlife as the comments I was referring to seemed to suggest. Death with no afterlife is an end, with one it is a beginning.

We can't scientifically prove it is my point, you can point in the direction... Which you did, but that doesn't mean that your right. We can argue subjective things all night, but its true, you can't prove that the afterlife is real or that it isn't, just its unscientifically proven.

 

[Brandon237]

Yup depends on if there's an afterlife. If not then I would become all knowledgeable and eternal. Ideally with eternal youth as well. If not then I don't wanna know what it would be like as a 200 year old man.

This, and throw in "my wife is immortal with eternal youth" too, and then the decision becomes a self-competition of how quickly I can say "yes". I don't wanna die!

 

[zuro64]

Are you also counting immortality with invulnerability? If not, then of course I'd want to be immortal. If so, of course I'd want to be immortal and invulnerable. Imagine all the cool stuff you could do without getting hurt! And if you weren't invulnerable, but immortal, and ended up getting sick of life, jump of a cliff or something.

Yeah... right... i dont think that you understand the concept of being immortal!
Being immortal means you are impervius to death!

 

[zuro64]

Despite this, is it really a good thing to live forever? This something I have wonder for a while and now, I ask you...is immortality truly a gift? Or is it a curse?

Is it good to live forever? Dont know! Is it a gift? Maybe! Is it a curse? Could be!

None of these questions have a real yes or no answer since no one(that we know of) has lived like that to have that knowledge!

As for me, i dont want to live forever! I wouldent mind to be like an Asari from Mass Effect that lives for a 1000 years but sooner or later i would want it to end! I dont fear death nor do i embrace it. The thing is that if you are the only one that live forever, it will become very lonely since everybody you know will die at one point. You can get new friends and start new families but they will die all the same.

So to make it simple I will answer how i think it is!

Is it good to live forever? It will if you use the knowledge and experiences you've gained to help humanity with it faults.

Is it a gift? For you it is yes.

Is it a curse? For eveybody else it is and one day it will become one for you.

 

[Joccaren]

Yeah... right... i dont think that you understand the concept of being immortal!
Being immortal means you are impervius to death!

I don't think you understand just how powerful Suns, Supernovae and Black holes are. Lets say you can somehow manage to avoid getting your matter utterly raped by a supernova or sun, and managed to stay the same as you were (Near impossible. Every single atom in your body would be changed the second you neared one of those things), if you fell in a black hole, it WOULD be over. Your entire body would be compressed down, along with Planets and Stars worth of other matter, into the size of something smaller than a pinhead. You would have no neurons to fire in your brain, they would all be a part of the one singularity along with everything else that fell into that black hole.

Whilst immortality means being impervious to death, the causes of death it covers are old age, disease, and trauma. Complete and utter destruction of the particles that make up the body is not something immortality can protect you against.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Only if i stayed at a certain age. Become super smart, teach new civilizations maybe? Watch empire rise and fall. Cool story, bro.

My post, ladies and gentleman.

Yeah it would be cool, but it would royally bite me in the ass if those "End of the Universe" theories were real, that is, the Big Rip or the Big Crunch. Crap, it would hurt.

Well, you could counter that with some more theories, namely the infinte universes theory, including ones that are hardly any different from our own, and that they theorize that it might be possible to travel between these universes somehow. Since you would have an eternity to either find someone that could make traveling between universes possible or make such a means yourself, you could just open a portal or something and head to another universe if it's about to be destroyed or you just get bored of this one.

 

[averydeeadaccount]

depends on the rules.
if i still age and get joint pain and arthritis but never die then no, but if i stay young forever and can`t die then yes, because even with the deep hole scenario id rather spent a thousand years getting out die and never see the light of day again.

 

[zuro64]

Yeah... right... i dont think that you understand the concept of being immortal!
Being immortal means you are impervius to death!

I don't think you understand just how powerful Suns, Supernovae and Black holes are. Lets say you can somehow manage to avoid getting your matter utterly raped by a supernova or sun, and managed to stay the same as you were (Near impossible. Every single atom in your body would be changed the second you neared one of those things), if you fell in a black hole, it WOULD be over. Your entire body would be compressed down, along with Planets and Stars worth of other matter, into the size of something smaller than a pinhead. You would have no neurons to fire in your brain, they would all be a part of the one singularity along with everything else that fell into that black hole.

Whilst immortality means being impervious to death, the causes of death it covers are old age, disease, and trauma. Complete and utter destruction of the particles that make up the body is not something immortality can protect you against.

Yeah... not to be an A-hole about this but WE ARE ON EARTH!!! When i sayed that you are impervius to death i meant in the way humans dies and not at an atomic level! Of curse you cant live if you completely destroy, vaporize or desintgrate the body at the atomic level.

Since you sayed that if you get sick of being immortal just jump of a cliff or something, it doesent work since you are still trying to kill your self in a way that immortality can reverse! That was all i meant.

 

[Aethersniper]

If I were given the option to become immortal I'd definitely say no. I could easily go on for yonks talking about it, so I'll just sum it up with a (pretty crappy) analogy:

Imagine you have the perfect game sitting in front of you; a kind of photorealistic, flawless Oblivion with a randomly generated world, countless activities and as many hours of play as you could muster in a lifetime. Now imagine that you had to spend 14-15 hours a day for a year doing nothing but playing that game. You'd probably get tired of it by the first month. It'd be the same with real life after a few hundred or even just a hundred years. And that's not even including stuff like painful illnesses or injuries that could crop up. You'd eventually just get bored, and you'd long to die more and more over time. Also there's the argument that the looming threat of death gives your life purpose, that you have a time limit to do what you want to do. Kind of disturbing, really, when you think about it.

 

[dvd_72]

In the words of the Doctor: "You need a good death. Death gives us size, gives us meaning. With no deaths there would only be comedies."

No, I wouldn't enjoy immortality. To have everyone I care about, and come to care about, grow old and die before me isn't worth any ammount of knowledge or wisdome. At least in my eyes.

 

[Joccaren]

Yeah... not to be an A-hole about this but WE ARE ON EARTH!!! When i sayed that you are impervius to death i meant in the way humans dies and not at an atomic level! Of curse you cant live if you completely destroy, vaporize or desintgrate the body at the atomic level.

Since you sayed that if you get sick of being immortal just jump of a cliff or something, it doesent work since you are still trying to kill your self in a way that immortality can reverse! That was all i meant.

Hehe, I also mentioned supernovae, suns and black holes. We have a sun quite close too us, not too hard to reach. But yeah, jumping off a cliff probably wouldn't win kill you, though you would have to stop being human and adopt quite different characteristics to be able to survive trauma at the level of jumping off the grand canyon or something.

The concept of immortality is that you -can't- die, you will live forever. The reason that this topic is so debated is because it's a choice between having no control over the fact that you will die or having no control over the fact that you will never die.

Given the option to just 'step out' at any given moment when you don't feel like living anymore kinda sidesteps the whole dilemma here.

Additionally, you are only immortal, not a superhero. Unless you find a way to pilot a spaceship on your own and take care of fuel and stuff like that, you ain't going nowhere. ;P

Quite simple. Get rocket, point at sun, launch. You have nothing to fear from space and impacts, as you will either be completely impervious to its effects on the human body, or be in a coma like state for the entire trip until you die. From there all you really need to do is time the launch so you won't hit Mercury or Venus, probably get a science team to guide the rocket around Earth so that it actually is aimed at the sun, and let gravity do what it does best. By the time I, and I would think most, would want to die, spaceflight will be a lot easier. Convincing people to help kill you would be a bit more difficult, however you would find those who would help. Hell, you might even cause riots all over the earth over whether or not to kill you.
Absolute worst case scenario, sit on the planet and cryo yourself. In a few hundred million years the sun will turn into a red giant. Then your job will be made that much easier.

The thing on Cryo also brings up an interesting point; put yourself permanently to sleep. Your not dead, but your body is not active in any way. Whilst Cryostasis itself might fall under the 'trauma' side of Immortality, there will be ways that you can get yourself to sleep forever, unless you're going to stay awake for the rest of eternity and have your brain overload due to stress.