Once you become bored as you inevitably will, there are many ways to experience things. Go into cryo-stasis for 3 years then as you are immortal you can defrost with no downside. Use your Immortality and some creative surgery/therapy to erase your memories and start anew. Things will never get old as long as you have creativity.
Also as a secondary thing, if you become insane where is the downside. Insanity is only looking at the world in a way different then other people.
Live for several centuries? Sure. No way to die at all? No thank you.
Don Savik said:
What kind of hipster douchebag answers no? Seriously? LIVING FOREVER. You could rule the world by default, no questions asked. Could get boring? Did imagination die in the past 5 years and I just haven't noticed it or something? Too much depression on this forum. Lighten ups.
You call it being a 'hipster douchebag', I call it having foresight. Boredom is actually the least of the problems. Now, I wouldn't mind living for a few centuries, or even a few millenia, but the 'cannot die' clause is a dealbreaker for me. Some day, many years down the road, life on Earth will cease to exist. Inevitably, this will happen before our sun stops shining (when it hits its Red Giant phase (which is estimated to occur in 5 billion years) it will be large enough to engulf the Earth). In a best case scenario, you'll have started planet hopping by then. Worst case scenario, you'll be stuck on the sun for all eternity. Now, in the best case scenario you're looking at finding a new planet to either colonize (assuming you weren't the only escapee) or take you in as a refugee, which you'd better hope happens before you run out of fuel, or else you'll again find yourself stranded. Either way though, you'll last until and beyond the time where every star in the sky stops burning. At which point you're faced not only with the rest of eternity alone in total darkness. It is this endgame that makes me despise the concept of immortality. I don't hate the idea of living for a very long time, I hate the idea of seeing the last of the stars themselves die while I continue to endure, unable to die myself. If you'd been absurdly good at rationing resources and repairing/inventing tech, you might be able to stave off that result for a while, but it's a losing battle against inevitability.
If the universe is constantly expanding like Einstein believed, then you'd never run into a scenario where all the stars would burn out and die and you'd be alone in the universe.
I would definitely take it.
You enjoy the ride as long as it goes and then when it gets boring, you have a hell of a lot of fun trying to kill yourself (even if it will never work).
That weak crap you can find on YouTube of people skateboarding off the roof of a two story house and landing nut-first on a handrail won't have anything on the kind of shit I'd post on YouTube.
This week's upload: I'm going to hurl myself directly into the sun. I set cameras up on both sides so you can see me shoot out the other end butt-naked.
I'll eventually reach the pint in time from where the kool-aid man came from. Since they'll understand how immortality works, they'll be able to make an antidote, if by that point I really did want to die.
Every second of life is worth all the pain in the world.
If Highlander has ever taught us anything, it's that immortality with eternal youth is pretty sweet. Quite frankly, with all that time on my hands I could amass fortunes easily and use it to fund my quest for knowledge and any other activities that interest me. I could do anything I want (within reason) with all the time to do it, and although eventually my friends and family would pass away there would still be a world of new and interesting people to meet and experience life with. I can't imagine life getting too boring either. In the past hundred years alone the human race has done so many things collectively that I can't imagine the future slowing down any time soon. I don't even need to mention the possibilities that will arise when we master space travel and colonize other planets, do I? An eternity's worth of knowledge, wisdom, and wealth... think I'll buy a planet or two and see where things take off. There is NO guarantee that humanity will die within the next thousand years, just as there is NO guarantee that you'll run out of new things to experience.
Death means the end, nothing that ever happens will matter to you. You simply cease to exist except as an insubstantial memory of those close to you, which will too fade in time. You will have no stake in life or identity, nothing. A whole lot of boring, unsatisfying, empty nothing. I say screw that! Eternity is where it's happening, daddy-o! Anything that isn't death is a victory within its self!
Kiss today goodbye, and point me towards tomorrow!
Live for several centuries? Sure. No way to die at all? No thank you.
Don Savik said:
What kind of hipster douchebag answers no? Seriously? LIVING FOREVER. You could rule the world by default, no questions asked. Could get boring? Did imagination die in the past 5 years and I just haven't noticed it or something? Too much depression on this forum. Lighten ups.
You call it being a 'hipster douchebag', I call it having foresight. Boredom is actually the least of the problems. Now, I wouldn't mind living for a few centuries, or even a few millenia, but the 'cannot die' clause is a dealbreaker for me. Some day, many years down the road, life on Earth will cease to exist. Inevitably, this will happen before our sun stops shining (when it hits its Red Giant phase (which is estimated to occur in 5 billion years) it will be large enough to engulf the Earth). In a best case scenario, you'll have started planet hopping by then. Worst case scenario, you'll be stuck on the sun for all eternity. Now, in the best case scenario you're looking at finding a new planet to either colonize (assuming you weren't the only escapee) or take you in as a refugee, which you'd better hope happens before you run out of fuel, or else you'll again find yourself stranded. Either way though, you'll last until and beyond the time where every star in the sky stops burning. At which point you're faced not only with the rest of eternity alone in total darkness. It is this endgame that makes me despise the concept of immortality. I don't hate the idea of living for a very long time, I hate the idea of seeing the last of the stars themselves die while I continue to endure, unable to die myself. If you'd been absurdly good at rationing resources and repairing/inventing tech, you might be able to stave off that result for a while, but it's a losing battle against inevitability.
You're thinking with a relatively young brain though... no matter how old you may be right now!
Who knows. Maybe a human aged to above a thousand years would have a different perspective than one simply aged to about a 100. Watching stars fuse together and slowly wink out might be the most satisfying experience ever had.
Long stretches of boredom might seem trivial, and after all the excitement of galaxies wizzing around and exploding occasionally, a nice uniform universe could be nice.
Social interaction of any kind might be completely secondary to the cataloguing and analysis of millions of years of memories.
So yes... I'd take the gummi bear. Only one way to find out, right?
Probably not. Don't get me wrong; I'm pretty sure that dying (or being dead) is gonna suck but I don't want to live so far past my loved ones; but if I didn't have any then I might. I would just try and form simple and fluid bonds. I wonder just how much of my life I could remember, or if it would all get really hazy after 100 years or so.
If the universe is constantly expanding like Einstein believed, then you'd never run into a scenario where all the stars would burn out and die and you'd be alone in the universe.
Well for starters that doesn't follow. Constant expansion does not equate to constant formation. Expansion requires only an increase in total volume, what you describe (or at least what I think you're saying) would require an increase in total mass, namely that new material be forming constantly, giving you an infinite supply of new stars and new worlds. That is not part of the constant expansion premise. To give you an analogy: Imagine you have 12 marbles. You place them in a circle and then apply a constant force to push each outwards. They will proceed in that exact direction for all eternity (for the sake of example they are limited by neither gravity nor collisions) and thus the area they collectively cover is constantly expanding. The universe can be viewed similarly, with the total area constantly increasing as matter continues in the directions that the Big Bang pushed it.
What kind of hipster douchebag answers no? Seriously? LIVING FOREVER. You could rule the world by default, no questions asked. Could get boring? Did imagination die in the past 5 years and I just haven't noticed it or something? Too much depression on this forum. Lighten ups.
I don't want to outlive all my friends and family sorry.
Life is a beautiful precious thing partly because it is fleeting. Life with no end is almost empty. Eternal existence is only an attractive idea because of our natural fear of dying, but in reality without death life is nothing.
I would take it. not for the fact of youth or anything,but with it I could help the world more efficiently. I've always felt that I'm never going to have enough time in my life to do what I want to. so I'd rather keep living on,no matter how difficult, than die without leaving my mark here.
If I wouldn't suffer from pain condition and severe neurological condition (Dystonia) then I would. But every day I am alive is horrid fucking pain to begin with so, I wouldn't want to feel this for eternity. Tho if the pain is reduced to 3 on pain scale.
I would take it if I would be healthy, but at my current situation... no. I barely want to live now to begin with.
On the one hand, it doesn't matter how far humanity evolved. Whether it be faster, smarter, stronger or the ability to urinate through a finger ..... i'm immortal, i'm going to outlive the lot of the smug bastards.
I'd get to see everything that happens.
I'd outlive everyone.
And if I did happen to go insane then it wouldn't matter, i'd be insane, I wouldn't bloody notice.
And me and my pet rock, Bob, will rule over the rubble thats left. I'd be a fair and just rubble god and not punish my collapsed building subjects for every minor infraction. But if they pissed me off, woe betide them.
A green kool-aid man from the future shows up at your front door. You let him in (he seems trustworthy enough) and he gives you a box. Inside the box, there is a magic gummi bear that, when eaten, gives whoever ate it immortality. You live forever and cannot be physically harmed or killed. You feel pain, but it is greatly nulled and maxes out at like a 3 on the 1-10 pain-o-meter. Do you eat the gummi bear?
Now at first the answer may seem obvious. "Why wouldn't I eat it?" you may ask. However, I reccomend reading this Cracked article. If your too lazy to read it I will provide a short summary.
1. Evolution will turn you into a freak: Over thousands of years something better, stronger, faster, and smarter will likely develop from humans, leaving you left behind as a freak.
2. Nobody can ever find out: If you've got immortality then everybody will want it. Governments, CEO's, the masses, you name it. And they don't care what they have to do to get it.
3. You're still getting older (mentally): You will be forced to remember everything that happens over the course of infinity, which your brain just isn't built to do.
4. Time speeds up till you're insane: As time flies by, your different friends, loves, and lives slowly fade from your memory, making 50 years seem relatively equal to a saturday night.
5. You will eventually get trapped there forever: Eventually, you will get trapped in a pile of rubble, or the rest of the human race gets wiped out, and you till be trapped there forever.
If you have any questions about that list, read the article. It is way more detailed and well written than the above summary.
So, would you eat the gummi bear?
EDIT: Just to make things clear, you would not physically age.
You should watch the movie The Man from Earth[footnote]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/[/footnote], it gives some cool ideas of what could happen if you are immortal.
Btw I would probably take it, just to see what will happen to us all and if we are able to colonise space on a bigger scale and to witness the first contact with other species.
Maybe I would go insane for some time, but in time I will get over it and I would have a lot of time...
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