the spud said:
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.
[/spoiler]
I would take it because these items are all pretty easily deflected.
1. I just don't really believe this applies. Yes, it's true that you would bear little resemblance to a human from a million years from now, but thousands? There's no reason to think that humans will evolve so much in thousands of years that you can't keep up, especially considering that most of that "evolution" is going to come from augmentations. It won't happen naturally. It'll be implants and surgeries and technical stuff. All stuff that you can take part in. And as for the whole "millions of years" thing, ideally mankind is going to splinter off and inhabit multiple worlds/systems, and their evolutionary paths will go in different directions. Either that or we'll die out completely and you'll be by your lonesome, which might get boring, but not so boring I wouldn't still take it.
Either that or we'll reach postphysical status and just all live virtually, which might make this whole exercise largely moot.
2. Shouldn't be too hard. Just keep changing your name/appearance. You'll have plenty of time to learn new languages, so travel the world for a while.
3. Technology will take care of this fairly soon. They're already working on it.
4. Meh. This is debatable. A year is still a year, and it's still going to last a year. I'm not buying this one as a serious problem. Sure, I imagine you'll hit a rough spot after a few generations and you have this crisis moment where all your original friends are dead, and that you'll outlive all your new friends and every friend you make after that. But I think it's something a person could adjust to, eventually.
The hard part here is letting yourself continue getting emotionally involved with people. And like I said, there would be a rough patch, maybe 200-300 years from "now", where you'll decide that people aren't worth caring about because they'll be gone and you won't, and you'll live in a shack in the woods for a while, but I think eventually you'll learn to deal with everyone else's miniscule lifespans, especially if you keep reinventing yourself as a person.
5. Trapped where? The death of the universe? Who knows what that even is?
