Would you become immortal, if you had the choice?

I'm in complete agreement with JL. I'd love to live long enough to see this piece of rock evaporate in a storm of solar plasma. ^^'

It'd at least be a kodak moment

ok peeps you going about immortality ALL wrong. you guys need to look at the bigger picture. some of you said you would get bored of life(oximoron) others said no change to the body would be unbareable. in reading these replies i can see why the idea of immortality frightens you particular peeps is odviously because you have no self asteam and no will to get out and live life. personaly immortality would be a blessing to beable to experiance eons you could never get bored and if you had a companion also immortal then you would have all th angles covered so to speak

Welcome to A2K, duxanur.

(I think, btw, that only a small percentage of the posters here said they'd be afraid of the boredom. There are other considerations which might make immortality less than desirable.)

true but those who mentioned boredome just struck a nerve and i natraully had to say my pieceand i do have other comments for the rest of the forum as well but i must be off to work for now but do expect to hear from me often i always have something to say

Druther be bored than dead. Not that I ever am truly bored. Living in the moment has something to do with that.
I have no interest in dying, because, being an atheist, I know this is my one shot. If I had the power to live like that, no reason I couldn't be healthy too. So, what's the problem?

If we were all immortal we would have bigger backyards and less graveyards!

hmm...Firstly hi to everyone, im new! I kinda just found this link on 'Google' when searching for 'what would you do if you were Superman?' (dont ask me why, it was 2AM).

Well an interesting topic i must say. Well my way of thinking in some aspects may be very similar or the same to many of you however I may miss out a few of my opinions because i wasnt brought up to think perfectly...

Well i disagree with the idea of immortality not just because im a Muslim guy. I'd like to say that i love to challenge my religion especially from a scientific perspective. Why i disagree with the idea of immortality (and not with the idea of a longer life span) is because if it was possible to be able to live forever and not be affected by any sort of physical damage or mental (which could lead to physical damage). Depression wouldnt affect us but the feeling of depression would still be horrible after going through if for billions of years as it would be something you've gone through so much. Imagine the idea of also being able to take in infinite amounts of information in our brain and over a few hundred thousand billion years (presuming human life is still in existence) you've almost experienced everything obvious to mankind such as playing football (obviously the present time would invent something new, just like while im typing a unique experience may have been created in this world). At this point when you go back to doing something you've already done you may still enjoy it (afterall humans do the same thing thousands of time), but there would come a point where everything has been done a million odd times and that experience just wouldnt be as good. Then life would feel boring (leading to depression, suffering, pain, pointlessness) because everything you could possibly think of would have been done too many times over (think of an example of watching the same movie even 5000 times in your life). The experience would degrade everytime reaching a point where it may feel unejoyable or useless or pointless.

Another point i would like to make is when you say 'immortal' would that mean physically immortal but not mentally. Clearly our brain has its limits of holding information. If this were true (im not quite sure how it would work) would we just crash like a computer, or previous memory be forgotten making room for new information (something along the lines of amnesia ---> but wouldnt that just suck neway). If previous memory just deletes then what i said about experience degrading may not be completely true and immortality would be actually be pretty good to an extent.

My final point is for ppl following a religion. If you beleieve in God then even if you were immortal somehow then wouldnt the power of God still be able to overcome you, i mean seriously you wouldnt think you could match him. I dunno. It would be like you pinching God and him hitting you with a nuke each time however neither are affected. Would you also still be able to feel pain, that too would suck. I also agree with the person who said that you may as well kill your selfs now (but only to an extent). I mean im not saying what he said is completely true (about just killing urself's now) but i mean if you were immortal and your memory would just erase at certain points (forget things) then life would just be the same all the time, experiences would come new, its kind of like the concept of being immortal because when you die your just reborn just like Hindus believe. There concepts also accept the notions of immortality, as if your just reborn again and again then your still immortal in a sense because there never comes a time where your existenance is wiped permanently. But if your talking about immortality for one set period of time then thats different.

Scientists could possibly invent immortality someday whether its injections, dna transplant, pills etc, but immortality to the extent we think is immpossible as we are still prone to error. Imagine the doctor accidentally gives the wrongs pills then what? Immortality can still be stopped by preventing those pills or injections from entering you. What about a car accident where you squashed to death? Then what? OK even if they somehow recreate your life form what happens if 10 nuclear bombs go off wiping mankind. Who will re-make you then? robots with their AI? what if they too die? Aliens?...now thats a different topic in itself.

Good Night guys!

P.S. Its now 3AM

Welcome to A2K, BritishPak.

I liked your post very much, and I also agree with pretty much everything you said.

One thing, though. Even though you're opposed to immortality on religious and quality of life grounds, are you against, say, an extra 100 years added onto your life? I think that would make you a better person, due to both accumulation of knowledge and a better, long-term kind of perspective. I think an extra 100 years would make you wise beyond anything we have now.

Again, welcome, and I hope to hear from you again soon.

I agree, Taleisin. We just don't live long enough.

but where would you have the film developed?

Yeah lol, thanks Taliesin181, nice 2 hear from you.
Well yeah like i said a longer life span can only really be a good thing. I mean giving someone a longer life span is tecniqually saving their life at the point when they would have died, so i also dont see any reason why it should be against religion. Now immortality does bring out many problems and not just from a religious perspective. But even if you take it from a religious perspective, then why did religion say its not a good thing (if it did). Well after all religion is also science to an extent and science is based on fact. Clearly its fact that if everyone was immortal say bye bye to babies at a point in time! lol!

being immortal = too much time = nothing to do = BORINGNESS.

I voted the last choice of course, because in a sense we are all immortal. why you ask?
Because we can never know death. That would be like being aware that you are in a dreamless sleep...Not possible

booman2, of course we cannot know (our own) death. There will not be anyone to know it. At least isn't that part of what we mean by being dead?

Hence, all we'll ever b aware of is conciousness. Is than not in a sense immortality Grasshopper?

Oh yes. I've always felt that we live forever, OUR forever. We also live each moment in a timeless Eternity, IF we know how to access it.

Yeah J.L...OUR forever, I like that.

haven't read all of the posts - but......
To be immortal and vulnerable to harm!?
That sound like that story "the monkey's paw" or something like that.

To have an immortal body and repeatedly loose the people you love, generation after generation would be hell.
To see you children die again and again, or decide not to have any although you may want them desperately, just so you wouldn't have to subject yourself to their death would be hell.

To live in fear of how you may hurt yourself, and have to live with it forever.
Medical miracles aside, you would eventually end up as a head and torso, crushed and covered with scars.

It's just too horrible to think about this anymore -

There's a fascinating article in the May issue of The Atlantic by Charles C. Mann on the implications and ramifications of the increased longevity which is becoming one of the legacies of new medical research. People are living longer and longer and -- according to Mann -- that ain't necessarily good news. He paints some pretty nightmarish scenarios in "The Coming Death Shortage."