You think you will live forever?

What is your view on immortality for humans?

  • I want it now, and I'll see you for a drink at the end of the universe!

    Votes: 14 40.0%
  • No way, immortality was never meant for humans, and it will destroy us

    Votes: 8 22.9%
  • Well, I don't want to live for ever, but a couple of hundred years or some more would be fine

    Votes: 10 28.6%
  • Well, I don't know. If I get the option to die when I want to, maybe

    Votes: 7 20.0%
  • My deity forbids immortality, so I don't want it.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    35
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Maxinquaye

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It's amazing what you find on the internetz...

Medical knowledge is racing ahead. Most of us aren't even aware of the progress being made all the time, and the pace is quickening.

There is, for instance, a vibrant research into cell rejuvenation, which is probably the closest anti-aging therapy in time, with actuall technical immortality within 30-50 years. Maybe that will be Kurzweill's theories about machine-biology melding. :)

I don't share Kurzweill's techno-optimism, however, since he tends to forget one thing about human beings - we are often driven by fear. I think that the first Kurzweillean superbeings will be killed in their beds by enraged mobs of "normal humans". :)

But, it is progress, and technical immortality is a likely thing within the next 50 years. The question is, do you believe so, and do you want it?
 
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Zoombie

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I hope, but you can't know or think about the future. I mean, I think about things I think I know. But I know I don't know what hasn't happened yet. So, I hope a lot, and I believe i will if I'm lucky...but I don't know that I will.
 

alleycat

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One thing about predicting the future. By the time it gets here the prediction is usually forgotten.

I remember in the 80s some "experts" were predicting we'd all be working at home and telecommuting by now. Uh, huh.

My father has some old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s. They were big on flying vehicles and atomic energy back then. By 2000 people were suppose to be flying around in the own anti-gravity aircraft and energy was going to be too cheap to meter (heck, everyone would have their own atomic energy powerplant in the basement).

I sort of take any prediction of what going to happen 30 or 50 years from now with a spoonful of salt.
 

Zoombie

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Eh, they weren't so far off on the telecommuting now. My parents do it all the time, save for when they need to do secure stuff.

But yeah. The future is remarkably hard to predict.
 

LOG

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Well since you're having a drink at the end of the universe, I'd say yes.

Why am I the only one who's voted?
 

profen4

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I wonder if they'll have to sterilize everyone. not much room on this little rock of ours for people that don't die.
 

Manuel Royal

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One thing about predicting the future. By the time it gets here the prediction is usually forgotten.

I remember in the 80s some "experts" were predicting we'd all be working at home and telecommuting by now. Uh, huh.

My father has some old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s. They were big on flying vehicles and atomic energy back then. By 2000 people were suppose to be flying around in the own anti-gravity aircraft and energy was going to be too cheap to meter (heck, everyone would have their own atomic energy powerplant in the basement).

I sort of take any prediction of what going to happen 30 or 50 years from now with a spoonful of salt.
Atomic powerplant in the basement? How about in the trunk of your car? The Ford Nucleon.

Reality has a way of laughing at 20-year predictions. Fusion power has been twenty years away for decades now. Nano-robots in our bloodstream, keeping us healthy? I'm pretty sure those were twenty years away, twenty years ago.

In 1968, it seemed believable that by 2001 we'd have a base on the moon, a big rotating space station, a plasma-engine expedition to the Jovian system, and HAL-level artificial intelligence.

A lot of things have to happen for those kinds of advances. Even if the will to do it, and the money, are available, unexpected problems always come up. Especially when it comes to biology.

That's why near-future science fiction takes so many different forms. (And it sometimes occurs to me that we're living in a near-future science fiction story written in 1972; and one of the more benign ones, really.)

The population explosion may well still collapse our civilization. If I had the power to bestow immortality, I'd require sterilization to go with it. There's certainly no shortage of humans.

One possible future that I really hate is where most of the world's people are a permanently poor underclass, ruled over by a small elite of hyper-rich assholes who hold onto power for centuries. (Think of Dick Cheney still being around in 2150.)

But me, personally, I plan to live forever or die trying.
 

Don

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What makes you think you'll be important enough to be let in on the secret? There's only so much real estate to go around, you know.

The only way we know it hasn't happened already is that they put Saint Teddy in a hole in the ground.

Or did they... really?
 

regdog

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Why would I want to live forever? So I can see endless war, death, famine, suffering and have to work until I'm oh forever.

"True immortality isn't about living forever. It's what you do with the time you're given."
Hudson-Gargoyles
 

robeiae

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LOG

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Why would I want to live forever? So I can see endless war, death, famine, suffering and have to work until I'm oh forever.
Hudson-Gargoyles
Why should I live at all? So I can see endless war, death, famine, suffering and have to work for the majority of my lifespan?
 

LOG

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I should live for lust, got it.
Let me go contact Slaanesh, let hir know I'm coming.
 
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Plot Device

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I love what JRR Tolkien had to say when he wrote about death from the perspective of the immortal Elves. Here's my paraphrase of a very brief yet teasing passage I recall reading in The Silmarillion over 30 years ago:

"Death was gift given to men. After they died men passed on to a mysterious realm of which the Elves knew not, but they marveled at it all the same."



.
 

rhymegirl

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I'm not sure what the point would be to live forever.
 

Plot Device

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And on a side note ..........

I began a Christian fantasy novel over ten years ago that I never finished (and I'm certain I never will -- I abandoned it because the theology started getting very wonky on me and I had to put it down). I will share part of my premise, and you can take what you want from it and puke out the rest (wonky shit, I admit, which is why I stopped writing it). And I am certain I am not the only writer (Christian or otherwise) to ever write this general premise, so I won't even begin to claim it's entirely original.

In my never-to-be-finished novel, the mysterious and elusive creatures whom we refer to in modern times as space aliens are really the half-human and half-angel children from the Book of Genesis Chapter 6, referred to as the Nephilim. They were once very tall and beautiful people, very strong and physically fit -- hyper-idealized specimens of the perfect human, superior to us in matters of strength, physique and inteligence -- and most especially superior to us in good looks and sexiness. Except they are NOT human because unlike us they were not made "in the image of God." Instead their very existence is an unauthorized cheat. They suffer from a cosmic bastardization, so they are not recognized by the Throne of Heaven. They are flesh and blood, and so they COULD die, but they refuse to die because they know that if they die, their spirits will have no place to go. Upo death, their flesh and blood bodies will drop to the floor, and then their spirits will remain standing there with no passage for them into Heaven -- or even into Hell. Instead they will remain marooned here on the Earth until the End of Ages. There are already many thousands of such marooned spirits whose Nephilim bodies died long ago, and now they flit about as ghosts (aka "disembodied spirits"), wishing very much to be back inside of a human body again. Those who successfully do get back into a living breathing human body again are referred to as "demons", and the person whose body they are inhabitting are said to be "possessed."



Here's the heart and soul of my side note ............


But there exists another group of Nephilim who were rescued from death via technology. They CANNOT let themselves die, so their aging and decrepit bodies are withering away, many thousands of years old. They are forcing their bodies to remain alive, intervening for themselves medically with everything they can. But they have no more hair on their once beautiful heads or their once perfect bodies because human body hair barely lasts a century. They lost their teeth because teeth also only last maybe a century. They had to surgically remove all portions of their bodies that have cartilege because cartillege merely keeps on growing for as long as you are alive -- so they took out their own nasal cartilege, took out their ear cartilege. They are disfigured shells of their former beautiful selves. They MUST protect their eyes because of how delicate optical tissue is, so they cover their eyes with dark contact lenses. They stay out of the sun to prevent skin damage. Their spines have shrunk somewhat from bone loss, so they are shorter than they once were. Their heads seem disproportionately large for their small frames, but the truth is they were once mighty giants.

Yeah -- you know the imagery I'm trying to conjur for you here.

I'm describing the typical bald and bulbous-headed "space alien" with the dark shiney contact lenses covering their huge eyes, no nasal bones, no ear cartilege, sickly pale skin, tiny mouths, no teeth. I ALSO am describing a desperate people who cling to a lifeless form of life only because death is not an option.



No. I do not want to live forever. I am greatful for what JRR Tolkien calls "the gift of death."




Consider the Greek Goddess Eos who fell in love with a human named Tithonus. She asked Zeus to grant her lover eternal life -- but forgot to ask for the companion gift of eternal youth. Tithonus grew older and older and eventually shriveled up into a cricket.


No. I do not want to live forever. Not in this frail and makeshift body I don't.



.
 

SPMiller

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For one thing, living forever (or as long as I want) would be cool because then I'd have a chance at accomplishing my goals, which are unachievable in an ordinary human lifespan.
 

Albedo

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For one thing, living forever (or as long as I want) would be cool because then I'd have a chance at accomplishing my goals, which are unachievable in an ordinary human lifespan.

But the longer you live, the more donuts they'll make! You'll never be able to eat them all!
 

Paul

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And on a side note ..........

I began a Christian fantasy novel over ten years ago that I never finished (and I'm certain I never will -- I abandoned it because the theology started getting very wonky on me and I had to put it down). I will share part of my premise, and you can take what you want from it and puke out the rest (wonky shit, I admit, which is why I stopped writing it). And I am certain I am not the only writer (Christian or otherwise) to ever write this general premise, so I won't even begin to claim it's entirely original.

In my never-to-be-finished novel, the mysterious and elusive creatures whom we refer to in modern times as space aliens are really the half-human and half-angel children from the Book of Genesis Chapter 6, referred to as the Nephilim. They were once very tall and beautiful people, very strong and physically fit -- hyper-idealized specimens of the perfect human, superior to us in matters of strength, physique and inteligence -- and most especially superior to us in good looks and sexiness. Except they are NOT human because unlike us they were not made "in the image of God." Instead their very existence is an unauthorized cheat. They suffer from a cosmic bastardization, so they are not recognized by the Throne of Heaven. They are flesh and blood, and so they COULD die, but they refuse to die because they know that if they die, their spirits will have no place to go. Upo death, their flesh and blood bodies will drop to the floor, and then their spirits will remain standing there with no passage for them into Heaven -- or even into Hell. Instead they will remain marooned here on the Earth until the End of Ages. There are already many thousands of such marooned spirits whose Nephilim bodies died long ago, and now they flit about as ghosts (aka "disembodied spirits"), wishing very much to be back inside of a human body again. Those who successfully do get back into a living breathing human body again are referred to as "demons", and the person whose body they are inhabitting are said to be "possessed."



Here's the heart and soul of my side note ............


But there exists another group of Nephilim who were rescued from death via technology. They CANNOT let themselves die, so their aging and decrepit bodies are withering away, many thousands of years old. They are forcing their bodies to remain alive, intervening for themselves medically with everything they can. But they have no more hair on their once beautiful heads or their once perfect bodies because human body hair barely lasts a century. They lost their teeth because teeth also only last maybe a century. They had to surgically remove all portions of their bodies that have cartilege because cartillege merely keeps on growing for as long as you are alive -- so they took out their own nasal cartilege, took out their ear cartilege. They are disfigured shells of their former beautiful selves. They MUST protect their eyes because of how delicate optical tissue is, so they cover their eyes with dark contact lenses. They stay out of the sun to prevent skin damage. Their spines have shrunk somewhat from bone loss, so they are shorter than they once were. Their heads seem disproportionately large for their small frames, but the truth is they were once mighty giants.

Yeah -- you know the imagery I'm trying to conjur for you here.

I'm describing the typical bald and bulbous-headed "space alien" with the dark shiney contact lenses covering their huge eyes, no nasal bones, no ear cartilege, sickly pale skin, tiny mouths, no teeth. I ALSO am describing a desperate people who cling to a lifeless form of life only because death is not an option.



No. I do not want to live forever. I am greatful for what JRR Tolkien calls "the gift of death."




Consider the Greek Goddess Eos who fell in love with a human named Tithonus. She asked Zeus to grant her lover eternal life -- but forgot to ask for the companion gift of eternal youth. Tithonus grew older and older and eventually shriveled up into a cricket.


No. I do not want to live forever. Not in this frail and makeshift body I don't.



.

wow.
On the story I'd develop it without the Christian dimension go for a more secular philosophy angel - sounds pretty intriguing to me.



Anyway as for the main op Q, let me say this.

Consider non-existence. I mean really meditate upon it, Then get back to me and we'll talk of what is alive and non-alive. :D
 

Ruv Draba

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I don't know about "never meant" for humans, but I don't think that prolonged longevity is very compatible with a warp factor 5 sex-drive that leads us to hoard, compete, over-eat, struggle for power and over-consume. I suspect that if we gave people a choice between longevity that turned their sex competition off, and leaving things as-is many would be hard put to choose.
 
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