Not according to this guy: Question is . . . who will it 'feel' to have all that artificial stuff inside you which would be better. . . Finding a way to recreate the tissue or to simply upgrade with artificial parts Rocket River
<br> I don't think you grasp the concept of forever. Say it takes you a bajillion years to write all that stuff down. Then a bajillion more to do it. Then you spend 5x that bajillion repeating it. Then you do everything possible in the world which takes you another 500x the bajillion. Then you repeat it 1000x which takes 500000x that bajillion. Then what? You're still here and out of stuff to do.
I also suspect the people that seem all too eager at the prospect of an immortal life... the opportunity to do a lot.. stems from the idea/belief that living life to the fullest.. is best achieved through quantity.. rather than quality..
People have illusions about the continuity of self. Certainly, if you take me as I am today, and me as I was yesterday, we are close enough that we can be called the same person. But when you start spreading this out over decades your personality is like a cellular automata. You are an evolution of who you were, but you are, in fact, when viewed as snapshots at two different points in time, something completely different. Furthermore, after age 20 or so, your brains move from expansion to optimization - it stops the process of mass generation of new connections, and starts pairing away redundant connections. By the time you are 70 or 80 your brain is optimized, but not especially stimulated by new experience. Any treatment which enables you to live longer will necessarily turn back the clock on the growth of new connections. Essentially, in living the length of that many lifetimes, you will necessarily become like a phoenix - you will actually live something like many different lives and you will forget things and relearn things and become interested in new things over and over. You will be like a house that has been torn down to its frame and rebuilt repeatedly. Since we are quoting SciFi books, Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling deals with it, though the process will undoubtedly be more gradual and less dramatic than in that book.
I wonder if "it" would still work and whether it could still ship the boys off to sea. Sure you could live a longer life, but neutered dogs do too. I think some traumas would be harder than learned skills or experiences for the monkey mind to get over. With time trending to infinite for an immortal, I guess dealing with it could be a given. But that goes back to whether the price of immortality is one's humanity.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. — Lazarus Long Robert Heinlein wrote several novels that dealt with the subject. Lazarus Long was a recurring character.
I would just continue to do the new stuff that was still being created in the meantime (new technology, art, etc), and continue to meet new people. I think Ottomaton made a good analogy when he said you would be like a phoenix in that you are "reborn" periodically and live many different lives. That's how I think of it. Instead of one long, linear life where you can supposedly run out of things to do, I think about it as being more cyclical in nature. You live one life, and then after all the people you know are dead and gone, you start from scratch and live another. And who says I'm still going to be "here?" I'm hitching a ride to go check out other planets when we have the technology. I'm also going off the assumption that this is a semi-realistic version of immortality where you can still die from terminal injury. Chances are the human race will destroy themselves before I ever get bored of what life has to offer.
How many episodes of Matlock can you watch before you just go kill yourself? It's the certainty of death that gives a sense of urgency to living. You are always on the clock. Dammit Chloe, we don't have much more time here! is much more exciting than ... Oh well, we can always try again tomorrow. ( also: see the Law Of Diminishing Marginal Utility)
For all we know, we get "reborn" everytime we die. Our memory gets erased and we start over again. No one living has died before, so who knows what really happens. Better yet, I haven't died yet so who's to say I'm not immortal
<br> If immortality were somehow achievable, why would you be the only one?? I think Hmm summed it up best when he said that a lot of you are basing this off of quantity over quality. To each his own. I would rather live a limited and fulfilling life than an endless one with no purpose. Though, I would not mind being alive for 500 years or so.
I don't understand why you think extended time means no purpose. You and I could live the the same life from which you find so much meaning. Then, right about the time you die, I could go to medical school and spend another lifetime or two with a new purpose, helping heal and empower the poor of the world. Then, a lifetime later, when I begin to lose joy in medicine, I could go to civil engineering and architecture school on Mars and help build the structures of a new civilization. Then, a lifetime or two later, I could get on the first interstellar colony ship, and start a new life as one of the first human beings to try and create a civilization under another star at Tau Ceti. It seems to me that that life has a whole hell of a lot more meaning than your puny 6 or 7 decade single narrative. When you are twenty years old it is easy to talk about how you'll happily die when your time is up. I think the evidence shows that when most people come up against it - when they are 80 or 90 or 110, they are no longer so eager to die. I read a book the other day when one character asked, "Who want's to be 90 years old?" and the other character responded, "Someone who's 98 years old". From another angle, imagine you had been alive for the last 3000 years. How incredibly proud and fulfilling it would be to look back over that stretch and see that you've played a part in taking mankind from huddling over a fire afraid of the dark, to landing on the moon. Imagine what someone with that full range of experience could offer mankind. Imagine the things you could learn from watching civilizations rise, burn out, and die away and be replaced by others. You could spend centuries ferreting out an answer to something hyper-specific like the Riemann hypothesis which has eluded normal people with their mayfly lifespans. Most mathematicians would consider their lives fulfilled after something like that - the true geniuses sacrifice living a fulfilled life in other capacities to turn inwards in thought, but not you. That sort of self-enforced prison of hyperfocus would be a momentary blip, soon discarded and forgotten. Afterwords, you could go on to live a normal fulfilling life in every other capacity. You could learn what it was like to love someone so intensely for a full human lifetime that you could think of nothing else. Then you could live a lifetime of group sex and casual encounters and be honestly able to talk about the pros and cons of each. You could become the most studied scholar of Christianity ever, and then change directions and become the most studied scholar of Islam ever, and once you were done, you could decide from which you find more meaning. As a human being, every choice you make in how to go forward ultimately limits you down the line. With eternal life, you can experience the paths on both sides of that choice. You can make horrible mistakes with your plan for your life, and then go back, start over, and try something else. You could smoke crack for 20 years, then spend the next 200 helping other crack heads get their lives back on track, and still achieve in other ways, and then you could forget it all and go on to live the life of someone who had the good sense to never try crack. You could understand and experience every iteration of how people live their lives and compare and contrast as to which you find to be the most fulfilling from experience. You would experience the world like a Picasso painting - you would look on life and any conceivable question from a thousand different perspectives simultaneously.
Besides immortality, I'd appreciate at least a further out endpoint. I think the consensus of most of us living is the life span we have is too short. I'll take a "generous lifespan". Well, after all he is an Ottomaton True. There ALWAYS something to learn, a new experience to gain. I think that it SHOULD be people will think of new ways to laugh, new ways to have enjoyment. There's also the traits we have called boredom and monotony. The initial people who have immortality will be in high heaven with all the new plentiful time and options. Instead of laughing, people fill the boredom with increased empowerment, greed and danger. What about after centuries upon centuries of doing the same things? You have no more youth and naivety about the world around you. What about things like sports and competition, where Kobe and Lebron can dominate the league for another 70 millennium? What if all GMs are already superhuman Daryl Moreys? Along with ability to have immortality would probably be ability to be whatever you want. What if everyone looks and acts the same, cuz everyone is given the optimal ability a human can have?....What about, the WOMEN in all this? We always kinda just leave them out of the future-world discussions... What we do know is if we already had a current lifespan of 500 years, we would NOT SHORTEN it. So, just keep going and keep living until the solar system implodes.
