New Study: Only 33% Would Opt For Immortality (msn.com) 211
Captain Kirk once said "The trouble with immortality is it's boring." But how many people agree with him?
Long-time Slashdot reader tinkers shares one answer. University of Texas scientists surveyed more than 900 adults living in the U.S. — and discovered that only 33% of them would be willing to take an immortality pill if one existed.
But then they broke down the results into different age groups. From The Independent: One group was younger people, between the ages of 18 and 29, another group of senior citizens whose average age was 72, and a third group made up of individuals whose average age was 88. Each of the groups reached a majority consensus that they would not want to live forever. However, among the youngest group and oldest group there were differences in what age they would prefer to be "frozen" at by a theoretical immortality pill.
The younger group chose the age of 23, while the oldest group picked 42... The youngest group had the largest number of individuals saying they would want to live forever, with 34% saying they would take an immortality pill. Another 40% said they would not take one, and 26% said they were unsure.
The middle group saw slightly fewer people willing to live forever, with 32% saying they would take the pill, and 43% saying they would not. A quarter of the the respondents said they were unsure. The oldest group saw the fewest number of those interested in eternal life, with only 24% saying they would agree to take the pill. More than half — 59% — said they would not take it, with only 17% saying they were unsure....
Differences in responses emerged along gender lines as well, with more men saying they would take the pill than women.
Long-time Slashdot reader tinkers shares one answer. University of Texas scientists surveyed more than 900 adults living in the U.S. — and discovered that only 33% of them would be willing to take an immortality pill if one existed.
But then they broke down the results into different age groups. From The Independent: One group was younger people, between the ages of 18 and 29, another group of senior citizens whose average age was 72, and a third group made up of individuals whose average age was 88. Each of the groups reached a majority consensus that they would not want to live forever. However, among the youngest group and oldest group there were differences in what age they would prefer to be "frozen" at by a theoretical immortality pill.
The younger group chose the age of 23, while the oldest group picked 42... The youngest group had the largest number of individuals saying they would want to live forever, with 34% saying they would take an immortality pill. Another 40% said they would not take one, and 26% said they were unsure.
The middle group saw slightly fewer people willing to live forever, with 32% saying they would take the pill, and 43% saying they would not. A quarter of the the respondents said they were unsure. The oldest group saw the fewest number of those interested in eternal life, with only 24% saying they would agree to take the pill. More than half — 59% — said they would not take it, with only 17% saying they were unsure....
Differences in responses emerged along gender lines as well, with more men saying they would take the pill than women.
taxes? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it's a no from me unless there is a tax break. My 401K isn't infinite and social security does not cover nearly enough.
Re:taxes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: taxes? (Score:2, Insightful)
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"You would certainly eventually become rich"
Everyone can't be rich. And imagine being in prison for 1000 years for some crime. Or worse yet, being in prison for 1000 years for a crime you didn't commit. It reminds me of a crack commando unit who was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune.
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Yes. With unlimited time, some things which were not possible suddenly become possible. You would certainly eventually become rich, and life would become effortless, assuming society maintained itself, and you did not go crazy.
you would actually have an extreme advantage in this since 66% of people would choose to die off - leaving you with a much smaller 100+yr group
Re:taxes? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nope, it just means never dying. What you described is eternal.
Nope. Being immortal doesn't mean all your cells are as well. Some jellyfish are essentially non-aging (immortal) and their individual cells are not.
How about you define that in explicit terms?
OK, now you're just slapping quantum on shit to sound erudite. Tha
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You'd have plenty of time to accrue things of value and be a rent-seeker. Land, houses, whatever. Live off the income.
That only works in a scenario where you are the only immortal. If everyone is, the current economics won't apply.
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If that was true then your kids could live off generational wealth and basically do nothing, or even lose huge amounts and still be wealthy!
Oh, wait...
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And the basic rule will always be there.
Spend less than you make, and you'll become wealthy.
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Living off returns on your investments forever presumes that other people -- the younger productive folk -- are keeping you alive. This has the makings of a good science fiction dystopia. I think the idea of a gerontocracy has been explored in various stories.
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You need less than a million bucks of liquid assets to live off it forever in reasonable comfort. That's not insignificant of course, but also not impossible to accumulate by the end of even our regular working lives, let alone infinite ones.
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True. At the recommended rate of 4%, you'd get 40k/year from that indefinitely. Some pros recommend up to 5%, but it depends upon how risk adverse you are.
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Investing (Score:2)
The most likely scenario is that people will retire for a while and then return to work so you'll just need to save to support yourself for howev
Re:taxes? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess it's a no from me unless there is a tax break. My 401K isn't infinite and social security does not cover nearly enough.
If you are "locked-in" at age 42, you can get a job and continue to earn money. As your expertise accumulates through many lifetimes of experience, your pay should increase as well.
"C++ programmer wanted, with at least 400 years of experience."
With centuries to learn, you might even eventually understand Git's CLI.
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Yes but when the add for a C++ programmers with 400 years experience is posted, no one will have over 380 years of experience so It will just be an excuse to actually give the work to an inexpensive AI programmer.
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"C++ programmer wanted, with at least 400 years of experience."
You jest, but I saw a job posting that asked for 10 years of Java experience when it had only been out for 5 years.
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If you invested in the S&P over the last hundred years, you'd have gotten ~10% per year. Deductions from your 401k should typically be limited to ~4% of the total per year, which will allow your fund to continue indefinitely. I've been taking about 3.5% from my own and have a pile more than when I retired because we've had some good years recently.
Dude? No death, no taxes bro. (Score:3)
What are they gonna do? Put you in prison for life? Shoot you to - HAH! - death?
It's immortality! Only laws you have to fear are the ones concerning the heat death of the universe.
Also, being immortal you can go totally possessionless if you wanted to. It will all fall apart on you sooner or later anyway.
And being immortal it's not like you'd really NEED food. Or air.
But you might wanna keep some sentient beings around for conversation and all. Volleyballs tend to be pretty silent companions. Also, shitty s
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If only taxes were based on your income with different percentage of income taxed changed based on how much one makes so to not be sure you are taxing people into poverty.
Also if you were to live forever, I would expect you would be working and asked to be a productive member of society for the infinity.
If you were to stay youthful and healthy for all times. Retirement isn't going to be an issue. Every 30 or 40 years you can probably save up 20 years sabatacle, where you can get a break, and relearn a new
A few years of life (Score:3)
When I was young, I wanted to live 1,000 years. Five years later I realized, meeting new and interesting people wasn't worth waiting for.
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Many of us don't need (or want) other people to be happy/content.
The big picture (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, keep in mind that only a literally infinitesimal portion of your life would be spent skydiving and seeing humans colonize other planets and generally crossing things off your not-a-bucket list. Essentially all of it would be spent drifting in a thin, entropic haze near absolute zero. Overall maybe not a great trade off.
Live longer or live forever? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, in the former case (which I suspect is what the researchers were actually thinking of) I can't think of any reason other than cost or unspecified side effects why anyone might refuse. If a few decades down the line you decide that it was a bad idea to take the pill then surely all you have to do is put a gun to your head?>
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I think it makes a big difference whether it simply prevents old age or whether it actually makes it impossible for you to die.
Or option three, prevents death but not old age. I'd probably skip that one, too. Forever young, or at least forever no older, is the minimum acceptable result. On the other hand, if you age but don't die at least there's hope that one day they'll also figure out how to reverse aging.
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Ah yes, the original cautionary tale of 'eternal life' rather than 'eternal youth'.
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Ah yes, the original cautionary tale of 'eternal life' rather than 'eternal youth'.
Tithonus [wikipedia.org].
"When loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to Eros in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs."
In the end, Eros turned Tithonus into a grasshopper. So, somewhere in the world, there is a grasshopper who will never die.
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Yeah living to around a 100 should be pretty good and probably enough to get bored of everything, which isn't too far from what we achieve nowadays. The problem are the shitty disintegrating meat bodies that will make everything a misery sooner or later.
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You will find "natural causes" frequently in that case.
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There's an analysis of this in an appendix of one of Charles Sheffield's science fiction works. He came up with several options for apparent immortality but, the actuarial studies say you'll be squashed flat by a truck, slip in the shower, or whatever in no more than a few thousand years.
If you happen to have rapid regeneration, you might last a bit longer. It would be useful to be able to backup your mind and not be stuck in one body.
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It seems to me that the premise of the question might be slightly flawed and I guess it partly depends on what the imaginary immortality pill does. I think it makes a big difference whether it simply prevents old age or whether it actually makes it impossible for you to die. In the latter case, where you cannot commit suicide even by, for example, jumping into a volcano then there might be a problem with eventual extreme boredom.
Do want to have kids knowing you'll outlive every generation and must watch them grow old and die? Will tehy believe you if you say "Luke, I am your great great great great great great great grandfather?" What happens when the sun eventually goes supernova or the universe collapses? If you can't die you're kinda stuck; hopefully their are interesting people amongst your fellow immortals.
Realistic Possibility (Score:2)
it partly depends on what the imaginary immortality pill does.
The only realistic possibility is that the pill cures the aging process. This would leave you technically mortal - you can still die if hit by a bus or if you catch a nasty disease etc. - but with no fixed lifetime. It would also need to keep you in reasonable youth and good health otherwise nobody would want to take it and due to the healthcare costs, society could not afford for us all to take it.
The concern often raise with indefinite lifespans is boredom but I wonder if that is not really an issue.
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In the latter case, where you cannot commit suicide even by, for example, jumping into a volcano then there might be a problem with eventual extreme boredom.
What happens once the heat death of the universe sets in? Do you die? Do you have existing consciousness in a frozen body that can't move and states into darkness? Considering that the torture would be eternal while productive life before that would be finite, I don't think that "extreme boredom" is a sufficient description of this outcome.
That's because (Score:4, Funny)
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People who own a ski lodge rejoice.
Re:That's because (Score:5, Insightful)
Physically, yes. But in fact your 40s is around the minima for the curve that describes how likely you are to report yourself as happy.
Your chance of being rises in your fifties until you're roughly as likely to be happy at 70 as you are at 10 -- and the curve continues to rise through your 80s. But I can tell you as someone well on the way up the upswing, aging is an exercise in letting go of things. Some of those things are painful to lose. I would give any material thing to have my parents back for an afternoon. I've lost two brothers and I am in the process of losing a sister to Stage IV cancer, and that's painful.
But the thing is, my sister is basically happy. She'd rather not be dying, but the less time you have left, the more you live in the moment -- like a young child does. If you lived forever you'd be always focused on the future and never get around to experiencing the present.
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That is insane (Score:2)
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New knowledge is found every day, and much faster than you can absorb it. The same goes for fiction if you're into reading. You would never catch up. I can't imagine ever being bored. Even just going out to enjoy sports, play with my dog, video games, etc would keep me occupied for hours every day. You could spend ages learning languages. And if you're actually worth a shit, putting all your knowledge to good use helping other humans.
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I cannot fathom reasons for declining immortality. If there were circumstances like degrading health or dementia then maybe, but the question apparently says "frozen". Maybe something religious; religions promote all kinds of nonsense, like prohibition of some food or (nonharmful) behavior. By the way, I have only read the abstract as the study seems to be paywalled.
You answered your own question. If the people queried were all convinced there wasn't an eternal post-death reward of bliss, angels, and peace, maybe the numbers would be different.
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Look at the world the way it is now. Extrapolate into infinity. Hell on Earth indeed.
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Look at the world the way it is now. Extrapolate into infinity. Hell on Earth indeed.
And yet. Our world is - in most ways - better for us than it's ever been. For most of us, even the biggest issues such as pollution aren't personally impactful yet. By most of the metrics I'd use, the world is better off than when I was a kid. The Internet alone is a great example. Perfect? No. Game-changing improvement? Yes.
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It depends a lot on what sort of immortality is offered. If you can still get sick/miserable, it may not be so good. Especially when entropy will eventually change everything into a frozen wasteland, so what, you stay alone in a cold dark universe forever?
But of course that sort of immortality should be impossible, anyhow, at best we might reverse the damage from aging... but even then I doubt we can cure it all. Maybe we get some kind of computer upload, but then it'd depend on resources to keep that go
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Hell? We have it extremely good compared to most any time in history. If you think otherwise, you're probably in the bottom 1%.
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My father died last year at the age of 78 from multiple cancers. He was an (strongly voiced) atheist. He didn't want to see any doctor to grab a few more moments of pain, and he welcomed death. When you are suffering and struggling to do everything, why would you want to continue on forever? I can understand people in their 20s taking the pill, but past 60, the number of people in such a good health that they see themselves going on forever ought to be the minority.
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At 62, I'd still take it, but agree that I wouldn't much later. It really depends upon your state of health. I've watched as my parents and in-laws have declined (and died) over the last ~20 years, and it's just ugly at some point. I'll put a bullet in my own head before that happens. My 83 yr old father in law is on his deathbed as I write this, and he was still in relatively good health just a couple years ago.
Read the Fine Print (Score:2)
I cannot fathom reasons for declining immortality.
I'd want to know the details before accepting or declining. I'd go for a "cure for aging" type of immortality where you are fixed at a reasonably young and healthy age but otherwise just like we are now i.e. you can still die from accidents, disease etc. just not from your body getting old and infirm. But who would go for one where you just keep getting older and older but never die? The "magical" versions where it is impossible for you to die also seem rather unappealing since our universe is going to get
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Fuckem! (Score:2)
More immortality for ME!
I'll have a dozen of them please. To the heat death of the universe! AND BACK!!! Screw the big bang! I'll reboot the universe with a fat fart!
Complex Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Immortality has practical purposes such as space travel. I think the more introverted a person is the more they can live with it. I think there is also likely an interesting relationship to mental "disorder".
If you accept a life of immortality, you have to accept there are only two ways to die: suicide or accident. Many people would find these deaths undesirable. The disorders that allow one to accept and contemplate suicide may be more beneficial for immortals that aren't taking this path for some clear practical motive.
I personally think I could accept immortality but the practical motives would be a huge requirement, say as a Martian colonists or a deep space explorer. There is no reason to try to live an ordinary terrestrial life as an immortal.
Also the age to freeze is kind of silly. It's more emotionally driven. These kinds of conclusions are about "the best time of our lives" but how does that matter for an immortal?
The question seems absurd. The question is why would one need to be immortal and then ask those people based on such a lifestyle.
You might as well ask how many people could spend 6 months in space... because immortality is going to be a comparable level of emotional isolation over the long haul.
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Space travel is not limited just by the human limitations of time. Whatever you're traveling to see will be gone or far different by the time you get there. Your trip home might take until after the end of human civilization.
Obvious from the Choice (Score:2)
If you accept a life of immortality, you have to accept there are only two ways to die: suicide or accident. Many people would find these deaths undesirable.
I think we can take it as a given that anyone opting for immortality generally takes any sort of death as undesirable.
Immortality vs Stopping Aging: Two different thing (Score:3)
I wouldn't take immortality. Last thing I want to do is be floating in space for eternity after the heat death of the universe.
But if I could elect to stop or reverse aging and disease while still being able to die from an accident or by choice? Absolutely would take that option.
Re:Immortality vs Stopping Aging: Two different th (Score:4, Insightful)
Having got old, I have come to the conclusion that it does not matter so much what you die from, but rather what you suffer from. There are some ailments of old age that don't kill you, but cause immense suffering for a long time, such as arthritis. Then there is a possibility that your brain stops working properly, and you as a person do not exist any more. The science fiction ideal might be completely healthy life forever, but I wonder how long I would be able to find useful things to do, given an eternity.
Best outcome... (Score:2)
Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to make sense.
As you get older, your body ages and life becomes physically harder. You get tired more easily, you start to collect long-term defects and (perhaps) continuous pain, and life becomes more of an uphill walk than a downhill one. Less motivation to continue.
At 23 you're having a lot of fun with your life, so it's reasonable that young people would choose that age, while older people would note that at around 40 you have figured out most of life's problems and are starting to live in comfort - your children are adults (IIRC, average age to have 1st child is 23), you're still reasonably young and no longer have to care for your kids, and you can still get joy from visiting the grandkids without having to be the parent 24/7.
In my view, it greatly depends on the state of existence. In the series "Lovecraft Country", a woman transported to an alternate reality where she lived the experience of different lives, and did so for 200 years. Noting that 20 years experience is enough to become expert in something (maybe 2 or 3 things, depending) how much pleasure would you get from the experience of learning 20 or 30 things you are interested in? This includes being expert at raising children, social interaction, artistic endeavors, or academics.
In "The Good Place", people were transported to heaven and allowed to pursue their dreams in perpetuity, but most people eventually opted to terminate their existence. As was pointed out in the series, "Shakespeare's last 2000 plays weren't as good as his first 2000" so his self-passing was seen as understandable. Eventually everyone interesting opted to self-pass, and heaven itself became a boring place to exist.
After 200 years, life *might* start to get boring, in the sense that there's nothing new under the sun, but note that the world (and in a larger sense, the universe) is pretty big and it's not clear that at that time you would have different information to make the decision from.
So it seems that the best course would be to take the immortality pill, and note that you have the option of becoming non-immortal at any future point.
Does everyone else get immortality too? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or are you the only one? I can't imagine how distressing it would be to outlive all your friends, and even your children and grandchildren. That's one of the things that a lot of people who live to 90 or 100 often mention, the fact that all their contemporaries have died.
Plus, if you have to keep it a secret, the fact that you have to keep moving around because you don't seem to age, and watching out to not make references to things that happened before you were born. (Like the fact that I saw Nirvana play live, if I'm trying to claim I was born in 1989.) Like Hob Gadling in Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics.
As for the age...I'm in my mid 50s now. I wouldn't mind having the body I had when I was 21 again, but I think the best combination of a youthful body and life experience came for me when I was in my early 30s.
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Or also, what about your friends and family you've already outlived? SF has already explored that question.
I believe this is only available as a Kindle book, so that's the only reason I'm posting an Amazon link. Ted Reynolds (remember "Can These Bones Live"? How could you forget?) has a story in
From Adam to âz: 20 Tales by Ted Reynolds
https://www.amazon.com/Adam-%E... [amazon.com]
on the subject. People in that society deliberately take the black pill to rejoin the ones they've lost. But there's a twist that I won't
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Reference (Score:3)
I'm reminded of Marvin the Paranoid Robot waiting on Arthur, Ford, Trillian and Zaphod at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
The first ten million years were the worst and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
I suspect that once you live more than a million years, things get pretty boring but I'm willing to give it a shot.
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The first ten million years were the worst and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
I suspect that once you live more than a million years, things get pretty boring but I'm willing to give it a shot.
My 5 and 7 year old kids can dig up a worm and play with it for hours. My 9 year old kid is bored with that kind of thing now and needs something more interesting to feel stimulated.
I'm 45 and there is nothing I do or experience on a daily basis at this point of my life that provides any excitement or satisfaction. I've already experienced everything I reasonably ever will.
Would I want to l
Captain Kirk (Score:2)
Anybody know which episode the Captain Kirk quote comes from? (If any...)
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Metamorphosis [chakoteya.net]
How many of the other 67% are religious? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just curious because isn't the afterlife (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Valhalla, etc.) essentially forever?
Infinitely Prolonged (Score:2)
If you were immortal, you might want to take up a hobby to keep yourself occupied. Something like insulting everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order.
Re:Infinitely Prolonged (Score:4, Funny)
Bored? Your own fault (Score:2)
As my mother always said, "If your bored, its your own fault".
Get a hobby, go to Mars, help go to Mars, theirs a LOT of work to do to secure human survival in the universe.
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[...]theirs a LOT of work[...]
I hear that learning grammar is a lot of work.
Only with the option to kill myself if I choose (Score:3)
Doctor Who has explored this one pretty throughly.
The Torchwood episode where Capt. Jack got cast in concrete was horrifying. If his friends hadn't figured it out and rescued him he would still be there.
The girl who couldn't die was another one, but that wasn't so frightening; almost a kind of way out of the perils of immortality: She forgot events that had happened centuries before and her character changed according to her decisions over the years. Effectively she wasn't immortal because she wasn't the same person in any meaningful way.
The Doctor himself is a best case scenario, and that's pretty grim. He has to work hard to fight despair and loneliness. Everyone he loves will eventually leave him, and no matter how hard he tries he can't form a truly permanent attachment to them. As the Master (Mistress at the time) said to Clara Oswald--"See that couple over there [looks at a happy couple walking a puppy]? You're the puppy." Even without time travel, after a few millenia it would become apparent that nothing human matters on that timescale.
Immortality with some profound mental or physical disease is pretty much the definition of hell. Don't want that.
So, I would only choose immortality if it came with with perfect mental and physical health, an apparent age of my choosing, and was granted to both me and my wife if she wanted it. If she didn't want it, then I wouldn't either. With the option to suicide if we get cast in concrete or something like that. I'm sure there's something I've forgotten; this is kind of like trying to outsmart the genie. But I'd still try it.
Next question--If you win a billion dollar multistate lottery how would you spend it?
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I thought of "The woman who lived " episode right away. Ashildr was having a rough time of it.
And also the second "Meanwhile in the Tardis" episode, (aka the Space Gandalf one)
"The Doctor tells Amy that he can't "see it" any more. He's made time and space his back yard for over nine hundred years, so everything about it is now just facts to him. But Amy can "see it", which lets the Doctor see it as well. That is his only reason. Amy wonders if there have been others before her."
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With the option to suicide if we get cast in concrete or something like that.
That's simple, just bind it to a key.
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Just don't lose that key
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We're already pretty good at not remembering what happened during our childhood.
No Way (Score:2)
Between finances, health, and people, I'd rather not. You all can keep this pig sty. Good luck, kids.
Astonished by the result (Score:2)
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Assuming you acquired most or all of the things you own now between your 20s and now, and you'd likely retain your likely much improved skills and network of friends and peers, it doesn't sound like your offer is as high as it sounds
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33% of 6 billion... (Score:2)
2 billion+ customers is still a very large market. If anyone could offer such a pill/course/treatment, they would have...
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Best way to estimate someone's age is to ask them the world's population. Amazing how it changes over time. We're up to nearly 8 billion. And even when I looked it up to make my comment, I underestimated by most of a billion.
I'm all for it (Score:2)
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Immortality vs invulnerability (Score:2)
Immortality, where you can still die by injury so it can end whenever you're ready (or by accident, which means statistically likely to end in 40k years or so if accidental death rates stay similar)... Now that I wouldn't understand why people turn down. E
Do you have the option to off yourself later? (Score:2)
How Is This Not A Slashdot Poll? (Score:2)
Just saying...
The problem with surveys (Score:2)
Is they use cherry picked questions to generate the stats the "researchers" want. The populations are usually not homogenous. And then the media takes the so called results and runs with it
ignorant fools (Score:2)
anyone who would want true immortality hasn't really thought it out beyond the "Oh boy I can't die!" part.
True immortality is the worst curse imaginable. Oh sure, it might be fun for the first few decades or centuries, maybe even a millennia or two if you really put some effort into it. If you ignore the fact that would still have to work, or at least worry about money. Oh? Your already super rich? what if the economy collapses and you lose it all? Or there is a revolution by people feed up with the i
Perfect! (Score:2)
Then we immortals won't have to eliminate those 2 thirds.
Ever had a really long term project? (Score:2)
Ben Franklin said he could deal with dying if someone would wake him up every hundred years to see how the United States was doing.
Arthur Clarke, in "The City and the Stars", came up with an immortality system to prevent boredom. Every thousand years or so, you toss out memories you don't want in your next life, and upload to static storage in the Central Computer to be reincarnated at a random interval in a population of mostly different people from your previous life.
The other measure to prevent boredom w
Not interested, except.... (Score:2)
Why is this on Slashdot? (Score:2)
More deliberately shitty content for clicks.
Non-technical people's opinions are worthless. When you include them you include people who believe in astrology and other drivel so why should anyone care what the room temperature IQ crowd think? If technology offers immortality they'll have no part in it.
Don't assume we can survive immortality (Score:2)
I don't want to work forever (Score:2)
That's my main problem with this. I'm looking forward to retirement. That's not to say that I won't continue doing productive things if I could live forever, I just want to have more of a choice in what to do.
Beyond that, who knows. It's certainly too early to judge if I would find it okay to continue living. It's just that so far I haven't found a reason to stop or think I might want to stop. I'm guessing that I'd never know.
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The complications of life... (Score:3)
I'm old enough to have given this a LOT of thought, it's not a new thought, and I'm well over my 50's now, and have learned a bit about life, so if you're young and think that living forever would be the best thing ever, read on...
Life is complex. You're born and the world is your oyster, you literally have a grab bag of opportunity around you and life is a minefield of pleasures and pitfalls that creates the person that you become eventually.
At first living forever sounds like an awesome deal, you'll never stop learning and you'll eventually become so experienced that you can literally do it all, but can you really? Anyone with some years of experience in their bag of life will know that it's much more complicated than that.
You will experience things that you wish you hadn't experienced in the first place, these things are hard to shake off and it will most likely follow you for the rest of your life, or at least until the positive aspects of your life overshadows the bad experiences, and then you can move on. The older we become, the more we have experienced and seen - and it's not all paradise, most likely you will have made some enemies along the way, and also gotten some physical or/and mental wounds on the way as well. The physical ones we can easily overcome, it's the mental ones that gets to you.
And life corrupts you. Have you ever had the thought - Oh to be young again - to be innocent and naive, to believe like you once did, that everyone was essentially good and you didn't even know that corruption or evil existed, you only heard of it in movies and in games... but your life was protected and you could dream of becoming anything, you could achieve anything.
Well - the thing is - YOU STILL CAN - and life is in fact exactly what you make of it, but our mind gets polluted over time. Eventually you'll reach that point were you've been-there-done-that, and it will take a whole lot of inspiration to get back to that youthful feeling you so badly crave again, that crystal-clear mind that doesn't have all of life's pollutions and corruptions that cloud your everyday thoughts.
I know from experience, I've been through a whole lot in life, lot's of bad stuff that has hurt me badly, and my belief in humanity too (I won't spoil it because your life may vary, for the better I hope), but things can happen, you've seen things that cannot be unseen, you've been hurt and have to carry around with you your pain for an eternity.
And then age gets to you if you're feeling to fit and comfy, you may be a fitness buff well into your 60's and life is smiling to you, but sooner or later your body will be falling appart and failing, and you'll be on the first row to experience your life slowly withering away right before your very eyes.
Even worse - you'll withness your loved ones go away, and soon you'll be there all alone, wondering what to do with all that time of yours, you've been-there-done-that, now what?
We humans have limitations, and our evolution is also our limitation (even if that doesn't make immediate sense to you now, depending on where you are in life), everyone's experiences are different, and while I might sound like a bitter old man, I'm not. I love the thought of living on forever, I'm just not sure that it'd be a really good idea to carry all my luggage with me for eternities, a new fresh reset button would be nice, then I'd enjoy the life to its fullest.
So - do you really want to live forever?
Because... (Score:3)
Because 67% think that they will get 7 virgins in heaven.