Many of us fear death. That is only natural, for many sane mind would probably prefer the certainty of life over the uncertainty of death. Many of us fear death out of the possibility that we would either face eternal oblivion or, if there is an afterlife, an eternity burning in fire and brimstone or bored out of your skulls in heaven. In other words, death may be one of the most undesired things in existence.

However, many people had pointed out that immortality had drawbacks:

1.) Your family and friends would die off because of old age or illness, as will their children and grandchildren, while you persist, leaving you with severe emotional tramau, become lonely or causing you to disassociate with humanity. Most obvious of problems

2.) Severe boredom, since there's only so much stuff that could be done to pass the time. We're talking potentially billions of years plus existence people

3.) Humanity would continue to evolve around you, generation by generation, while your original, unevolved form remains, thus causing you to eventually become a freak of nature.

4.) According to recent studies, time passes by faster in peoples perspective as you grow older since each moment they represent a smaller part of your life when you are older than when you a younger. A day would seem like an eternity for a toddler but around 5 minutes for an old man. Immortality would eventually cause you to percieve time in such way, when you are super old, events and people would explode around you. People you use to know would become less relevant to you. This is why Dr Manhattan became such a dick.

5.) You get older mentally. Imagine if your cell phone number changed every week, and every week you were forced to memorize the new one. It gets exponentially harder because all of those old numbers are still in your memory, clogging up the works. Then imagine someone asked you to instantly recall the number you had five numbers ago. Same case for immortal people. As time goes on, more and more memories pile up. Your brain can keep all that stuff organized for a while, but it's not like you can go into your brain and just delete files like cleaning up a hard drive. So useless stuff starts accumulating, clogging up the works and slowing everything down, like all those toolbars on your mom's Internet browser. Your body will be young, but you'll still be forgetting people's names and telling the same jokes to the same person twice in one day.

6.) You can never be found out, unless you want millions of prospectors, opportunists, politicians, rich people, mobsters, scientists, and other types who want immortality coming to claim a piece of you and try to find out how to live forever.

7.) Chances are, you might accidentally get trapped somewhere and unable to move, act or do anything and unable to get help and nobody knows you are there. E.g. fallen into a cement mixer, trapped by magma which cools and harden, accidentally blown off your spaceship and drifting into deep space. For a normal person death may come as a release from such a situation, but for an immortal, not an option. Imagine being like this, FOREVER. Many people considers this as the most horrifying reason why immortality sucks

8.) Other reasons

So, here's my challenge: does anyone have counterarguments that justifies immortality for people? Or, if not, anyone have more arguments why people should not pursue immortality and embrace the inevitable?

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"You ask stupid questions. You overreact to just about everything. You hyperventilate... and shouted something along the lines of "GET THE SUPREME COURT IN HERE AIQBFIOUAFB!" when it didn't really warrant. All that seems to pour out of your mouth is stupidity. I'm sorry mang, but it's true. And don't even apologize. Don't even cry. Just...please. Just shut the fuck up and don't say anything. That way you won't say any other stupid shit."

-KhorneFlakes' criticism of my posts on forum, one which I would take as a reminder to myself not to act like an idiot.

We will solve the 'immortality' issue, although a much better description would be 'indefinite lifespan without the downsides of aging'. In the short term, things like accidents would still kill people.

If stuck in human form, alone and with no means of enhancing mental capacity and experiences beyond the current human norm, then yes, 'immortality' would quickly grow boring and uninteresting. But that change in human existence won't be an isolated one. Coupled with other radical technological advances and human 'immortality' will have very interesting outlooks in the future.

Without a doubt, future generations will look back upon our civilization with horror, perhaps even disgust at the prospect of inevitable and unwilling death for so many. To us it's a fact of life, but then so was slavery to our ancestors and look how we percieve that now.

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"Now let us be clear, my friends. The fruits of our science that you receive and the many millions of benefits that justify them, are a gift. Be grateful. Or be silent." -Modified Quote

A couple of thoughts:

@boredom: Huh, I don't have enough time even now while being at university. I think I would manage. If you are one of those people who can't entertain themselves, this might be an important argument, though.

@watching family and friends die: People die. It happens and it sucks every time. This is not going to change. You change friends all the time, I don't think you would be lonely.

@mental age: But that would break the rules you yourself declared. Either I stay young or I don't, my brain would not age just because its philosophically interesting. I would certainly forget many things over time, though. I don't know whether remebering the face of a lover is worth dying for in the long run.

@things changing around you: Wow, what a wonderful opportunity! For sure I would want to see humanity evolve. At some point I would become God-King or something like that, of course. No, thats not a joke. Who would have the same knowledge, experience, wisdom or even money in their bank account after several millenia? You imply that I get invulnerability, too. Who is going to launch a coup against me?

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http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
Economic Left/Right: -7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.74

This is pre-WWII. You can sort of tell from the sketch style, from thee way it refers to Japan (Japan in the 1950s was still rebuilding from WWII), the spelling of Tokyo, lots of details. Nothing obvious... except that the upper right hand corner of the page reads "November 1931." --- Simon_Jester

1) Yes, completely true.

2) A very interesting idea. A possibility to escape of that would be to get a spacecraft and exploring the Universe with it. You are bound by the speed of light, but you don't have "x" years to arrive where you want, so you could be relatively slow. However, what to do in the loooooooong journey?. Perhaps so many boredom would make you insane.

3) Both humanity -to the point perhaps of seeing how it disappears-. Same to those species you know; at least, you could see new ones appear -the same can be said of other evolving things like the Earth or the Universe-.

4) Curious. As a side note, that's how I think time would pass for those fictional races with very long life spans (or inmortal) -dragons (if an adventurer does not kill them before to steal their treasures ), Tolkien elves, WoW Forsaken...-

5) Yes, an important thing most people does not think off.

6) No doubt that it'd happen. See 2).

7): Or imagine those things that will happen on the very and the very, very far future and that you'll end watching -death of the Earth and the Sun, much later the death of all stars, and much more later the desintegration of protons (what would happen to you then?. Same if you fall in a black hole)-. Its excessive, I know, but it's an example.

These are very interesting toughts, some of which can be eluded by assuming being inmortal does not suppose to be and think like an human as Singular Intellect has commented. For example, what for us is an entire year it could be for you much less or you could have a brain that does not have the limitations of the ours -both processing information much faster and having much larguer data storage capacity-. You could even not to have to worry of physical needs, and with that huge data processing and imagination to create entire virtual worlds in your mind -yes, I know it sounds like a super-powerful computer-.

On science-fiction, I can think on the alien described on Frederik Pohl's novel The World at the End of Time. It's a plasma entity that lives in the heart of a star and whose life passes at the speed of what happens at the quantum level. Among its recreations are to observ and study the Universe (and to create clones of itself devastating entire solar systems, but that's another history). In the very, very far future of the Universe, when less and less things happen to the Universe his time becomes slower and slower.
I'd give more details, but it's better if you read the novel; I don't want to spoil it.

EDIT. I've a fantasy setting with inmortal -or at least with very long-life span- races and had to make myself questions alike; why a race that is not very different of a sylvan elf would not end bored of contempling the nature for centuries, etc-.

You got to be kidding me. People can kill time so efficiently - some even die while playing World of Warcraft 24/7, and you're saying immortals would suck at time-killing? They'll be the masters of time-killing. On-foot expeditions to faraway places take years. You'd probably need millions of years to cover every place on earth with your footsteps and see everything there is to see. If you're immortal, nothing holds you back. And that's just the real world - humans are making virtual ones every day.

Look, we know immortality will suck in some way, because life sucks.

But hey, you've got forever to stop being a whiny bitch and get over it. And even if you can't, you also have forever to make/buy/somehow acquire a permanent/immortal whatever you think you're missing, like a best friend, or a dog, or your soul mate.

Besides, if you like exploring you'll essentially have an infinite number of places to go to since by the time you explore the existing ones the ones you already saw will be completely different, this is even if a magical FTL drive is invented.

I'm not a very social person and most of the people I've ever been close to are already dead. And realistically, immortality isn't going to be something that happens to just one person; so I could just make friends with some of my fellow immortals.


I don't buy that; there's not enough time in the day for me to do everything I'd like to do. And most likely a bunch of immortals would tweak the way boredom works, psychologically; say, it wears off after a long period.


Immortal isn't unchangeable. Eventually I'd have myself improved.


I doubt that would continue indefinitely; and at any rate, adjustments could be made to the brain.


Since when did human brains have perfect retention? A more likely problem would be losing old memories.


No need, since I'd volunteer for research into the subject assuming I was the only one. I'd feel a moral obligation in that direction, it's the best way to ensure I end up with immortal companions, and some kidnap-and-experiment scenario is pretty unlikely for something like this. If nothing else, why wouldn't they just pay me to cooperate instead?

As well, living under government protection would be a good thing since the greater danger would be religious fanatics in my opinion.


Realistic immortality though wouldn't work like that; sooner or later you'd "run down" no matter how tough you were. And it's another reason to make your immortality public since people would know not to give up on you even if you've been buried under debris a few weeks.


Because without it you'll just be dead. Wormfood. Nonexistent.

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"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

That assumes only you get it and not the rest of humanity around you. That in it self is something that is highly unlikely to happen sort of comic book radiation or strait up act of Q. Any sort of realistic scenario with a medical solution would spread like wild fire at least to the rich.


So what? I mean, boredom is hardly something reserved for the long lived.


Again, see my answer to point #1. And besides, with my wisdom from all those millennia (since that is how slow evolution works) I would be the wisest man on earth and the ideal great leader. And that is not even accounting for the fact that humanity is liable to genocide them self within the next few centuries.


This statement is absolutely false. What you said happens but only becouse as you age, you have less and less life to look forward to. Time runs by when you don't have much of it left. An immortal would likely see time just as we do, perhaps even slower as they don't have the burden of years in front of them.


Any sort of immortality would have to include a patch to fix this. Otherwise, it would drive you insane in a couple of centuries and would not be true immortality.


And that is bad why exactly? What's wrong with selling blood samples to the highest bidder and selling off vials of your sweat as old man Purple's miracle cure? And if they can adapt it to be spread to all, than by all right it is your duty toward man kind to let them.


Most cases of immortality do not preserve you from death due to damage. If this is the case here, just rip open your space suit when you get bored. If it is not the case, well do you know what happens than? You become a GOD AMONG MORTALS BABY! Can't be hurt, why not conquer the world. What are they going to do? Inconvenience you?

---

I am the Purple Cube from beyond. Seek not to understand me for thau shalt fail.

Warning: I am an amateur writer/roleplayer and as such my posts are liable to contain text that would fit better into a work of literature than a conversation. Hence (unless I am in debate mode) be sure to read my posts with care and not take everything I say at face value. It might be (and at times is) full of stylistic exaggeration for the sake of explaining my point. Thank you.

NOTIFICATION: From this point on all my posts are censored by the thought police.

Isn't it the other way around? Life is uncertain - you don't know how long, what quality, what events. Death is very certain: you're dead. You're going to stay that way.


Oh, please - by the time you hit middle age you'll have had some friends and family die and you know what? It's sad and painful but you don't stop wanting to live because of it. At least most people don't. Hell, I know a man who by the age of 14 had had every relative and every person he ever knew die, then he wound up halfway around the world in a place he didn't know the language. Wow, that completely sucked. You know what? He's in his 80's now, has a new family (including a great-grandkid), and lot of friends.

People you know dying is a normal part of life, whether you're mortal or immortal. This is a weak-ass argument against immortality.


I'm sure I could fill up my time for the next few thousand years... I'll take the risk.


Unless, of course, humanity is wiped out leaving you alone in the universe. That would suck, but I'm not sure it would be intolerable.


I have somewhat observed this effect myself as I age, but you know, a day is still a day long. It's not like time actually passes faster than it used to. Still takes as long to play a game of Monopoly as it ever did.


First of all, why would you remember all the old numbers? That's not how memory works, you either use phone numbers and addresses or eventually you lose them.

Recall five numbers ago? Why would that be a problem? Now, five hundred numbers ago, that might be an issue... but why would you need to?


The brain is not a computer. Please write that out 100 times (no cheating with the copy function). You don't need to deliberately delete stuff, you'll forget on your own, automatically, after awhile. Nor is there any evidence that remembering more stuff slows down the human brain. As for "forgetting people's names and telling the same jokes to the same person twice in one day", that's called "dementia". Not all old people suffer from it. Assuming the body is unaging, why would your immortal suffer from it?


This is about the only decent reason you give.


Because I always want to know what happens next.

Being buried wouldn't be all that bad, since you'll last longer than the rock, and you have plenty of time to try and dig out.

A lot of those reasons are from this article from Cracked.com. Anyway, I'd take immortality if only for the chance to watch how humanity would change over the centuries and more. Hell, I'd love to watch the sun go nova, if that's even possible.

---

"I'm just reading through your formspring here, and your responses to many questions seem to indicate that you are ready and willing to sacrifice realism/believability for the sake of (sometimes) marginal increases in gameplay quality. Why is this?"
"Because until I see gamers sincerely demanding that if they get winged in the gut with a bullet that they spend the next three hours bleeding out on the ground before permanently dying, they probably are too." - J.E. Sawyer

We take a dim view of cribbing from other sources without attribution.

People die already on large scales and people pull through. With infinite time on your side you would move on eventually.



There would still be stuff to do, new discoveries, we haven't seen everything yet and even in a billion years we'd never see it all.



Unless you had a position of power or importance. Or implants become good enough to fix that issue.



That happens due to brain age. If you were immortal this wouldn't happen.



Sorry, that's not going to happen unless immortality = dementia now.



Unless it was a common thing, or you were rich enough to tell them to fuck off.



That would kill you, unless you're talking true immortality with a side order of invulnerability in which case just go to sleep and wait for people to find you. Or you dig yourself out knowing that stone against your fingers won't actually harm your invulnerable ass.

------

Really, being able to see everything outweighs any drawbacks.

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School requires more work than I remember it taking...

Invulnerability != super-strength. If you were encased in solid rock by a volcanic eruption, you're not going to dig your way out of that. You could be stuck in the rock for geologic timescales. The ZOMG BURNING feeling will stop when the rock cools down. The inconvenience of not being able to carry out any 'mortal' bodily functions will freak you out to begin with . . . but it'll stop feeling inconvenient after a while. The horror of being entombed in rock for several million years will also wear off very quickly, since you'll have no way of tracking how long you've been in the rock. Your internal clock will drift to the point of meaninglessness without your daily dose of sunlight to reset it.

Besides, with that sort of fundamental sensory deprivation, you'll be in all-up hallucination mode before too long. You'll probably eventually start believing that you are an actual hunk of basalt that occasionally hallucinates that it is self-ambulatory.

Eventually, erosion will free you from your prison; at which point, you'll probably freak out, since you spent the last few eons thinking you were a particularly imaginative rock, and you'll have to spend some time trying to remember how to move.

No, if your fingers degrade more slowly than the rock you will wear it away with constant work. If you aren't harmed to incapacitation by the lava in the first place you might not even get stuck in it at all as the pain would have you thrashing to the surface. In this set up you're tough enough that lava doesn't do shit to you, I think you can, slowly, wear away some rock.

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School requires more work than I remember it taking...

Sorry, my bad.

---

"You ask stupid questions. You overreact to just about everything. You hyperventilate... and shouted something along the lines of "GET THE SUPREME COURT IN HERE AIQBFIOUAFB!" when it didn't really warrant. All that seems to pour out of your mouth is stupidity. I'm sorry mang, but it's true. And don't even apologize. Don't even cry. Just...please. Just shut the fuck up and don't say anything. That way you won't say any other stupid shit."

-KhorneFlakes' criticism of my posts on forum, one which I would take as a reminder to myself not to act like an idiot.

"My bad" is not good enough. Cite your sources, and you're on notice.

As said before, what scares me of this is the inmortality not in the sense that you can be killed by something powerful enough. The god-like one in which nothing can kill you and don't need food, water, sleep, etc.; you'll survive the mankind and you'll see how first Earth becomes a Venus-like world as the solar luminosity increases and later an airless molten rock world under the dying Sun whose fate is being engulfed by our star. For that epoch, you'll see the Andromeda-Milky Way collision, and much later -the worst- how stars burn out one after other until there's nothing but dead stars and darkness (and don't follow, but at least you'll have seen the dream of many astronomers... the Universe evolving)... no doubt for then you'll desire to die unless with the oceans of time you'd have managed to think how to create an Universe and a wormhole to go there when there were nothing interesting in this one.

Yes, with so many time and even without other superpowers, assuming you had the required technology, you could try to apply the ideas suggested by some people of using asteroids passing close to the Earth to increase its distance, so it would gain some more millions of years of habitability, and ¿who knows? even other more bizarre things at larguer scales.

Source of many of the arguments on this page originates from Cracked article "5 Reasons Immortality Would be Worse than Death". For more information, please visit <http://www.cracked.com/article_18708_5-reasons-immortality-would-be-worse-than-death.html#ixzz1QWT9WPT0>

Cracked.com, America's only humor site since 1958

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"You ask stupid questions. You overreact to just about everything. You hyperventilate... and shouted something along the lines of "GET THE SUPREME COURT IN HERE AIQBFIOUAFB!" when it didn't really warrant. All that seems to pour out of your mouth is stupidity. I'm sorry mang, but it's true. And don't even apologize. Don't even cry. Just...please. Just shut the fuck up and don't say anything. That way you won't say any other stupid shit."

-KhorneFlakes' criticism of my posts on forum, one which I would take as a reminder to myself not to act like an idiot.

Better plan:

Gather up large amounts of antimatter during your wait for the universe to end, and when the time comes, blow up a few super massive black holes, essentially making enough mini-bangs to make a few artificial galaxies to live in while you wait for the other super massive black holes to either undergo catastrophic explosive decay, evaporate into a large collection of nebulae, or bunch together and then do one of those two.

Alternatively, you could jump into a black hole to try to kill yourself, or jump into the antimatter in an attempt to kill yourself.

I'm not sure if a black hole, even one on his lasts stages of life when it's close to disappear due to Hawking radiation, could be blown up with antimatter. However, the idea of making artificial galaxies using the remaining hydrogen and controlling the collapse of the gas clouds is good. Hell, you could even accelerate them to relativistic speeds, so from the POV of the external Universe those stars would be nearly frozen in time.

Good point. Would you be so powerful than you'd even survive to a plunge into a black hole -especially if the classical black hole model with a central singularity is wrong and one of those alternate theories to describe them (fuzzballs, dark energy stars...) are correct (ie: no pass through the singularity to end into another Universe)- or to an annihilation with antimatter (in other words, the laws of physics would not apply to you)?.

Don't care about this one. Don't have much of a family or friends as it is.



I don't think this will be a problem for me. I'll get to experience so much more than a mortal. In fact, since you are immortal, you can party it up for some decades, than switch up to a career, or several.



Eh? Humanity will most likely evolve due to cybernetics which would apply to me probably.



Don't bother me



Does this really happen, outside the brain aging and degrading I mean.



I probably would take my chances and not try to hide it.



errr what are the chances of this happening, and I thought we were talking more realistic immortality, meaning you can get killed or whatever.

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Brotherhood of the Monkey @( !.! )@
To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift. ~Steve Prefontaine
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Would you be even able to see much of anything after being cut off from all sensory stimulation for that long?

---

Brotherhood of the Monkey @( !.! )@
To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift. ~Steve Prefontaine
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

I'd say it depends upon the nature of this 'immortality'. It takes years for your brain to create hierarchical structures modeling reality to be useful and comparable to what most people take for granted when they grow up with normal vision capability.

Obviously your body isn't breaking down in the normal sense, so even assuming a normal brain would lose this capability, there's no explicit reason to assume our 'immortal' human will as well.

---

"Now let us be clear, my friends. The fruits of our science that you receive and the many millions of benefits that justify them, are a gift. Be grateful. Or be silent." -Modified Quote

Well, it all depends on how much antimatter you have, and how exactly you use it. All you need to do is create an explosion with enough force to upset the balance between the repulsive (nuclear, electromagnetic) forces and the force of gravity in the singularity in favor of the repulsive forces. Personally I'd want to have at least 0.5% of the black holes mass of antimatter hurled towards it at relativistic speed, like say at least .3-5 c. At the very least you get a rather large explosion, which would be pretty.

Although, I've always wanted to see what would happen if two black holes hit each other at relativistic speeds.....



And that's the million dollar question.