Mortality

[a completely inoffensive name]

I disagree with you Hooah. I think it would only be a terrible toll on those who are too weak to handle it. If I knew I could live forever, quite honestly I would work so damn hard. Know why? Because now I can fulfill my big desire to learn everything. I want to learn everything, but in my 90-100 year time span I only have enough time to specialize in one field and perhaps along the rest of my life take intermittent breaks in my job to take classes in my later years to expand my learning. If I could live forever... I could see humanity become god and see us reach the point of terraforming entire planets far off in the future. It would be glorious and I would welcome it fully.

[Hooahguy]

I disagree with you Hooah. I think it would only be a terrible toll on those who are too weak to handle it. If I knew I could live forever, quite honestly I would work so damn hard. Know why? Because now I can fulfill my big desire to learn everything. I want to learn everything, but in my 90-100 year time span I only have enough time to specialize in one field and perhaps along the rest of my life take intermittent breaks in my job to take classes in my later years to expand my learning. If I could live forever... I could see humanity become god and see us reach the point of terraforming entire planets far off in the future. It would be glorious and I would welcome it fully.

Of course, that would only be for those who are very committed. There will be always those who will spend centuries sitting around being lazy. If I knew that I would live forever, I would do that. Spend a century being a nerd, another century being a jock, and so forth. But eventually I would ask myself what Im doing on this planet if Im just wasting time. Of course people would say they are tough enough to handle it, but would they actually be tough enough? We will never know, for there wont be any cure for death in the future. At least within the next century. First we got to cure AIDS and Cancer.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

bah, "immortality would be terrible" is one of those things that come from mythology. Like "getting three wishes will turn out terribly!" etc. Authors love to cheat when they write about it.

Ask someone who's 80 if they'd like to be rejuvenated along with their wife and best friends, and given 80 more years and see what they say. And then make the same offer in another 80. How about living for a thousand years, that would be cool? Why do these stories always involve people who want to commit suicide but inexplicable can't, and people who lose all friends to death?

[Hooahguy]

But then that just trivializes your actions of the past 80 or so years.

[a completely inoffensive name]

But then that just trivializes your actions of the past 80 or so years.

No it doesn't. If you spent your 80 years finding a cure for cancer and then managed to be given another 80 years, your accomplishments are not demeaned in any way.

[Hooahguy]

No it doesn't. If you spent your 80 years finding a cure for cancer and then managed to be given another 80 years, your accomplishments are not demeaned in any way.

Oh please, thats only assuming you have the smarts to cure cancer.

And Sasaki Kojiro, what Im trying to say is that if you just told an 80 year old "Ok you can essentially start over," what happened to all his decisions in years past?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Oh please, thats only assuming you have the smarts to cure cancer.

And Sasaki Kojiro, what Im trying to say is that if you just told an 80 year old "Ok you can essentially start over," what happened to all his decisions in years past?

We aren't wiping his memory. And I would bet a lot of his decisions were focused on happy retirement, which is now improved and extended. I mean, the fact that he would have to work for a while longer is a flaw of that specific example, but after a certain amount of wealth is built up you would be set.

[Hooahguy]

Of course we are going with the stock "happy marriage, happy life" formula.
What about those who did not have a happy life? Just saying "oh OK, you live forever so you can get one if you would like" does not always work and it wont enable them to get one.

[Hosakawa Tito]

No it doesn't. If you spent your 80 years finding a cure for cancer and then managed to be given another 80 years, your accomplishments are not demeaned in any way.

If everyone's immortal why the need for a cancer cure? Heck, many would probably pay a fortune if you could invent a way to reverse their immortality.

[a completely inoffensive name]

If everyone's immortal why the need for a cancer cure? Heck, many would probably pay a fortune if you could invent a way to reverse their immortality.

You are talking about immortality in the sense of nothing can hurt you (superman). I am talking about immortality from the more realistic view of eliminating the most "natural" and common of illnesses that plague humans (disease and aging).

[Hooahguy]

So if you are eliminating only the most common forms of death, then you arent really immortal, only immune from certain things.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

But then that just trivializes your actions of the past 80 or so years.

So what would you say to a 40 year old then? Don't live to 80, it'll trivialize your actions of the past 40 years? And how does it trivialize it?