Pros and Cons of Immortality

[neo-dragon]

Suppose that you could live forever, in your human body with perfect health, in this world as opposed to Heaven or Hell. What are some of the pros and cons in your eyes?

Off the top of my head...

Pros:
- Don't have to worry about death (obviously), growing old and frail, or maintaining good health.
- Get to live long enough to see what becomes of Earth and the human race.
- Enough time to do anything you could possibly want to.

Cons:
- Boredom
- Watching Loved ones grow old and die... over and over again.
- Memory limits? I tried looking into this one briefly but didn't find any definitive answers. The question is, how many memories can the human brain hold? How many centuries could a person live before he could no longer remember his parents' names and faces or where he came from?


Thoughts?

[Luet]

I agree with all your pros but I would only think it would be a good thing if all your friends and loved ones were also granted this immortality on earth as well. This is actually what my religion believes in, so I'm probably biased as to the pros/cons thing.

I believe that once returned to a state of perfect physical and mental health, that we wouldn't get bored. I mean, there is just so much to explore and learn! The universe is huge. And I don't know that the human brain capacity is limitless but maybe in perfection it would be.

[Rei]

I wouldn't worry about memory limits. We already have a kind of memory limit, assuming we are not actively exercising our memories. What would probably happen is you'd just forget less relevant things as time goes on, exactly the same way we forget less relevant things now. You'd just end up forgetting a greater quantity of memories, but probably the same percentage.

Myself, I'm not sure if getting to live long enough to see what becomes of Earth and the human race is necessarily a pro

[neo-dragon]

The memory limit still bothers me though. If you think about the REALLY long term, like millions or even billions of years, I don't think that the human brain is set up to hold and recall a respectable portion of the experiences that it would have in that time. Even if you just lose the "trivial" stuff, a million years from now probably everything about your life right now will no longer be relevant. It's hard to imagine, but would you really remember loved ones after they've been dead for 100 million years?

The caveat that I'm presenting here is that even though your body is immortal your mind is essentially still that of a mortal, and I'm tying to think in the super long term. That's why I also present growing bored as a con. While the universe may be filled with infinite wonders to experience, how much can our limited mortal brains really appreciate? Hell, there are people who by all appearances seem rather bored with life in the 80 or so years of it that they get!

And let's say that you did have a companion or companions. Is it even possible to enjoy someone's companionship for eons? Maybe you would eventually have to take up the practice of spending decades, centuries, or millenia apart just so that when you meet up again you'd have something new to say to each other.

[jotabe]

I can't conceive immortality on our bodies. Memory limit is one such limitation that is so easily bypassed through technology.

Our own bodies are extremely faulty on the long term. Not simply growing old, that's but a sympthom of our selves taking our toll to entropy. Bones erode and grow in wrong ways because the blueprints become less reliable after so many replications... and we don't have the means to copy the "originals" (from adult stem cells) and distribute them to all the cells in our body. Genetic reparation therapy could help, it could even make us as close to immortal as we could want...

...then we would meet the other limits. Our body is a limited design: we can't store arbitrarily large amounts of information, we can't push arbitrarily large weights, we can't run arbitrarily large distances without resting. We can't jump real high. We can't fly. We can't compute with precision at high speed.

Then there is the boredom... No matter how large the universe is, it's very likely a finite entity. And immortality means infinite time in your hands. You can tour the universe once, twice... ten times and still find it interesting. But what after having been one million times in each place of the universe? What after you have tracked down every single atom?

Then again, we probably don't have the means to last that long, anyway. Even if we can develop technology to expell entropy out of our bodies, we can't do the same about the universe, and the universe itself will die.
But we will have had a pretty good run, that's true. And maybe we can do something about the death of the universe, who knows.

[neo-dragon]

If you're going to accept the premise of immortality at all you have to assume infinite and flawless cellular repair and regeneration. In other words, no wear and tear on the body. As for technology fixing the memory limit, what are you suggesting, uploading our memories on to hard drives as we go? Even digital formation will degenerate over enough time.

And yes, the universe itself will eventually burn out. I guess there's no way around that...

[jotabe]

No need to upload our memories to storage devices... if we integrate memory expansions inside our bodies And that way we can adapt to any new type of technology that appears. Technological devices can be just as eternal if you keep them under permanent self-reparation.

And yes, the universe itself will eventually burn out. I guess there's no way around that...

Don't count your chicken just yet...

[Gravity Defier]

I hope I don't offend or otherwise insult anyone but I've been thinking about this and the idea of living forever seems more like a punishment than a reward or privilege. I say this without invoking the idea of any entity orchestrating events or watching over my life, to get it to or see how it gets to that outcome.



The pros you listed aren't pros, as far as I'm concerned.

Don't have to worry about death (obviously), growing old and frail, or maintaining good health.

I fear, as of right now, growing frail, immobile, or unhealthy more than death. I'm not even sure I fear death on more than a super subconscious, all living things want to survive level. I think and hope that, by the time it comes calling for me, I'll be ready for death.

Get to live long enough to see what becomes of Earth and the human race.

I, like most people in the generations that came before me, am of the belief that there was some golden age and things have since gone downhill. That is subjective, of course, and I'm really more certain that the old adage "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is true. The technology, culture, lifestyles, etc. have, are, and will continue to change and it is in those areas I wish it would stay the same; as for the part that does stay the same? That would be the nature of people and that would be the area in which I most fervently wish for some change and think it is most needed. All that aside, a not insignificant part of my questioning my own personal option to have children is precisely because I fear the type of world, and people in it, I would be subjecting them (or their children, and so on) to. If everyone thought that way, we'd be a doomed species but the point is, I am prone to thinking that way, making it safe to say, I likewise don't want to witness what becomes of things.

Enough time to do anything you could possibly want to.

I think having limited time is the better option, of the two. It makes you really think about what truly matters to you and forces you to prioritize what you can/are willing to and what you can't/aren't willing to live without. I would like to do quite a bit but it's not about what I can do, where I can go, or even what I can witness so much as it's who I share those experiences with. Those moments would mean more to me, knowing someone subconsciously or otherwise thought, "I have limited resources and I'm choosing to be here with you."


Cons.

Boredom

I think even the most creative, imaginative, adventurous people would start to experience this as an immortal. I don't think it could be avoided. That's not so say it's necessarily a bad thing; I've gotten bored, which pushed me to go somewhere I'd been a million times before, and enjoyed myself with the right company. How often that could be done in an endless lifetime, who's to say? I'm calling this a neutral or unknown.

Watching Loved ones grow old and die... over and over again.

This is the biggest reason for me to skip immortality. While thinking about jobs, skills, talents, etc., I thought that my best quality wasn't anything I'll ever get paid for or that I could really physically manifest in obvious, helpful ways. It's how much I love the few people I do and all the things that come along with that. Take away those people and, quite frankly, you'll have taken away my will and reason to live.

Memory limits? How many centuries could a person live before he could no longer remember his parents' names and faces or where he came from?

There would be memory limits but dismissing the possibility for something like Alzheimer's, I doubt people would ever forget their parents or equivalent loved ones. I think that as history repeats itself, people would begin losing world events long before they'd lose loved ones.

Given the choice, I'd pass. If family could stay with me, I think I'd still pass and hope they did, too (though I wouldn't be offended if they went on without me).

[neo-dragon]

I, like most people in the generations that came before me, am of the belief that there was some golden age and things have since gone downhill. That is subjective, of course, and I'm really more certain that the old adage "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is true. The technology, culture, lifestyles, etc. have, are, and will continue to change and it is in those areas I wish it would stay the same; as for the part that does stay the same? That would be the nature of people and that would be the area in which I most fervently wish for some change and think it is most needed. All that aside, a not insignificant part of my questioning my own personal option to have children is precisely because I fear the type of world, and people in it, I would be subjecting them (or their children, and so on) to. If everyone thought that way, we'd be a doomed species but the point is, I am prone to thinking that way, making it safe to say, I likewise don't want to witness what becomes of things.

I don't really agree with that mentality. I've always seen the development of the human race as being analogous to the development of an individual human being. We've made it through our infancy when we were little more than animals, and our early childhood when we first learned to think but simply made up explanations for all the things we couldn't understand (some would say this is where religion came into the picture, and when we were most dependent on it). Now, I believe we are in our adolescence; reckless, destructive, selfish, self-righteous. If we survive our teen years, I very much want to know what kind of adult we grow into. Because if we survive it will be by growing better, not worse. And if we don't, I would still like to see how we end.

[Bean_wannabe]

No matter what your opinion on the matter, you have to admit that the ability to skydive without a parachute would keep you occupied for a few centuries...

[neo-dragon]

Now here's a big old random BUMP!

I just happened upon this quote from one of my favourite authors and it reminded me of this thread:

"There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven."

- Isaac Asimov

[Inexoh]

Hmm. Being immortal, in my case, almost scares me. What would I become without the fear of consequences?

[starlooker]

Cons: See Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.

http://hhgproject.org/entries/wowbagger.html