Immortality Calling....

bonkey

Foollowing from Rope's most interesting thread, and some stuff I saw in it...

Would you like to be immortal?

Ignore religious factors (getting to heaven, or nirvana, or whatever) if you can, and seriously consider it...you do not have to be the only immortal. You can set your own parameters (health, aging, blah blah blah), but really....would you like to be immortal?

jc

Shiminay

If I could set my own parameters, then maybe, ya.

A friend told me an interesting thing and that was that everyone on the planet will develop Parkinson's Disease if they live long enough - not something I'd look forward to! As far as I know, this was based on research she'd done for her thesis, so it's pretty solid.

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All the best!
Dav
@B^)
So Bob Hoskins was about to roll a spliff when in walks Dana with her 3 foot Bong
[honey i] violated [the kids]
When the Beefy King arrives, I shall be paying homage with Puunack The Receiver in a haze of green curry.

GreenHell

I wouldn't mind immortality if I could remain reasonably young and if I got bord end it be cutting my head off or something.

bonkey

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by GREENHELL:
I wouldn't mind immortality if I could remain reasonably young and if I got bord end it be cutting my head off or something.</font>

There can be only one.

This seems to be a common enough idea tho....

After thinking about it seriously, most people eventually conclude that they would like to be immortal (which usually involves also being unharmeable so they cant be left in agony in a broken body at some stage), but only until they got fed up of it.

Which really says...."No, I dont want to be immortal, I just want to live until I choose not to."

We dont want immortality, we want to choose when we die. Maybe.

jc

Chubby

An eternity with your loved one could turn your feelings towards each other sour after a while. Then again you don't have to stay together. And yes I would love to be an immortal because I want to choose the time when I die. Maybe I just don't want to die with regrets. Regrets for not doing the things I wanted to do and seeing things I wanted to see.

Shroom

The question your gonna have to answer here is "does life get boring?". I think if your surrounded by your m8's and your all immortal, life will be anything but boring. That combined with infinite time to gather knowledge makes it very interesting indeed.

Still...i think that our life-spans are central to our enjoyment of our lives. Its a motivator, getting you up in the morning to go out and do things. The flip-side of immortality is that you'll be confronted with the crap of the world for the rest of yur life which isnt a pretty picture, and can drive any normal person insane.

bonkey

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Shroom:
The question your gonna have to answer here is "does life get boring?". I think if your surrounded by your m8's and your all immortal, life will be anything but boring. That combined with infinite time to gather knowledge makes it very interesting indeed.</font>

Only if there is an infinite amount of knowledge of interest to you.

Greg Egan wrote some excellent sci-fi about people who initially were able to transfer their being into robots, and then after that into some form of coherent energy (I think). Essentially, they were immortal.

After a few billion years, they ran out of things to interest them, and voluntarily "stopped".

Heres the problem...as an immortal, how deep would your despair be to find that there was nothing left of interest to you? Remember, we arent talking thousands of years (typical Anne Rice "immortal" vampire) - we are talking about the ablility to liv for eons - until the death of the universe should you wish.

I find the possibility vaguely disturbing actually....

jc

Jug-A-Lug

id settle for infinate re-incarnation, being immortal would only end up being boring.

or at a later point in time id get myself a space ship with time travel capabilities and make it my business to insult every living thing that ever lived.

"are you arthur dent?"
"yes"
"your a pr!ck dent"
"what?"
"just thought youd like to know"

-hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

Karl Hungus

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by bonkey:

Remember, we arent talking thousands of years (typical Anne Rice "immortal" vampire) - we are talking about the ablility to liv for eons - until the death of the universe should you wish.
</font>

I think the Anne Rice Vampire type would be most apealing, because it wouldn't be infinite, you COULD die, and you'd basicaly have to live in a lot of secrecy, which would make your life EXTREMELY interesting.

Manach

Enjoyed the first 3 books of Anne Rice's Vampire series (downhill from there). From what I can recall about them, the ones who could experience life, the +/-s, were the ones who held onto their immortaliy best.

My own personal driving force for immortality would be the dream of one day catching up to Hobbes' post count.

Shroom

I think its more the fact that no-one wishes to out-live his/her loved-ones.
Who wishes to roam the world without any m8's?

[This message has been edited by Shroom (edited 19-07-2001).]

fisty

welcome to my world

WhiteWashMan

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by fisty:
welcome to my world </font>

nah, you just need to shower more and get out in the sunlight

mind you, it would be really interesting, like that silly anne rice series about the vampires.
live through a couple of hundred years and watch the world change. but could you imagine the job market?
'must have a relevant degree or at least 99 years experience'


personally id love to try it if i could stay at my age and keep my hair

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Your Imps Demand Cable...

bonkey

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Shroom:
I think its more the fact that no-one wishes to out-live his/her loved-ones.
Who wishes to roam the world without any m8's?</font>

Like I said in the first post....you dont have to be the only immortal.

So, if your mates could be immortal (and wanted to be), abd roamed the world with you , and blah blah blah....

would you go for it then?

jc

Greenbean

Immortal means there is no end, its infinite. Infinite means anything than can happen over time will happen.. ie there will reach a point were nothing new happens and theres an infinity of time still to go.. another infinity later and theres still more. The biggest curse ever if there was one. Its like falling down a well with no bottom forever and not being allowed to die.

smoke.me.a.kipper

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Manach:

My own personal driving force for immortality would be the dream of one day catching up to Hobbes' post count.</font>

even if you live for a million years you couldnt do that. :P

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i invented '.com'

ButcherOfNog

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by bonkey:
Would you like to be immortal?
</font>

what i really would love is the ability to see the world in a few hundred years, to see the advancments we will have made, to see if we do reach for the stars and to see what we'll find, will we find life on other planets etc ..... that i think will be the worst thing for me about death, never knowing how far as a race we went and what we achieved.

Greenbean

Theres an interestingly miserable prediction for the outcome of the human race. Its based on the, fairly difficult to REALLY know, assumption that there should be millions of other worlds with life on them given the size of the universe.

Given there is so much opportunity for life and given that 5 billion years has past. 1000 million/1 billion years should be more than enough for life to advance from an primodial soup to intelligent beings on the majority of planets if not less. Lets say this starts around 2 billion years into the life of the universe, that would mean 3 billion years / 4 billion years into the universe we really should have plenty of opportunity for life forms to have become significantly intelligent to be at our level. At 5 billion years into things overall it seems humans are pretty late in evolving - we have had a set back in the wide spread destruction just after the dinosaurs; whatever that was.

So the ground work is: there have been plenty of chances for other races to have colonised our galaxy - they've had loads of time and they would have reached that level of self awareness to progress outside of normal evolution. Where are they? No radio signals, no signs of life, no artifacts, nada. Perhaps they are still travelling across the galaxy? - that is supposed to be unlikely - similar to the philipines if they had been colonised island by island it still wouldn't have been done by now; but if its done in parallel with people going in different directions it would (and did) only take 2,000 years. Once one race can achieve 20 lightyears with one generation, then every generation can do it in every direction - meaning widespread colonization in extremely little time. So overall it suggests something is going wrong with EVERY SINGLE ONE of these intelligent races, they haven't been able to do it, why?

A possibility is that perhaps the occurance of life destroying disasters that occured at the end of the reign of the dinsaurs happen alot more than people think and we may be unique and lucky... why not, we presume having life on a planet at all is very lucky - just because we exist doesn't mean its normal. Or maybe its the idea that I think is much more likely..

In a survival of the fitest regime its very clear that those who take best advantage of their environment will win. This is fine while the environment is pretty much in control of you - ie no matter how much you grow your claws or how evil your thoughts are you won't harm the world in a huge way - your gain is pretty much limitless. There are some balances which you have to abide by, ie if you were a lion and your dominated your pride by killing all the other adult you'd wipe out your clan. But such things are learned over time with genetic coding and balancing, and the development of mechanisms to counteract changes etc.

Stick a brain on top of things, then you've taken evolution outside of the genes and into the realms of culture/teaching and immediate environment. This basically speeds things up because change is much more dynamic - in the same way that software is much more dynamic than hardware. Tada, so survival of the fitest takes place at breakneck speeds. Its a different game but this is fine because we've got brains to facilitate it. Unfortunately even though we've got brains we're still mostly just animals with good thought processes, we still answer to basic instincts that are used to being in a world you can't kill the environment. So we act as though we can never destroy everything, or kill ourselves off, never really set things back millions of years; its not an element that survival of the fitest understands - its totally incapable of diverting its course from disaster - it always ends up being totally self destructive.

Example? How about global warming and the waste of core resources (alaska, kyoto, refusal of waste disposal tax). It is very likely that before we can colonise other planets we are going to have to live on this one for another couple of hundred of years, and we're going to have to do it with these monkey brains that only want to ride women and kill each other - a capitalist society that lets the world be run by such motivations. Monkey brains that put pride and "look out for no.1" as top of the agenda in the thought processes.

The only way to stop this is to remove the animal and carry on with the brain only, with thoughts only. I reckon no race has survived this 30,000 years when the evolutionary race becomes so quick they don't have time to take the corners anymore and simply die.

scutchy

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Greenbean:
So the ground work is: there have been plenty of chances for other races to have colonised our galaxy ... So overall it suggests something is going wrong with EVERY SINGLE ONE of these intelligent races, they haven't been able to do it, why?</font>

Hmm... first off, good post. As to your above point, I can think of a few reasons:

(1) They don't want to interfere with our development.

(2) They don't like us.

(3) They're nanoscopic.

(4) They don't care; they just stay on their own planet.

(5) They have colonised, but it's been covered up.

(6) They've evolved beyond the need for planets or a place to live.

(7) They've evolved beyond intellect, and looped 'round to being 'lower' animals again

(8) They developed intellect, and found a way of ridding themselves of it. (Like going back to Eden, or becoming one with the Dao - you get the idea.)

I realise there are problems with some of these, and some are highly unlikely, but it's all I can come up with in 5 minutes

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">In a survival of the fitest regime its very clear that those who take best advantage of their environment will win. This is fine while the environment is pretty much in control of you - ie no matter how much you grow your claws or how evil your thoughts are you won't harm the world in a huge way - your gain is pretty much limitless... Unfortunately even though we've got brains we're still mostly just animals with good thought processes, we still answer to basic instincts that are used to being in a world you can't kill the environment. So we act as though we can never destroy everything, or kill ourselves off, never really set things back millions of years...
The only way to stop this is to remove the animal and carry on with the brain only, with thoughts only.</font>

Ah - but are we really that different from animals? To look at this from an outside view, a species on this planet has survived, prospered, and is now choking on it's own waste products. This is not unusual in nature; in fact it's a fairly typical bacteria cycle. As for adapting the environment to suit us, beavers build dams which have widespread effects, rabbits kill trees by eating the bark in a ring - all these practices are normal, and availability of resources normally manages to bring about a balance. We will not destroy life on this planet, but we may well destroy life as we know it. But something will survive.

You propose as a solution continuing with the intellectual brain, and dropping our animal self as the only solution. Tell me, how would you feel about the converse? And what is the solution - to continue with our current exploitative unbalanced relationship with our planet and ourselves?

RopeDrink

Never was fond of any type of immortality...

Life would grow exceedingly boring with time, and you'd have to witness friends, relatives and loved ones wither away.

As frightened of death as I am, everlasting life is just as scary.

Karl Hungus

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by scutchy:
As for adapting the environment to suit us, beavers build dams which have widespread effects, rabbits kill trees by eating the bark in a ring - all these practices are normal, and availability of resources normally manages to bring about a balance. We will not destroy life on this planet, but we may well destroy life as we know it. But something will survive.
</font>

On this point, I would like to note that there was a Fungus found that could eat through a CD.
Which means, that all the trash that was thought to be un-recyclable, like polystyrine(sp?)...

...

Life finds a way...

RopeDrink

I actualy wrote a poem for the Leaving Cert on a similar scale as this topic...

You can check it out at http://www.boards.ie/bulletin/Forum13/HTML/000373.html if you like...

Pretty old, but I still like it...

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[VAR]-RopeDrink***** was killed by IOL NoLimits with Headshot from Disconnect