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If one were immortal, life would probably get boring...unless...

You hibernated thru every winter, lived normally during the summer, experienced everything that went on while you were asleep, and go back into hibernation

Life in the really slooowwww lane and then life in the really fast lane

I dunno... this is what happens when I think to hard at midnight

Immortality would only suck if you were human first

Plus, if your relitives/friends were immortal too it would be coolness. Yeah, you might get bored, but only as bored as you normally get. Life'd be pretty much t3h same. ^_^

....Unless of coarse everyone just got really boring......

Inky

There can be only one, Highlander.

I think that if you and a few others were immortal, that would be really cool. If random sections of the population just were. Especially if you fought to be the last immortal with swords. That would keep it not boring. But, even without the fighting thing, there are rules that people would have to follow if you're the only immortal, or one of few.

You have to move a lot. If you "die" then you can't go back to that place/area/country for another 30 years to pretend you're an offspring.

Those you love will eventually wilt and die, and there's nothing you can do about that, but think of all of the people you get to meet in the meantime.

I think it would be a lot smarter if you could 'live forever' more or less to stay out of the limelight. People will want to try to kill you because you're different, and others will want to exploit you for power, to use you as a messenger to strike fear into their followers. That's not that fun either.

I would travel a lot. I would be involved in every risky sport imaginable. I would read everything I could possibly read and I would pass down all of the information I gained.

I think it could be really cool.

Back in the 1950s James Blish wrote a series of four science fiction novels grouped under the collective heading of Cities in Flight. One of the basic premises of the series was that long distance interstellar spaceflight required vastly extended longevity, and to facilitate this, Blish created a future vision in which ageing and death had been conquered medically. This he considered a necessity, because even relatively short interstellar journeys take a decade or so, and long ones require centuries. Even if you have access to the marvel of propulsion that he devised in his novels, the requirement that a journey from point A to point B still required finite time meant that his spacefarers had to be effectively immortal in order to go about their fairly mundane everyday business, let alone engage in anything spectacular such as wars or founding new colonies.

An extract from the fourth book, The Triumph of Time, is apposite here. Allow me to share with you ...

The fact of the matter was that longevity now hung on him like a curse. An indefinitely prolonged life span had been a prerequisite for an Okie society - indeed, until the discovery of the first anti-agathic drugs early in the 21st century, interstellar flight even with the spindizzy had been a physical impossibility: the distances involved were simply too great for a short-lived man to compass at any finite speed - but to be a virtually immortal man in a stable society was to be as uninteresting to one's self, for Amalfi at least, as an everlasting light bulb; he felt that he had simply been screwed into his socket and forgotten.

It was true that most of the other former Okies had seemed able to make the change-over - the youngsters in particular, whose experience of star-wandering was limited, were now putting their long life expectancies to the obvious use: launching vast research or development projects the fruition of which could not be expected in under five centuries or more. There was, for example, an entire research team at work in New Manhattan on the overall problem of anti-matter. The theoretical brains of the project were being supplied largely by Dr Schloss, an ex-Hruntan physicist who had boarded the city back in 3602 as a refugee during the reduction of the Duchy of Gort, a last surviving polyp of the extinct Hruntan Empire; administration of the project was in the hands of a comparative youngster named Carrel, who not so long ago had been the city's co-pilot and ranking understudy to the City Manager. The immediate objective of the project, according to Carrel, was the elucidation of the theoretical molecular structures possible to anti-material atoms, but it was no secret that most of the young men in the group, with the active support of Schloss himself, were hoping in a few centuries to achieve the actual construction, not only of sinple chemical compounds - that might come about in a matter of decades - of this radical type, but a visible, macroscopic artefact composed entirely of anti-matter. Upon the unthinkably explosive object they would no doubt paint, Amalfi surmised, had they by that time also composed and anti-material paint and something to keep it in, the warning "noli me tangere".

That was all very well; but it was equally impossible for Amalfi, who was not a scientist, to participate. It was, of course, perfectly possible for him to end his life; he was not invulnerable, nor even truly immmortal; immortality is a meaningless word in a universe where the fundamental laws, being stochastic in nature, allow no one to bar accidents, and where life no matter how prolonged is only a temporary discontinuity in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The thought, however, did not occur to Amalfi; he was not the suicidal type. He had never felt less tired, less used-up, less despairing than he felt today; he was simply snarlingly bored, and too confirmed in his millennia-old patterns of thought and emotion to be able to settle for a single planet and a single social order, no matter how utopian; his thousand years of continuous translation from one culture to another had built up in him an enormous momentum which now seemed to be bearing him irresistibly toward an immovable inertial wall labelled NO PLACE TO GO.

One of the problems would be that if you were truly immortal, in the sense that you never ran down, aged or died, so long as you were in environmental conditions that didn't actively kill you, is that your perspective would have to undergo a fundamental change. To an immortal being, a time-span of millennia is blink-of-an-eye short term. You would have to develop a perspective that saw periods of billions of years as natural increments. You would, for example, witness the mutation of the entire map of the earth due to plate tectonics, and live long enough to witness the coming of that time when live on Earth itself was no longer possible due to the change in the internal dynamics of the Sun. Depending upon who you speak to, that could occur as early as 600 million years hence, or as late as 1 billion years hence, when the oceans themselves are boiled off into the atmosphere, and Earth starts to resemble the present-day Venus. If you decided to pay Earth a visit after that event, you would possibly witness the entire planet being swallowed up into the nuclear fires of the expanding Sun as it turned into a red giant. You would live long enough to watch the Sun turn into a white dwarf afterwards. Hopefully, you would have access to the means to travel elsewhere, perhaps assist in the establishment of your species on other worlds, but in as little as 50 million years' time, the very concept of "human being" might have mutated sufficiently for your descendants to have become an entirely different species. You would therefore face the prospect of being, unless you were accompanied by a retinue of others of your kind, the sole representative of "humanity" as constituted at the time of your birth. You would possibly find yourself the sole remaining speaker of your native language, as your distant descendants evolved the language into something completely different to its current form. You would not ncessarily be an anachronism, indeed as the millennia rolled on, you would become an increasingly valuable living historical treasure to those around you who remained mortal, but there would be fundamental difficulties arising in terms of your ability to maintain personal contact with your distant descendants, difficulties that would become more and more acute with the passage of time. An interesting perspective on this was created by Douglas Adams (track down the section in the H2G2 books on Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged) if you require further reading.

Eventually, you would, if you had access to the requisite means, live long enough to see the end of even large-scale structures that were once familiar to you, as the stars in the galaxies burned out, were replaced, and ultimately, some 10^50 years or so down the line (yes, ten to the power fifty years in the future - can you contemplate such a timescale now?) the amount of hydrogen left in the universe to form new stars began to run out. You would live to see the universe undergo thermodynamic decay into an assortment of black holes and very large balls of solid iron (black dwarves), and the formation of some very exotic structures following on from this. You would live long enough to see the lights go out in the entire universe sometime around the year 10^116. At that point, you too would run into that immovable inertial wall mentioned above in that extract from The Triumph of Time, labelled NO PLACE TO GO. Unless the 'multiverse hypothesis' had since been proven to be true, and you had the means to 'jump universe' into a more habitable one and leave this one behind, you would be faced with the prospect of a very lonely passing as the entire universe that had spawned you had now become inimical to your very existence. This assumes, of course, that you managed to avoid over that truly yawning chasm of time, any of those unfortunate stochastic events described above - 'accidents'.

One of the downsides of increased knowledge is that we can no longer delude ourselves that the universe was devised for our exclusive benefit. Once upon a time, you could take comfort in theology: now you can't, because the unfolding picture is one in which we are ever less and less significant on the grand scale, and where the Laws of Thermodynamics have effectively ruled out conventionally constructed deities. Yes, it is scary. For our ancestors, it was the uncertainty that was frightening to behold, the vast expanse of the unknown that they knew stretched out before them, and which remained for them the realm purely of speculation. We, on the other hand, are the first to discover that knowing what lies ahead is in some respects even more terrifying. The laws of physics allowed us to come into being and contemplate them, while ensuring that at some point, us and everything else after us that shares that contemplative ability will be snuffed out. This should go some way toward explaining why I have, in the past, frequently uttered the quip that God has a schadenfreude sense of humour.

Don't have nightmares now y'all ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Excellent post, and one thats sums things up perfectly. Those that wish for immortality have absolutely no idea what it is

Mind you there is a complicating factor, you could theorise about the existence of other dimensional activity, and possibly a way to reach it.
Question is, if given such a means to escape the death of this universe and a chance to continue an immortal life would you chose to do so?

I think immortality without invulnerability could be made to work, your chances of living more than a few hundred years without getting killed would be remote, but if you were invulnerable too? Sounds like hell. You could end up just getting blown about in space when the sun goes into nova because humanity never had the sense to technologically advance effectively enough to enable fast long distance space travel. Worse still, you might see the ecological devastation of this planet happen , watch the death of humanity, and have to sit and wait , virtually alone on an incredibly boring and sterile mudball.Mind you, you dont need to be immortal for that, it could even be seen in some of our lifetimes.

Its probably ok to have a few nightmares