Live forever, but if there is a God and or a heaven, and i would get in, id rather die right now.
Live forever, but if there is a God and or a heaven, and i would get in, id rather die right now.
Would I be the only immortal person?
I would choose to live forever regardless of the answer, but it would be nice to know more immortal people.
Living forever sounds great but it's a deep question and more info would have been good.
You could probably deify yourself if you lived forever, especially if it halted things like aging. If I had to choose between that and dying right this second, I'd go for it.
Unless, over the course of your immortality, you "somehow" gained conclusive evidence that death really isn't so bad after all. That would nag at you for an eternity to come, maddening you with envy and despair ever so slowly...
at first i wanted to say - stupid question, live forever ofc... but then i realized there would be great amount of downsides too... :S Voted for live forever
Live forever.
Seeing how many others there are that want to live forever I wouldn't feel too lonely out there, while swimming to distant planets. :P
Space is not without its forces. Why do asteroids fly in massive ovals and not simply fly out of our solar system? Gravity. You can't simply push off of the earth and fly endlessly in one direction. Very likely you'd quickly be caught in the gravity of a sun or planet and get stuck.
On topic:
I think it's easy to have a romantic idea of what it might be like to live forever. I can imagine all the things I might be able to accomplish in that time. But realistically, our minds and bodies are not able to cope with that kind of existence.
1. There is a limit to a human being's ability to process and store information. Time doesn't make people geniuses (otherwise our grandparents would all have PhDs in quantum mechanics) and in fact intelligence tends to degrade with time. Even if we assume that your mental faculties didn't degrade with time in this hypothetical situation, they still wouldn't expand with time either. So without synthetic or genetic alterations, we would not likely be any smarter 200 years from now than we are now. We would inevitably expand our knowledge of different areas, but we'd also forget many things we knew along the way.
2. Humans need constant interaction and entertainment. This is a product of our limited lifespans and of our community-based environments. Unfortunately, a consequence of this is that we get bored easily. If we experience the same thing too often, we lose interest in it. If we see a problem occurring too often, we get frustrated with it. If we lack entertainment for too long a period of time (even an hour or two) we become extremely antsy and restless. Try to imagine spending a day floating out in space with nothing in view (pitch black) -- just 24 hours. Could your mind handle that? Now imagine it lasts 1000 years... or 20 billion. You'd go insane. In fact, under many scenarios where you live indefinitely, you'd end up going insane unless your mind somehow adjusted to the extreme boredom and loneliness that you'd inevitably experience in that time.
3. Humans are social creatures. As a product of our evolution, we need other people in order to survive. Not only is this true in a hunter-gatherer sense, but it has also caused humans to develop the need to be close to other people emotionally. People who lack emotional contact with others tend to be depressed. Many extreme cases result in suicide. Can you imagine being severely depressed for hundreds of thousands of years and having no way to end that depression. I think depression is an inevitability for a person that lives forever -- that is hell. That's worse than any kind of physical torture you can devise. It would be as bad as a feeling of suffocating (from lack of oxygen) for all eternity.
Die now. Couldn't bear to live forever without my friends and family.
Live forever. I'd love to be able to tell people of the future how we lived back in the good old days and tell people lies about how I cured death but failed to write it down.
I don't really understand what's the purpose of the choice here? Also if you live forever you most likely won't be flowing in space as humanity will create the needed technology - it's one of those things that are guaranteed to happen, but take longer than Blizzard's trademarked "soon".
Impossible to live forever unless you can save the Universe from Collapsing in billions of years from now
---------- Post added 2012-02-18 at 08:07 PM ----------
Within 500 years Bionics/Mind uploading would enhance your well being and in todays standards you would be considered a God.
-K
Given the lack of real detail with the situation, I'd choose live forever... Face of Boe, here I come!