If you could live forever and never change (i.e., invulnerability) would you?
If You Could...
- Thread starter NomadicHavoc
- Start date
Not in my current body. perhaps 25 years ago I would have.
Actually, I've been thinking about that for a while.
Simple answer: no.
Reason: At one point you'd be siitting in an empty universe waiting for the big bang to happen in reverse. And that would take millions of years.
I'm not THAT comfortable being by my lonely self.
Also, I'd be running out of beer and crisps fast. Can't have that.
I once read one episode of the 1990's comic "Lazarus Churchyard" where the main character, due to a science experiment which replaced most of his body with a timeless instant adaptive plastic, became something of an immortal bioweapon. The story itself takes place 400 years later in a dystopian future where the world is depopulated due to germ warfare killing a lot of the population off and our lad Lazarus is the good guy by default. He's bad, a looser junkie, but the world is worse.
In the episode I read, he talks of his childhood with a companion, sat upon a rooftop if I remember correctly. At the end of the his reminiscence, and the episode, he turns to his companion - they have died while sat there, their blood running down the rooftop. Can't recall what got them, I presumed at the time it was the poisoned atmosphere...
...I know nothing else about that comics series other than that impression of how it would feel to outlive your, and all other, species.
Alas with the amount of info I have pushed into the web, there is a vague possibility I, we, all of us may find some kind of immortality in simulated Artificial Intelligence based on what we talk about every day on here. Train a current algorithm on my TEST posts and you'd probably get it to respond with stuff that sounds like me with the occasional "For the GLORY of TEST" and "Thank you, Glorious Leader!"
Train an AI off all the stuff I've ever typed since 1999? You'd likely get a pretty good simulation.
Train an AI of 30 years time on this stuff? An AI of 300 years time? Technological ability is only a matter of time. Cost to do it getting so low it could be considered null and void is only a matter of time.
Would anyone want to speak to my e-Echo 300 years in the future? It might be so easy, so cheap to do, it could just be an entertaining pass-time by then: "Hey kids, wanna hear what great-great-great-great-great grandad NaffNaff would have thought of your new extendo-teeth implants?"
In the episode I read, he talks of his childhood with a companion, sat upon a rooftop if I remember correctly. At the end of the his reminiscence, and the episode, he turns to his companion - they have died while sat there, their blood running down the rooftop. Can't recall what got them, I presumed at the time it was the poisoned atmosphere...
...I know nothing else about that comics series other than that impression of how it would feel to outlive your, and all other, species.
Alas with the amount of info I have pushed into the web, there is a vague possibility I, we, all of us may find some kind of immortality in simulated Artificial Intelligence based on what we talk about every day on here. Train a current algorithm on my TEST posts and you'd probably get it to respond with stuff that sounds like me with the occasional "For the GLORY of TEST" and "Thank you, Glorious Leader!"
Train an AI off all the stuff I've ever typed since 1999? You'd likely get a pretty good simulation.
Train an AI of 30 years time on this stuff? An AI of 300 years time? Technological ability is only a matter of time. Cost to do it getting so low it could be considered null and void is only a matter of time.
Would anyone want to speak to my e-Echo 300 years in the future? It might be so easy, so cheap to do, it could just be an entertaining pass-time by then: "Hey kids, wanna hear what great-great-great-great-great grandad NaffNaff would have thought of your new extendo-teeth implants?"
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That's exactly what I was thinking :)
I am now suspicious that some omnipotent being made you this offer and you asked us idiots for advice..
Just think how quickly you could exit a building, yeet out the window & be fine. Get a job as ballistic ordinance. Find out if petrol taste as good as it smells. Sleep inside a fire (mm so cosy). Guide humanity to an equal, godless future that crushes xeno scum from orbit.
Monday things you know.
I would be a true to life Deadpool doing lines while riding a rhino bareback! That or use many centuries of knowledge and wisdom to the benefit of humankind. What to do...what to do???
Han Burgundy
Space Marshal
Oh yeah. Robbie Kinevel can suck it! I'm jumping the snake river canyon on skis made of crystal meth!
Is this one of those “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.” things? See GNU Terry Pratchett
Or do you just make us, the ones that will still haunt this forum in hundreds of years from now, believe that you are still there with an elaborate script that emulates your contributions?
Pretending to be an immortal by abusing cheap tricks. Shame on you!
Then again, in some way we are all immortal until proven otherwise.
Whatever holds true in the end, I'll drink to that.
Cheers!
Depends. Do I get to keep my dashing good looks and chiseled jawline?
Immortality Inc. just informed me that you can keep your cover model charm and they'll even throw in a deluxe caboose for good measure. All this and more for the low low price of your immortal soul. Sign up now and we'll also give you a pine scented air freshener for your train engine 100% free of charge.
Richard Bong
Space Marshal
You get to keep your depends.
While it might be fun for a while especially if it was in a young healthy body. But like all things I imagine it would get old and tiresome. And it's not like living for 100s of years will increase your intelligence the things you will have seen done and forgotten would give you the chance to relive moments again. But even then I cannot imagine what the loss of fear of death would do to one's psychic and how twisted one would become. Think of the the fate that most trust fund kids and child celebrities experience magnified by the realization that you'll easily outlive what ever opinions youve created.
I wonder how someone who has and have lived a full life to that point with a condition like short term memory loss would approach that challenge?
If you never had that power of recollection in the first place and every day is like a brand new unexperienced day to them anyway, would they psychologically be a better candidate for such a feat as living forever?
If everyday is a new day then what would be the point in living more than a day? It could be argued that we are a collection of our past experiences projecting towards future possibilities. After all the worse form of torture is to remove one's future. And a future with out a past seems as disconnected as having no future.
As for living for a long time I have to wonder at what point we would grow bored of living. It is not like ones wisdom would continue to grow only limited by time. After all as much as we may wish it to be untrue are born with limited stats and a finite limit to the amount of memories we can store. Studies have shown that memories themselves are not independent recordings but conglomerate connections of past experiences combined with highlights / differences in the new experience. Even here memories become distorted and trimmed. It's why we have a hard time remembering where we parked or what shirt we wore a few days ago.
So while it might be fun for a while to live in a healthy young body I imagine that most would become disillusioned distorted vile humans bored with life and as much as it socks it's a blessing to grow old and die so as to give hope and happiness a chance.
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This is strangely familiar but I can't for the life of me remember why ;)