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No matter how long life expectancy becomes, will it ever be enough?

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Posted

You can spend years learning the subtleties of the human heart, but what will any of it mean if you don't feel it's warmth? There are so many people living to old ages and dying alone and scared. A great number of people spend their lives wasting their time. Every day, wasting our opportunities. We are finite, and every day people die, having willingly let their life slip between their fingers. They lived each day in fear of their lives, until eventually they lost it. No matter how long our lives are, it's all just more time to waste. Are we just filling our lives with useless things until eventually we're dead?

 

And hey, immortality. My friend says it's a bad idea because "you can't appreciate your life if it never ends", but uhhh, sure you can. Living forever would be a blast. But the downside is, if people could live forever, then only the rich would afford it, and then the rich would keep the privilege of eternal life to themselves. They would reign over mankind forever, and nothing would change. Only the death of the wicked can make way for the good. If we all lived forever, we'd just plateau and settle to one mode of thought and opinion forever. Nobody would be persuaded by each other's arguments, culture wouldn't evolve. It would just plateau. If we all lived 1000 years each, then it would just take longer for things to change. Culture doesn't change with time, it changes with generations of people.

 

 

Have your say! :)

Treemotan and pheonix561 like this

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Posted

Yeah, good stuff to think about. I sometimes joke that I've just got to hold out until technological advancements in biological or cybernetic immortality.

 

I, like many people, want to stay young, be beautiful, live forever, and there's nothing really shameful in that. We're designed to feel that way. We're meant to retain a sense of self-preservation. This is the very reason religion exists at all. But like you said, physical (real) immortality being commercially available would be another way to oppress people. So I think before we can even think of it, we need a way to destroy corruption. When the time comes (because it's definitely going to) we probably won't have everything figured out. But perhaps there might be compromises for that longevity, like restrictions on reproductive rights. But if you're rich enough to get such a procedure, you'll probably be above the law if money is still as important as it is today.

 

Realistically speaking, I would prefer we have interstellar space travel figured out by then. That way we can at least discover a place for the immortal to go. If humans kept reproducing indefinitely, the current ecosystem would surely be destroyed. As for who among us should be considered wicked enough to die, the cruel irony is that they'd be the most likely to obtain immortality.

 

I think that time is an insanely precious thing though. I might dawdle a bit more if I knew I didn't have to worry about my fleeting existence, but I think I'd still appreciate that. We're still built to behave like human beings. Plus, nothing will ever live forever. It's important to understand that.

Treemotan and Teto like this

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Posted

I feel like Immortality gives you permission to be whatever you want. With the fear of death gone out of life, there is nothing to stop you from doing anything. Whats the worst that can happen. Maybe you go along for a couple hundred years and decide being a plumber is boring, and no longer fulfilling. In a normal lifespan, you spent so much time and effort to become a plumber, it would make all of that a waste of time, like you wasted a third of your life, and now you're starting over. Not so, now. Now You can decide to go back to school to do anything, and ust in general be a different sort of person. Imagine how much easier space travel would become if everyone was immortal? You wouldn't need to worry nearly as much about safety concerns in those terms.


There are dozens of social problems that have a root in the fear of death, if that was no longer a factor, on a very basic level humanity would change.

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Posted

Our lives are very short, whether we live 1 or 1000 years. I think it's best that we celebrate and use our lives as we wish, as well as for the good of all. If we spend all our years trying to prolong our lives...is that really a life worth living? What is "life" anyway? Is it the physical act of breathing and interacting on earth? Or is it something much deeper?

 

There are many on this earth I would consider dead inside. 
 

I have concluded that life is how you use the years you've been given, not how many years you can accumulate. 

Sahaqiel, pheonix561 and Treemotan like this

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Posted

An extra hundred or two would sure be a nice cushion though.

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Posted

ya @chase, that's pretty much my opinion as well.

 

With a good amount of observation it's easy to see how many people are just ticking off the days until they're dead and just going with the flow.

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Posted

All you can do is go with the flow

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Posted

I am pretty certain that we aren't built to withstand the ennui of immortality

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Posted

Thats only because nobody's been immortal yet.

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Posted

By going with the flow I mean transitioning from one part of your life to the next without really going towards any specific goal or working towards one. Living and working purely to continue living and working. No ambitions, no dreams, no aspirations. Just existing to fill the status quo. I'm sure you know what I meant.

 

Going with the flow is not the only option. Aspiration, innovation, and rebellion would lose meaning entirely if that were the case.

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Posted

You can do those things but at the end of the day all you can do is go with it

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