Disclaimer: The criterion of “immortality” in this post refers to “never aging, being immune to diseases and death by any event, and regenerating instantly even if the body is injured”.
The desire for immortality has existed since time immemorial. There was research in China to create a medicine for immortality, and in the mythologies of various countries, attaining eternal life must have been the ultimate goal and supreme joy.
But now that the era has become the present, at least 100 out of 100 people around me, no one wants immortality. (At least except myself…)
When I ask them why, they usually answer, “It would be nothing but pain to be left behind on an eventually empty earth,” or “I would go crazy if I were given eternal life when I think it would be painful just to live 100 years.
But I don’t think so.
I don’t think so, because there are many things we can do by becoming immortal. You can do things that would kill a normal human being, make your mark on history, master any musical instrument, etc. Even if there are no human beings left, there are still many things you can do.
You could enter every university on the planet and major in every field.
The possibilities are endless.
Even if humans disappear, the proof of their existence will remain. And so you could circle the globe, watching cities decay, walking, or strolling along the ocean floor.
If the earth and the sun were to disappear and we were to drift through space, that would be fun.
We would be able to see the stars directly with our own eyes.
Even if the universe disappears, when the next Big Bang starts and a new universe begins again, you can be the first living creature of that era.
Then you will be a living witness to history.
When humans are born again, you will witness the beginning of that history.
Therefore, immortality is wonderful.
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I don’t think drifting through space, suffocating but unable to die, is a great way to spend eternity.
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Agreed. I think it’s crazy that people so commonly and vehemently think that immortality would suck. Maybe they feel like they’re doing something by rejecting something so many people have wanted, or maybe they just believe they wont ever be able to have it so theres no point in wanting it so they cope by characterizing it as negative.
Id love to be immortal. Any potential downsides, especially ones many many MANY millions of years down the line, do not even remotely outweigh the upsides for me
Immortality does not prevent you from feeling things…such as the crushing depths of the ocean floor.
Immorality ≠ invincibility.
100% of your life would be spent post heat death of the universe.
The fact is that there are so many conditions for immortality to be enjoyable that realistically speaking it would suck.
-If you don’t have a way to die it automatically sucks because at some point the planet will explode or something and you will he left alone.
-It probably will be only available to rich people or else the planet won’t last a generation, meaning you and me probably still wouldn’t be immortal and social disparity will increase
-It it’s some miracle magic thing you’ll be experimented on sooner or later
Just not worth it
For the first 100 years, perhaps. But when everyone you ever cared for dies, their children and grand children die and your lineage is all but extinct and you are surrounded by strangers whose faces all, seemingly, meld into one and you feel truly alone? Might not be so fun then.
You haven’t eaten in centuries but are unable to die. The unpleasant feeling of being parched is all you have known for untold eons since you haven’t been near water in so long. Drifting through space unable to breathe. All artifices that could give you a perspective on how much time has passed have withered off of your form centuries ago; atom by atom worn down by errant pieces of debris moving at near relativistic speeds. You pray for an end that seems to never come, eventually gravity manages to pull you close enough to a black hole that the spark of hope reignites in your breast. Could the forces within finally end this nightmare? Years pass until you realize the horrible truth: you’re in a stable orbit. You will never pass into the the great unknown held within. Alternatively, you do manage to fall into the black hole, but you forgot that perception of time alters along with gravity since space and time are interlinked. Your undying agony as you are sucked in stretches out for a perceived eternity as it does nothing to provide the succor of oblivion. You are more acutely aware of just how hungry and thirsty you are than you have ever been and now time itself has slowed to a crawl from your perspective. Yeah sounds like a blast, upvoted for unpopular opinion.
Yeah, if regeneration and immunity are included in this, then 100% agreed. Anyone who says they wouldn’t want that should become a politician, the filthy liars.
I dunno, existing in a dark & empty universe for 10^(100) years waiting for all energy to uniformly disperse would get kind of boring.
Immortality really means no penalties. No one or anything can kill you so you can live life free. You can experience so much a normal human probably won’t even think about experiencing. I think theres enough on earth for an immortal life to be awesome. Really to me the only downside is outliving the people you love but I think you’ll eventually meet so many people it’s something you expect to happen.
I don’t want to live forever. I’m 41 now, and 80-90 years seems like more than enough time to exist here
I would only ever choose immortality if I also got to choose to die when I wanted to. Nothing could be more lonely than being the last person alive. You think that instantly regenerating sounds cool but when you still have to feel the pain of having something cut off, or being burned alive, or drowning that would be very not cool. I have no desire to live forever. For a bit longer than normal maybe, but no way forever.
If you are compeltly invulnerable for all of eternity to everything then it’s gonna really fucking suck when the sun explodes blasting the earth apart and yoy end up either floating through space for eternity or until you hit something or worse you’re stuck in black hole for eternity
Immortality would be a give and take, sure you’re blessed with eternal life, but on the other hand us as humans would eventually find it to be a curse unless they have a loved one that lives as long as they do if that’s what they wanna do, back then maybe it was a huge want or seen with many benefits, in modern times though? I doubt we’d be happy with eternity in this hellhole.
Not to mention if those individuals who would do increasingly dangerous shit you would have to evade the government like a criminal on the run because we know they’ll either want to weaponize it or somehow make themselves immortal
Id think immortality would have more benefits like make me a fuckin wizard because basic immortality does sound pretty boring especially once you hit the point of “I’ve done literally everything
I feel like cocaine was involved somewhere in this though process. The short and simple is being immortal to the point you never age or die still leaves you feeling feelings, like the pain of being crushed under a boulder.
So there are 2 sufferings here. The suffering of your soul, spending countless years watching time pass by. You meet people, you love people, then people die and you remain. You watch your home town grow and develop until it becomes a city that you don’t recognise as every building has been torn down and built over, cars on the street, the clothes people wear, everything is constantly changing and as you find less that you remember relating to you slowly distance yourself from humanity to ease the never ending ache of loneliness and loss. You can travel the world, study amazing things, but after a while you can’t really connect with anything as everything eventually blurs together into your long, never ending memories.
The second suffering is physical pain. If you live forever then that means you will experience everything. Inevitably, just because of how much time you have, even if you don’t do things, things will happen to you. You will be involved in a car crash, plane crash, shoot out, structure fire, fall into a pit, get crushed by something and spend a very long time suffering in agonising pain with no way to end it.
I don’t see how this is unpopular. I also want to live forever as a perfect specimen.
Immortality the way you describe it is a little extreme, no being able to die no matter what is just absurd.
But immortality in sense of not aging, no dying of natural causes, maybe some improved self-healing, like vampires or gods. I would definetly take that.
I kinda agree ngl. Only one issue. Our brain can only hold so much memory so eventually youd start replacing old memories with new ones and potentially forget everyone and everything
Tell me after this.
https://youtu.be/Y4sqfp02cH4?si=vZRxdKl4aWhk6ZXV
Okay Omni-Man, tell that to Mark.
I think you’re really underestimating the idea of infinity. You learn everything possible, visit every town in the world, go see every planet and star in the Milky Way, and you’d still have 100% of your life remaining. At some point, you will hit a stage where there is nothing to do (this is a bit more complicated since the universe expands infinitely, but you get my point,) and you will still have 100% of your life remaining.
Fine then. You have my permission to be immortal. Happy now?
True immortality is only good if you can somehow choose when to stop being immortal. Eventually you will be drifting through nothingness with only your thoughts and will eventually go fuckin insane. Everything will cease with enough time, except you.
You’re thinking too small, specifically because the human brain really can’t compute eternity. But without getting into too much detail, it would inevitably be horrific.
I might end up writing that long description anyway, because I think it would be fun.
A lot of what Tolkien wrote is also about immortality and mortality. The immortal elves envy the humans and vice versa.
I have a good read on it somewhere. If someone is interested, I can dig it up.
I’d agree with you if you said you could pull the plug whenever you were done living. Existing for eternity long after humans stopped existing is obviously not a good time for anyone
People often assume “immortal” means “indestructible”, rather than biologically immortal. Very different consequences.
I’d love to be biologically immortal, but terrified to be eternal and indestructible.
Every From Software game’s main underlying premise is that immortality is horrid and dehumanizing. They are excellent examples of fiction deconstructing a perceived positive.
Once your love, drives, ambitions, goals are gone, and once you have truly seen and done everything, then rest becomes the final goal. Without death, life has no meaning, and ambition has no point.
We build homes, lives, and careers to persist through a finite life, either believing our progeny will continue our endeavor or knowing that entropy will claim out accomplishment and return it to dust.
Without the ability to do this and then leave it behind, depression and nihilism will (not might) set in. You will give in to idleness and become hollow, or become sick with ambitious greed and become a tyrant because you fancy yourself a god.
Nothing good comes from immortality. It’s no surprise that it is a common mental trap for narcissistic people and tyrants.
Someday, the last person to remember your voice will be gone.
Someday, he last photo of you will disappear from physical or digital record.
Someday, the last person to remember your face will perish.
Someday, your headstone will erode and even the earth itself will forget you existed.
Something isn’t beautiful because it lasts forever.
A Sakura blossom would not be as beautiful as it is if it lasted the whole year.
This just seems like a shortcut to “I have no mouth, and I must scream” without all the messiness involved with creating an AI with a chip on it’s shoulder. Eventually, 99.9999999% of your memory will just be drifting through eternal darkness, more or less locked in your own head.
I am with you 100%.
You’re a fool. You have no idea how long eternity is. Eternal life would mean anything that can happen will happen to you, infinite times. Anything that has the slightest probability of happening would happen to you.
That sounds perhaps exciting but after spending billions and billions and billions of years being utterly alone with nothing but scorched earth to accompany you, you would forget who you are and why you’re even there.
The actual time you will spend with humans or even the remnants of human civilization will be less than drop of water compared the ocean.
Anything that brought you joy will turn sour when you realize there’s no escape and you will suffer in silence forever.
And the only hope you have is that the universe and time itself will cease to exist and finally free you from your suffering. Immortality is without a doubt the worst possible curse imaginable.
I would rather be tortured for billions of years in the most excruciating way possible and die a slow, unbearably painful death than take on the curse of immortality. In a way i think immortality is actual hell. True inescapable hell.
We will see how awesome it is when the world implodes into a black hole and you are left floating through space for all eternity
You’d go insane. If you survive to see all your friends and family die, survive to see the human race die, survive to see the planet get destroyed and then endlessly drift in space? You’d absolutely have gone crazy. Somewhere along the way you’d become suicidal but never be able to end it. You’d be searching for death.
“To Your Eternity” is a good show that gives a good reason why I wouldn’t want this for myself. The immortal in this show constantly keeps making new friends over and over just to keep losing them over and over. The pain from that weighs on him heavy. His mental state gets worse and worse the more it happens, but he can’t stop it from happening because he lives forever and his loved ones don’t. So, unless I could also have the ability to pass on my immortality to others, pass. I don’t want to live through losing loved ones over and over and over. That sounds like torture to me. Sure, I could master every skill in the world…but who would I have to share those skills with?
Are you hearing yourself bud?
Immortality is only ever great with a safe word suicide pact.
“At least 100 of out of 100 people around me”
This broke my brain a little.
Op has never been bored
I might consider it if there’s a promise I won’t turn into a vegetable after 300 years with a brain that has no more space left.
Here’s a ‘what if’ for your scenario. Some nefarious people find out you’re immortal. They decide to encase you in concrete and sink you to the bottom of the sea. What then?
I think it would be pretty cool for a while but eventually you’d go insane.
Give it 1000 years when you’ve done everything imaginable and report back. Eternity is a prison
this is a completely made up scenario
anything could happen in the billions of years in your immortal life including a way to prevent heat death of the universe
>But I don’t think so. I don’t think so, because there are many things we can do by becoming immortal. You can do things that would kill a normal human being, make your mark on history, master any musical instrument, etc. Even if there are no human beings left, there are still many things you can do. You could enter every university on the planet and major in every field.
Yeah but what are you gonna do in the year 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000? That’s the problem. You won’t survive the Big Bang resetting the universe, but if you did, will you really care about humans being born again the 100000000000000000000000000000000000th time?
When I think about my life so far without the possibility of death I can’t imagine it would be any different than it is. Which would mean a boring life filled with wants to do something but too anxious to try something.
Sounds like a fun eternity indeed…
All fun and games until you get buried alive
Oh the things I would do were I immortal: read every book, learn every language, buy the best long stocks, learn all the hobbies, buy property and more property and more property and put it in an irrevocable trust for my family line. So many things! Oh yes, also I would become the world’s most respected historian of every generation: I’d just change my appearance enough and stay silent for 50 years. Eventually, I’d become god-like.
Most aggravating sub on the platform, you do NOT believe this shit
You’re definitely underestimating how long eternity is and how lonely you’d become if there were no people. I wouldn’t mind not aging or getting ill/dying but I’d need some kind of ‘out’
These sort of hypotheticals never work because this kind of immortality is impossible so who’s to say you would still feel pain or whatever. Anyway you’re definitely wrong because the duration of people not being around would be infinitely longer than your time with humanity. Living for like 500 years would be cool though. Enjoy the upvote
“Immortality” would only be cool if I could choose to die myself at some point.
If that was an option i’d take it 100% of the time
Immortality is wonderful.
For a while.
The problem is, after it stops being wonderful, you still have eternity left…
>Being immortal is actually awesome
kind of a liberal use of the word ‘is’ here, huh
I think we all know the benefits of being immortal. It’s the negative parts you don’t think about much that come out of no where and smack you in the face. Like everyone you love and care about dying and constantly feeling alone
I would take immortal. I think I would long have turned insane before the tedious stuff happens
Immortality is great until the human race dies out or the sun destroys the earth. Both are inevitable.
Most of your arguments are based on fallacies though. You wouldn’t drift aimlessly through space after the sun engulfs the earth and all life is destroyed. You’d be stuck in the center of the sun for billions of years, your body fusing with the elements in the center of a star, in a cycle of destruction and regeneration.
Even if you somehow get lucky enough to escape the star through some explosion that evaporates your body and you regenerate with escape velocity, best case scenario would be the big crunch, in which you would eventually be collected in the reversing of current expansion of the universe and be exploded outward after your body has been compressed to a size smaller than an atom, with the rest of the mass of the universe. Then, you would drift aimlessly through the vast emptiness of space, most likely never setting foot on another planet, let alone be present when the ‘next humans’ form. You might get swallowed up by another star or black hole again, or crash into some gas giant planet or barren moon, wandering around aimlessly for a few more billion years, suffocating and burning and starving to death without dying. Then, the cycle would continue. Death by star, death by black hole, death by big crunch, death by big bang.
The most likely scenario though, is the heat death of the universe, in which the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium and reactions that increase entropy are no longer occuring. In essence, nothing happens anymore. Some theories suggest that there is a chance that through quantum fluctuations a new universe could be created, but you’re looking at a time frame of 10^10^10^56 years, so a one with 5600 zeros, but after maybe 10^106 years, the universe will consist of a dilute gas with mainly photons and lepons. No stars, galaxies and planets, just gas. Oh. And you of course.
In short, seems like a bad trade for a couple million years on earth.
Whenever people say immortality would be cool they just think about how it will allow them to see things they normally wouldn’t.
Yes being immortal means you get to see all the cool things that will happen with both human and natural history that you wouldn’t of before or maybe get to experience some extreme sci-fi stuff like intergalactic space travel maybe even meet alien life but it also comes with one huge drawback.
Eventually you will be left with nothing assuming science’s predictions are correct eventually you’ll be floating in the void of space eternally suffocating/freezing unable to die. Planets will be destroyed and desolate and suns and stars will eventually supernova leaving you in complete darkness nothing to look at.
For all the extra time you’d be given to see all the cool stuff you’re given even more time to suffer and be left with nothing. We don’t know what will happen at the end of the universe it could result in a new big bang and ultimately reset the universe giving you another chance to live a life or it could just be nothing for all eternity, is that a risk you’d really be willing to take just for the ability to master a few skills and see a few things you couldn’t.
Immortality is not possible so we’ll never find out
Me when the Mafia tosses me overboard tied up in a chest or with cinderblocks on my feet
The issue with true immortality is that unless the universe is a never ending cycle ehile you may spend a quadrlion years having fun accross the universe and learning its history after the everything is gone and the universe becomes cold and dark you still remain for eternity a quintlion years of nothingness if you were to pick a random year of this eternity the odds of getting any year other than one where you are just floating and cold is effectively 0%
I think this is a very popular opinion. It’s also happens to be extremely foolish.
I wouldn’t mind living longer and completely healthy. Like if I could live to 200 (or more) and have the body and mind of a 30 year old the entire time. That’d be great. At some point I’d probably like it to end though
What about pain? Still lots of ways to experience that even if you regenerate, and the usual, what if you’re ever crushed and pinned in place underground. In theory one day you might be able to make it out, but have fun with that. How about lost in underground caverns forever in the dark. Maybe you can stay away from them, but maybe you eventually fall in one anyway.
What about hunger? Even if you don’t die you’ll likely still need to provide some basic needs. Once the planet eventually starts dying around, you nothing to eat.
Isolation? Humans are social creatures to one degree or another, going to spend eternity floating through space playing “I Spy” with yourself?
>We would be able to see the stars directly with our own eyes.
What are you looking at them with now?
If you are immortal there is a 100% chance that you will end up stuck somewhere, eventually. Floating infinitely through the vacuum of space, falling deep into the earth during an earthquake, being pulled deep into an inescapable cavern in the sea, etc etc. You cannot die. You will end up stuck. Infinitely bored. Waiting for a death that will never come.
Just wait…
i feel like people forget that immortality means that every person you love and will ever love will die and there is nothing you can do about it. wife after wife and friend after friend and family member after family member will perish and force you to either find another and have the same happen again or be alone forever. the pain that would bring upon someone would definitely make you wish you could die lol
i think you misunderstand something, even if you had Immortality you would still need food, sleep etc yournot immune to pain, you would still feel it, suffication etc. burning etc. also i highly doubt that said immortality would still exist once the universe went coplooee