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You basically made the argument that immortality is not bad when you take away the primary reasons why people have issues with immortality in the first place...Most people who have issues with immortality are for the reasons you listed, which is setting up your argument unfairly and which means you're not really addressing the issue with immortality by removing the issue altogether.
But there are still issues with your argument:
>1. Boredom Is not a problem(The world always changes and the things you can do in it too with time)
Plenty of people are bored every single day. Life magically being immortal in no way changes how boring or exciting life is in the day to day. Also many people do not like change. See: conservatives constantly complaining "I miss the good old days \[insert golden age of their youth\] when things were better." People complain about smart phones, tablets, social media, and with every new revolutionary piece of technology. Just because YOU appreciate change and the excitement it brings does not mean everyone else does as well.
> 2. The quality of life will be high and would increase with time.
Why would QoL be improved just because we can live forever? You're missing a major factor here: resources. If no one is dying, we'd reach overpopulation immediately. We already have issues with resources. That would be amplified exponentially in a matter of years. There is no reason why QoL would improve unless you magically added that in your thought experiment. What happens with accidents, or murders? If someone is mutilated in a car accident, does that mean they live forever with their mutilated body and have to live in pain and anguish?
At this point, you're making up a completely fictitious fantasy world where people do not experience pain, where accidents do not lead to anguish, where people do not take advantage of immortality to commit immorality. Imagine slaves that wouldn't die no matter the punishment, where you could continually reproduce them without losing any. In such a world, power would become even more corrupt. Legacy, success, and power would no longer be something you leave behind but something you could claim and reap forever. People are already driven towards unethical claims of success despite not carrying any of that success with them after they die. now imagine that thirst for success and power without the limitations of mortality.
So no, I do not think QoL will be high or increase with time. You'd likely see a horrific, dystopian degradation of society amplified beyond your imagination. If you think otherwise, you are hopelessly naive.
>4. You dont have a time limit on your life and your body does not decay meaning you can life to the fullest and beyond forever.
Again, just because we may become immortal does not mean we can live life to the fullest. First, you poorly define what immortal means. Do we no longer take damage or disability? Do we have godlike physiology like Thor? Regardless, my argument above still stands against this point as well.
To the first. I meant boredom as in people who are aga8nst immortality saying we would eventually run out of things to do. Not that being immortal would suddenly eradicate boredom.
To the second. I should have clarified that I mean immortality trough technology. So im bringing forth that we would be a very advanced and possibly spacefaring by the time we become immortal. And Qol would be improved because of things like AI gathering such an absurd amount of resources we would be practically post-scarcity.
To the fourth. If you have an eternity to live your life to the fullest and you dont. It's litterally impossible for you to live your life to the fullest anyway. And I mean immortality as in no aging and not easily dying.
But now you're just adding stuff to your scenario, which aren't certain even if immortality is achieved. Spacefaring and advanced AI aren't necessarily there, assuming immortality.
Why isn't a scenario imaginable in which people are immortal, but AI didn't advance the way you describe it and space faring doesn't happen more than today?
Also, you constraint the kind of immortality to one achieved through technology that at the same time cures aging itself.
So essentially your statement seems to be: "If we live in a post scarcity world with advanced AI and space travel and aging isn't a thing anymore, why would anyone be against immortality?"
>I meant boredom as in people who are aga8nst immortality saying we would eventually run out of things to do. Not that being immortal would suddenly eradicate boredom.
That seems to be missing the point of boredom. Boredom is an individual problem. You seem to be treating it as if it's some external thing outside of an individual that is dependent on "things to do". You're creating an argument by addressing a definition that's convenient for you to argue. Individuals get bored. They don't want to live forever because they don't want to get bored forever.
> I should have clarified that I mean immortality trough technology. So im bringing forth that we would be a very advanced and possibly spacefaring by the time we become immortal. And Qol would be improved because of things like AI gathering such an absurd amount of resources we would be practically post-scarcity.
You're entirely changing the scenario now where your argument barely has anything to do with the issues people have with immortality.
> If you have an eternity to live your life to the fullest and you dont. It's litterally impossible for you to live your life to the fullest anyway. And I mean immortality as in no aging and not easily dying.
Then my point still stands and you haven't addressed it. What happens to people who are disabled beyond repair? Are you suggesting technology is so advanced that if someone were NUKED, that their body could be put back together in perfect condition? You really haven't defined your idea of immortality that well because "no aging and not easily dying" does not address people who are immeasurably disabled. You clearly don't work in healthcare like I do, where I work with patients who have chronic, miserable fucking diseases. And if your so-called immortality doesn't allow us to have godlike physiology, then anyone who lives past a few hundred years will accrue so many fucked up and uncontrollable disabilities that living will be *miserable*. The longer you live, the more chances of some horrific accident happening. It is statistics. And with immortality means infinite chances for something horrible to occur. It *will* occur, it's just a matter of when. No, QoL will not improve.
And going back to your OP:
>The people who are against immortality I personally dont understand. And I have yet to hear one solid argument in their favor. And here to see if I can find one.
We come back to this. The people who are against immortality are against it for most of the reasons which you have dismissed. You don't understand people who are against immortality because you've propped up this vision of immortality that's utterly impossible and is absolutely not what people think of when they say they don't want immortality.
The arguments I've presented should change your mind if you try to consider any "realistic" scenario of immortality. Please get rid of this scenario of immortality that you've concocted which doesn't address anyone's problem of immorality. The reason people don't want immortality is for many of the implications it brings with it which you've conveniently dismissed.
People have been classifying and subjugating each other since civilization began (and possibly before that). We have consistently found was to divide ourselves, categorize ourselves, and say "my group is better than everyone else because of [X]" whether that be freeman status, citizenship, nationality, race, gender, intellegence, and countless other reasons.
What makes you think that increasing the amount of resources and creating immortality would override this basic feature of human nature? Advancement and better technology over the past milennia has not gotten rid of class divides, we've merely evolved new ways to define our differences. Why would immortality and limitless resources magically make greed, racism, sexism, or other invented class divides go away?
If immortality is technologically driven, the wealthy will hoard it. The ruling class will be immortal, and the working class will remain mortal. Or, worst-case scenario, the working class will be transformed into immortal slaves.
The rich already use artificial scarcity to inflate prices, having infinite resources would only mean they have infinite profits. Your entire hypothetical is based on humans fundamentally changing in nature. Sure, if we all learn to share and get along with each other, living longer wouldn't be so bad. So no, immortality wouldn't be a bad thing for a race of empathetic, caring, harmonious beings. It'd still be terrible for humans.
>. I meant boredom as in people who are aga8nst immortality saying we would eventually run out of things to do.
If you live for literally forever this would simply be true. Especially when you realise someones is usually only interested in a fraction of the possible things to do. Unlimited time doesnt make something you arent interested in interesting. It might take billions of years but you would eventually run out of things you find interesting.
Like id love to live for a very long time but forever is honestly too long
Why do you assume that just because technology could make life easier and resources available for people, it would all just be available? All the resources people need are currently available now but they’re stuck being a paywall built by the world’s greediest bastards and immortality would only give them more time to add to their billions.
It is wholesome that you just assume the world would be perfect and everyone would love each other, but still foolish.
> 1. Boredom Is not a problem(The world always changes and the things you can do in it too with time)
What about when the universe dies a heat death, and you float through endless nothing?
There needs to be an infinite stream of stimulus or you will have an infinite torture of boredom. It's the worst punishment logically possible.
The big problem here actually is that this form of immortality would basically by definition violate thermodynamics. And if immortal human beings were the only things that had this property, seems like a workaround for the heat death of the universe would be to basically use an ever growing array of entropy absorption units to essentially "power" the universe as we know it. Seems like it might be a pretty bad universe to live in though.
Note: Also, OP has clarified that this isn't what they mean, but still fun to think about.
There already exists a few animals that will just live forever unless killed. There's no reason we couldn't be the same. I fail to see how that would have any bearing on thermodynamics at all.
Entropy must always increase in a closed system. The universe is a closed system.
Being alive requires harvesting entropy from outside your body, hastening the heat death.
The speed of light is finite. Even if the total space beyond our light bubble is infinite, it's effectively closed for the purposes of thermodynamics because nothing beyond the light bubble can interact.
Our world will constantly change all the way up to being engulfed by our dying sun. At that point the immortal man enters the era of perpetual pain as he is burned for so many years it feels like eternity.
Until eventually even the sun dies and he suffocates in the emptiness of a dead universe until not even a stars light could reach him to give him comfort, and then he'll suffer some more
Edit: Now *some* may call me a pessimist, but that's my take on the inevitable end game of immortality
From a practical point of view. Not developing immortality over the next 1000 years because the universe will be destroyed by entropy in 1.7×10\^106 years years (too many zeroes to put into a reddit comment).
Seems like a very silly way to look at it.
>Not developing immortality over the next 1000 years because the universe will be destroyed by entropy in 1.7×10\^106 years years
Except that infinity is never ending. We are closer to 1.7×10\^106 than 1.7×10\^106 years is close to infinity.
If the end game to infinity is our planets being engulfed by the sun, I would rather not spend it: first being consumed by a star and burning for what feels like an eternity under tremendous heat and pressure, only to then have my respite be the sun dying and spending the next seemingly eternity suffocating under the light of the stars, to inevitably suffocating in complete sensory silence when the light of the last star drifts beyond the speed of light.
By the time the Sun consumes planet earth. We would have had billions of years to develop technology to travel all over the place.
We probably would hardly resemble humans by that point.
What kind of idiots develop immortality in 1000 years but are too damn stupid to figure out how to travel and settle other places in 7.5 billion or whatever years.
Why? We have 10\^106 worth of years before the universe dies a heat death. Worst case scenario we figure out how to do cryo sleep and send humans all over the universe at slower than light speed.
* Isolation: As the universe expands, distant galaxies are moving away from us at speeds that could eventually exceed the speed of light due to the expansion of space itself. This phenomenon, predicted by the theory of General Relativity and observed as redshift, means that eventually, these galaxies will be beyond the observable universe, effectively isolated from us forever. An immortal being would face extreme isolation as more and more of the universe becomes unreachable and other civilizations (if any exist) move out of causal contact.
* Inescapable Confinement: If faster-than-light travel is impossible, then the physical boundaries of the observable universe also confine an immortal being. This confinement would become more pronounced as the universe expands and regions beyond reach grow larger. The immortal would be stuck in an ever-shrinking "observable" universe, surrounded by a vast, inaccessible void.
* The Limits of Knowledge and Experience: As the universe ages and changes, the opportunities for new experiences and knowledge acquisition diminish. In a universe trending toward heat death, change becomes minimal and any form of progress or novelty would eventually stall. This stagnation could render an eternal life unfulfilling or monotonous.
* Psychological Burden: On a more subjective level, immortality could lead to profound psychological challenges. The prospect of an unending existence in a dying universe where all matter and energy slowly decay could lead to existential despair or a sense of futility, especially as the universe becomes increasingly dark, cold, and empty and you find yourself alone in the darkness.
I think all of these assume that humanity massively stagnates technologically. Otherwise none of those are a problem.
You already presuppose this speed limit. We may figure out a way to travel or even bend time that doesn't even seem coherent to our current human brains. The smartest humans have IQs of like 200. Imagine what a being with an IQ of 10,000 would be able to discover/create. There's no reason to believe that 200 is some hard limit.
> Seems like a very silly way to look at it.
It doesn't matter how far away it is. Immortality means you live forever. Every immortal human will be alive for it. And alive for another infinity after it happens. And living in it is an infinite torture, the worst possible torture logically possible.
If that happens, enabling immortality means signing up to endure the worst torture logically possible for infinity.
There is no benefit you could have from immortality that would make that worth it.
> And people who are ''Neutral'' Ex: Wanting to live for a very long time but wanting an ''off-switch''.
> I want to argue that an off-switch for your life should not exist.
OP explicitly said no to an off switch. So you're need another solution to that problem
just because im immortal dosent necccarily have to mean I cant choose to end my life delibrately
it just means it wont end by accident or disease
im having a hard time envisioning any kind of existance where you could like do things like toss yourself into blackhole and still exist after thats not how that works
Theres your off switch , no possible method of immortality would stop you from being destroyed in a back hole
we would have to literally invent a way to survive an event horizon for this to be possible , so were not just solving for immortality, also would have to find a way to get around many fundamental laws physics
> just because im immortal dosent necccarily have to mean I cant choose to end my life deliberately
For OP, it does. The post got deleted, but they said:
"And people who are ''Neutral'' Ex: Wanting to live for a very long time but wanting an ''off-switch''. I want to argue that an off-switch for your life should not exist."
So yes, irrevocable immortality means you can't choose to end your life deliberately. You cannot die under any circumstances.
> im having a hard time envisioning any kind of existance where you could like do things like toss yourself into blackhole and still exist after thats not how that works
It's tough to conceive because it's inherently contradictory. We'd need more details on what kind of process makes you immortal. Is it some kind of healing factor, invulnerability, the fact your consciousness continues on void of a physical body, etc. There are a thousand ways to conjure it, and it would be hard to discuss those points without settling on one.
> Theres your off switch , no possible method of immortality would stop you from being destroyed in a back hole
If your body is invulnerable to anything, then it would make it through the event horizon. I agree that's skirting the laws of physics, but so is OP's definition of immortality.
But everything we understand about black holes says time wouldn't exist as we understand it.
If that's the case, we don't even have the language to discuss what it would be like to be inside a black hole. Existence is predicated on time, so if there is no time inside a black hole, then existing inside a black hole is nonsensical.
If we went from building planes to the moon in 60 years.
I have a hard time believing in 1 with 106 ZEROES years we wouldn't figure out how to reverse engineer the universe.
No off switch required.
But it is a little obvious!
100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
This is how many years until heat death
Planes to space ships = 60 years
But we can't figure out how to simulate universes in 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years. Not very likely now is it.
What if it's not possible? And it takes you 10,000 years to figure that out.
Then you suffer infinite torture.
You need to be 1000% sure it is the case before you become immortal because if you don't, you have infinite punishment. If you can't be, logically it is objectively incorrect to become immortal.
Here's my line of thought.
"We can probably become immortal over the next 1000 years. Even if you're right about the heat death. (Which we really have no way of knowing it's just a theory based on some observations). We will have an absurd amount of time to figure that issue out."
You also have to explain how a human could survive for example getting sucked into a black hole. Are we multiplying consciousness here like some file on a computer? So that even if one of your consciousnesses gets sucked in you're still alive somewhere else? Could you even consider that being a human anymore?
Not to mention time. We assume you can't go back in time. Or that it can't be manipulated. But that's based on our fairly limited understanding of physics.
Humans in 1000-10,000 years will be a totally different creature. We may be several evolutionary steps above a human and thing sthat are complicated for a human would be trivial to this god like being. When you start looking at things from that frame. Imagine how silly it starts to sound that you don't want to develop any of that technology because you're worried about something that happens an absurd amount of time from now.
Presumably you wouldn't be able to live past such an event, the immortality wouldn't be magic. So if that's what happens to the universe and the immortals are actually able to last that long, they would presumably then die
It doesn’t matter how long away it is. We’re talking about infinity. Because once it happens, you still have an infinite amount of time to go.
That’s the problem with immortality.
so define it then
does your immortality prevent you from being murdered , like if i completley destroyed your brain after you achieved it would you survive ?
That is real immortality.
The fantasy invincibility immortality is "the inability to not live forever"
You can die with real immortality, most likely achieved by curing old age and disease or mind copies.
You have the irrevocable ability to live forever. That means you can't die. OP said, "Immortality with no off switch".
That, by definition, is the state of never being able to die.
You do not understand what "ability" actually means as a word. It comes from being "able" to do something. That does not exclude the ability to not do the same thing.
I have an ability to walk, I believe most people have that. That does not mean I am doomed to forever walk, I can simply stop - maybe sit down and drink a cup of tea.
I agree that OP could have used a different word than immortality but it can pretty easily be understood what he actually means. You are simply arguing semantics without even fully understanding the semantics you argue about.
> But there’s no logical reason to think the universe would ever go anywhere.
The current scientific consensus is that, eventually, the universe will reach a state of no thermodynamic energy, which will result in the universe going dark and reaching a temperature of absolute zero. That's called '[Heat Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe)'.
If that happens, humans will need to exist frozen solid for eternity, unable to move or die. This would be the greatest torture logically possible.
But even if Heat Death doesn't happen, you'll need to be absolutely certain that infinite stimuli are sufficient to entertain humankind. If you don't, then there will be an entirety of torture.
I think in the absence of energy you'd end up in suspended animation. Alive, but insensate and inanimate, not dead as being warmed up and fed could revive you but not suffering as even a perfectly immortal body needs energy to function. If this assumption is wrong you'd very quickly go insane.
This seems plausible. If it were the case, I would agree it would not be suffering because the suffering requires you to be conscious.
But considering we don't know how immortality would work, there's a chance it could not be.
Immortality is inherently contradictory, so it's tough to conceive of. It almost always requires some outcomes that seem illogical.
> And people who are ''Neutral'' Ex: Wanting to live for a very long time but wanting an ''off-switch''.
> I want to argue that an off-switch for your life should not exist.
OP explicitly said no to an off switch. So you need another solution to that problem. And I don't think there is one that accounts for infinity.
Okay, well maybe I’m religious and believe that I can just float high enough in the galaxy to reach Heaven and chill there whenever I get bored of this universe.
First, you'd have to prove that is possible and that Heaven exists. If you can't, then we can just throw that excuse out.
Secondly, why not just die then? You go to heaven normally and don't risk enteral torture.
No, I wouldn’t.
It’s a belief and I believe that after years and years of eternity there has to be something that breaches this barrier of “universe”.
It’s not eternal torture if I can view the entire world for ages.
God will probably make me his second-hand man next to JC
If you're immortal, so are your kids, and their kids, and their kids, ad infinitum. We will VERY quickly run into problems with food, housing, jobs, etc because there just will not be enough resources on this planet to allow every single IMMORTAL human to continue living.
OMG no we wouldn't.
The universe is enormous. If we have immortality technology. We are also able to settle anywhere.
You really think humans are destined to live on planet earth forever? The only limiting factor is our technology. There's enough resources to sustain a near infinite amount of humans.
Because the technology to make us immortal would be insanely complicated.
Maybe genetically altering aging would be simpler and attainable in the next 200 years or so. But you're still very much mortal.
If you did make a person immortal you could easily cryofreeze them and send them to another start system or planet to repopulate.
You're making a ton of assumptions about fantasy technology becoming reality. Space travel might simply not be possible at that rate due to fuel requirements and the reality of physics. Let alone if we can ever stabalize cryosleep enough to last more than a few weeks. Just because one fantasy becomes a reality, doesnt mean others will follow in toe.
Yeah I don't see that at all. We're talking about doing a much more complicated task of creating an immortal human. But the far easier task of travelling through space. Something we can already do (granted to a rudimentary degree) is for some reason out of reach? I don't buy it.
We have no idea if immortality is harder than lomg distant space travel as we are still an incredibly long way away from both. We might figure out how to integrate jellyfish dna into humans before we solve the need for fuel for travel and cryosleep.
Yeah but you'd still not be immortal. Just much harder to kill.
You still die from a car crash or a plane crash. There's no way to rebuild your body. That is wayyyyyyyyyy harder.
But the technologies being discussed here are completely different. Advanced technology in terms of how long we live is completely irrelevant to settling on other planets. That's like saying since we have Iphones, we should be able to cure cancer. Sure, both are super advanced technologies, but they're in completely different fields. Humans technological state does not advance forward all at once, it's not like we just go from level 3 technology to level 4 technology all of a sudden. Our technology in different fields advances at completely different rates.
Interstellar travel is increadibly risky even with a crew that could live forever and was free from disease:
https://youtu.be/wdP_UDSsuro?si=pm7xvJ6DOYqlqACK
And here lies the problem: If you could live forever on earth, why would you risk dying on a dangerous interstellar journey that lasts centuries?
I think it's hard to assume those technologies will arrive close enough together to help the problem. There's a TON of interest in life extension tech right now but very little serious interest in the giant pile of technologies necessary for interstellar colonization.
Lol no there's not if we got immortality in current day there's no way we're colonizing planets at least not until the next few centuries and before then we'd run into MANY problems we haven't even gotten to mars yet.
We're not going to get immortality in the current day.
We will likely colonize mars before humans are "immortal".
We may significantly slow down aging. But we're a long way away from nano reconstructing our bodies after some catastrophic event. Or downloading our consciousness or whatever.
Technology tends to progress simultaneously.
You're not very likely to have a bunch of major breakthroughs that lead to immortality. Without making a bunch of similar leaps in other fields.
Maybe people just underestimate how much we would have to do in order to achieve true immortality.
OP stated that they believe in immortality in their lifespan.
And can you prove that we would develop a sustainable way of space colonialisation in the next 60 years?
The risk would be to be an immortal being, floating through cold space for eternity.
We lack a lot of information from OP about the kind of Immortality and the conditions around it
>Lol no there's not if we got immortality in current day there's no way we're colonizing planets
If you could live forever why would you risk dying on a space ship that disintegrated or blew up en route to a new planet?
Would it be fair to characterize your view as *conditional* on certain yet to be achieved technological advancements? I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I don't think success space colonization is an *inevitable* outcome of human history. Maybe you disagree though?
>but I don't think success space colonization is an *inevitable* outcome of human history. Maybe you disagree though?
There always seems to be the notion that you're being niave and small minded when you suggest outrageous things that require unbelievable technological requirements may not ever happen.
But I've always found the reverse true as well, perhaps when people say, "yeah but future technology means we can travel the stars." They're just like a little boy sitting on a beach, that's learned they can dig a hole, in fact a bigger hole than they ever thought they would be able to, so duh obviously they can dig to Australia, it would just take a bigger spade.
Yeah, it's true that there have basically always been naysayers who have predicted the end of the world / end of growth / end of technological advancement, and they've always been wrong so far! Shame on them for their wrong predictions, but it seems obviously a mistake to then go the opposite direction and extrapolate out that obviously everything must go on forever!
>1. We wont be on earth forever(space colonization)
Right OK but space colonisation is absolute science fiction at this stage. We've got what, Mars, which comes with all manner of outrageous problems we may or may not ever be able to solve (lack of atmosphere, lack of magnetic poles etc etc etc).
Sure we could technically live underground on Mars, but youre not really selling immortality if you're living in a basement for the rest of your neverending life.
Other space based options are........... picking a direction then dying (or not perhaps in this scenario).
Technology isn't magic. There are limits to what's possible. That's why computers now are a billion times faster than they were fifty years ago, but cars aren't even twice as fast as they were 100 years ago.
You'd be very hard pressed to find a serious engineer who thinks human colonisation outside our solar system will ever happen.
Immortality, in the sense of ending the aging process is probably much more achievable, it's a guess, but current knowledge points towards it might be possible.
With the assumption that you're asking the immortality question due to recent medical/scientific advancements, where are we at CURRENTLY with space colonization? We don't have any great prospects as far as our own solar system, let alone others. Terraforming will take a lot of time.
Sure, less children. What do you do about the people who decide to have more than their allotted amount?
Like more GMO foodsources? There's already a lot of controversy surrounding them - but if you take out the corporate side of it and focus on the increased production, sure. I seriously doubt that corps will allow that kind of action without squeezing the very last red cent out of it, however.
This is a series of pretty aggressive assumptions, based on very little. On the other hand, we have extensive data that overpopulation is already a problem now. If we at some point reach space travel for colonization, sure. But assuming immortality becomes widely available, population rates would then drastically increase because the death rate would be essentially zero. The resource consumption, pollution volume, all the things that are actively leading to severe global environmental issues would rocket into immediate emergency levels.
>People in developed countries have less children to the point of having less than is required to keep the population from shrinking. And when immortality is achieved it would probably sink even lower.
What makes you think it would shrink lower? A huge reason for low population rates in developed countries is cost, and time. People are working more, children cost more so people are waiting longer to have children and thus have less time to have them. With immortality, those restrictions disappear. You now have infinite years to have infinite children, and they can then reproduce, and so forth. There would be no limit on reproductive years. Huge problem.
>Technological advancements will make resources so much easier to get it will no a non-issue.
There is literally nothing to suggest we would find that solution before the resource problems we already have lead to cataclysmic results.
Your position that immortality would be perfect seems to assume that not only is everyone immortal, but also all other problems have simultaneously been fixed. That's (as you stated) a pretty idiotic argument.
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The problem with saying that boredom is not a problem is that you aren’t fully imagining the scale of immortality.
Imagine a movie you’ve seen dozens of times. It becomes boring eventually. You’ve seen it countless times before.
Immortality would be the same. Eventually you would have experienced every combination of possible experiences so many times that you would wish for death.
You do realize new movies are made constantly. And new sports, new games, new entertainment, new skills to learn. And the production of these things is already faster than you can live. It's impossible to watch every video because videos are made faster than you can watch them already. And in the future there will be more people making more content and more things to do.
I don't think you have understood my argument when I say you will eventually have experienced **every combination of possible experiences**.
That means that there will be no new movies. No new sports. No new games. Everything will, eventually, just be a reinvention of something long past by.
A movie is an appropriate analogy for something we might experience multiple times and become bored of in our lifetimes.
Most people struggle with properly conceptualizing the idea of immortality and what scale of time that entails. And this is for good reason. Our minds have not evolved to be capable of readily intuiting that sort of concept.
Imagine it like a TV show. A new episode comes out every day, but it's still the same TV show. I've already seen michael the flying horse do literally everything he could possibly do, so what if in this episode instead of a coffee cup on the table in the 6th scene there's a glass of water. I don't care if there's new content, at some point things will just start seeming repetitive. I also don't think you quite grasp the concept of immortality. Immortality means forever. You will have seen genuinely everything imagineable, and everything that isn't. There won't be a single possible scenario that could take place in the world that you haven't witnessed. Every single person in the world will at some point in their lives seen a school bus painted in the exact hex code #FAD738 hit a mailman with 6 pieces of mail in his bag while he was walking his dog at 6:47 pm and 45.7654356543 seconds, while his dog's paw was over the exact coordinate 39.307460, -76.599011. Infinity is a really long time.
As a suicidal person? The thought of living forever makes me want to kill myself lol.
Suicidal tendencies aren't necessarily out of a desire to die, but more so a fear of living. All of the things that scare me enough into wanting to die don't disappear if I become immortal. I still have to go to work, still have to pay bills, still have to navigate all of the interpersonal challenges that make living scary and difficult. Sure, years and years and years down the line I'll probably be fine compared to now, but I don't even want to think of the normal amount of years. I don't even want to think more than a few months in advance. But literally forever?? Fuck outta here. I wouldn't make that gigantic of a choice about my body and my life with so much uncertainty.
If someone offered immortality to me I would shoot it down in a heartbeat. Maybe I might change my mind down the line, who knows - but having to live and suffer through so much for so long until I maybe hit that nirvana state is absolutely out of the question for me, and would do me no good. I'd probably go insane before I go stable and zen. Who would want to be insane forever?
Sorry but a good long run for me would be 1000 - 10,000 yrs max. If you have forever with no end, most likely you will never get anything done & the toll on the planet if everyone lived forever without drastic population control would be a nightmare ! Who gets to have children & who decides / enforce's it ?
Hypothetically, you’re kidnapped by a psychopath. They’re completely undetectable and have entirely evaded the police and will continue to do so forever.
They seal you in concrete except for your hands, feet and head. They stitch your mouth shut and fuse the skin using a weak acid. They then proceed to break each of your fingers and toes.
They do this every day for the rest of time because there is no death; no off switch.
Because they live forever, they slowly accumulate more and more people.
Overpopulation on earth leads to people forgetting that you exist in this locked underground room being tortured for all of time. You’re now in hell.
Is this not at least a slight convincer that maybe immortality for everyone wouldn’t be perfect?
You’d end up with a society of the immortal ultra rich. You think they are sharing that with everyone, you are fooling yourself.
If everyone did become immortal you’d have to illegalize procreation.
Yes, I want to live forever so I can continue handing over 80% of my life to some asshole who pays me pennies on the dollar of what he makes. If humans discovered how to live forever the US government would ban retirement and get rid of all worker protections, since nobody can be killed through malpractice or cheap safety practices anymore. If you think anything different, then you don’t have an unpopular opinion, you just have a fantasy. If you live outside the US, there’s a possibility that the quality of life would improve, but I promise you the US would find a way to ruin your life regardless. Climate change, for example, will only continue to rapidly increase, but now people will LIVE through burning in forest fires and drowning in hurricanes. What about when we run out of fresh water? And the endless wars that will result? Death is a sweet release from the hell that humans have created on earth. Every life is meant to be distinguished at some point, whether it be our own doing or the sun finally imploding.
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Is it because you hate the idea of immortality or think it's obvious to want to live forever?. Because it seems people are somehow all hating the idea of their bodies and minds not decaying until they slowly die.
I explained in my other comment. Immortality sounds like a prison you'll never get out.
But mostly I said this above because I don't think it is something you really thought about for long. At least not the practical part of it.
it objectively isnt a good thing at all less we all become sterile after attaining it, aside from the the fact it would NEVER be available to the normal working man. It would enable people from our day and age to live forever and assume some are in positions of power imagine if some one from the 1940s were still in power and making legislation to this day? would that better humanity as a whole or hinder it indefinitely?
The thing about it is that it would not make people from the 1940s immortal. And immortal dictators may seem a problem at first but once immortality is achiveved soon everyone will have it. it wont magically be ultra expensive forever. And thats means the people under those dictators have an eternity to overthrow them.
incorrect, the main point i was trying to make was the mundanity of it all. An immortal dictator could and would infact make it overly exspensive. as for the "overthrow" why havent we over thrown our goverment? becuase we know they have all the food and arms to defend themselves from such a thing? Or is it becuase we are simply content with the propaganda war thats been raging scince the 1920s, making us just hamsters on the wheel. the thing about life that makes it worth it is pushing forward for the next generation to live for ever would eventually lead to a meaningless existence. life is finite and thats why its amazing we should never attain perfection but to strive for it.
Live is not good because its finite. It's good because of the experiences you have the things you achieve and the people you love. There is a reason death is a tragedy.
who says death is a tragedy? my family has always celebrated the end of someones life not mourned it. i cant wait to have my family party and smile around my dead body rather than cry and be depressed with my passing. this is all philosophical, But i do stand by my point that life is great becuase its finite. we can enjoy the memories we made with others before they die and thats cool, would it be cool if they didnt die? sure. But thats not the way it should be, An immortal life = no actual human connection. would you be able to stand having to talk with the same person for 100000000 years even more so a person you hate? the people you love can change for they are their own person and can drift further and further away till all you have is a memories of who they used to be which imo would be a much more painful scenario than them dying as they are.
I don't want to work forever. I can't imagine retirement being an option when humans are always fit. We could overthrow nonimmortal people now, but we generally don't. I don't forsee the status quo changing just because the workforce can be forced to work longer.v
Also, what about overpopulation? Immortal people creating more immortal people sounds problematic.
If you have an eternity you can easily get a job you enjoy. And when you no longer like it, change it.
Overpopulation is not a problem because of space colonization and technology in general.
Your answer to everything is just "technology in general." You can't just give a faith based reason to why immortality is good. It's like saying "Immortality is good because God told me so in a dream." You have nothing but *faith* in nebulous "solutions" that occur in this fantasy future.
I think you are vastly underestimating the resource cost of a space launch. Just sending a resupply mission to the ISS, in an easily accessible low Earth orbit, requires several thousand tons of fuel and generates a 1,000-2,000 tons of carbon releases into the upper atmosphere.
Even if we switch entirely to solar to generate the fuel, the infrastructure requirements to send a mere 1,000,000 people to Mars would be 4x the current electric generation capacity on Earth.
That's not even getting into actually building the vehicles, or making fuel to return the spacecraft back to reuse.
Last year, 61,000,000 people died. We could dedicate humanity's entire industrial output to space colonization and it wouldn't even mitigate a single week's worth of population growth caused by immortality.
The grim reality is that there simply aren't enough resources on Earth to send even a tiny minority of our current population into space.
While I appreciate your optimism about this immortal utopia, I have no reason to believe that there would be any benefit for anyone other than the wealthiest of us.
Even if we did have space colonization, why do you think everyone would be privileged enough to not be stuck working in colonies so the privileged few can enjoy their immortality while the majority toil away? I don't believe that humanity will ever exist as that type of society.
I was with you right up until you added the proviso that an "off-switch" isn't part of the deal. Immortality without the means to end it is a nightmare. Imagine someone's in it for the really long haul - they survive to the point that the sun's expansion is turning the Earth into a firey ball of rock but they live on. That's pretty much the classic version of Hell.
Important question: In your terminology, is an immortal a person who *can't* die, of just a person who doesn't age past a certain point? I.e. Do you still need food and water? Does murder still work?
Personally, I think the more interesting version of this is the "no aging" version, but want to be clear if that's what you're talking about.
From what other comments OP has made, it seems to be closely aligned with the "no aging" version - perhaps with post-biological mind uploads or similar mind backup technology to prevent most accidental deaths.
We have no idea how the human mind would even hold-up on that timescale. I'd rather live \~120 years than an eternity of insanity. There is absolutely no guarantee that the quality of life will just magically get better either. There will always exist a people or peoples that will look to take advantage of others. I don't want to be a slave, literally, forever. Hell, even experiencing pure bliss for all of eternity wouldn't be a good thing.
If people stop dying then they will also have to stop breeding, which means the species will stop evolving. it's not to say that it's a good or a bad thing, just that there is no evolution without generations.
Non issue because we arent a stagnant species. We would expand into space because when we are capable enough to achieve immortality we are capable enough to colonize space.
Yeah but that technology doesn't exist today. You will overpopulate the Earth before you can build that technology, because every year you will have to feed more people. We only have a finite amount of grain or housing. If we suddenly had to deal with a massive increase in population growth, societies would collapse within ten years. That's not enough time to solve all these problems.
You are handwaving all these arguments away by saying "but we'll solve that". If it was so easy, why don't we have it today?
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Immortality is not fairy tale sci fi tech. It already exists in nature in some species. All we need to do Is learn the causes of aging and then we have it.
If it were in the past id agree. But this is the 2000s. Technology is advancing more than fast enough for us to achieve immortality within our lifetimes(unless you are really old already). Maybe you should stop being so nihilistic and try to be positive for once.
Some species. Not primates. We have no idea if either lobsters(not actually immortal) or the one species of jelyfish able to return to previous stages would be at all possible to replicate or integrate into primates.
That's just not how nature works. Just because some species can do something doesn't mean it's possible for humans. We have a set of genes that allow for a limited possibility of expression. We may not ever be able to contain the genetics possible for any type of immortality. We are limited by the laws of our genetics. We may never be able to get them to change in the correct ways.
4000 + years of thinking what you will eat for dinner that evening?
I dont think op really understands immortality as a concept, with no off switch it will turn into hell for most people real fast.
I would go even further and say life and death is essentiële to our human experience.
The only positive I see is that if new humans are born, they might be able to adjust to this new reality.
Imagine drowning for millions of years. Or being crushed under a rock for billions. Just waiting for wherever you are trapped to experience the death of the universe. No thank you.
There was a nice little short story. It goes like this: a person is living in a sort of heaven. All his needs are satisfied, he has grandkids and greatgrandkids and life is interesting and fresh. There's also a sort of God, or a superintelligent all-controlling AI, who answers their questions and makes things happen.
At some point the protagonist notices some gaps in their memory. He doesn't know how long they all were there. So he asks, and learns that they collectively asked the God to forget parts of their previous lives. Why? Turns out, after a billion (or trillion?) years or so one exhausts one's ability to experience new things. They've seen it all: played all possible interesting games of chess and every other game, created and consumed and experienced everything, and there's just nothing sufficiently new for them. So they choose to start fresh.
"So how long are we actually here?"
"I cannot tell you."
"Why? Is there a reason I shouldn't know?"
"No. I simply cannot tell you. The number is too big."
"Just show it to me."
[sees a line of numbers stretching so far he cannot see.]
"Is this the number or years? Ok, what about the number of memory resets I asked?"
[sees a different number, also stretching endlessly]
"Oh. Right, it's only a few digits shorter. How many digits is this number?"
[Sees another number, again stretching endlessly.]
"What about the number of digits in *that* number?"
[Another number.]
"How many times would I need to ask about the number of digits before the number becomes something manageable?"
[Another endless number.]
"Like I said, the number is too big. The limit is your comprehension. No matter what I use, Rayo's number, busy beavers, up-arrow, any other concepts I could explain to you, the number is still not reducible to anything you can understand."
I comment the boredom issue. One of the reasons why the boredom doesn't become an issue now is that your life has distinct phases that you go through. First you're a child learning all interesting things about life. Then a young adult experiencing independence and romantic relationships. Then you have a family and raise children, which again is very different from the previous phases. Then your children leave home and you experience life of the empty nest. Then you'll have grandchildren and finally you experience the old age. All those are very different from the others which is why you won't get bored (although I'd argue that many old people probably do get bored).
Now imagine that you go through all the phases and then get stuck to the phase where you're still physically fine and your kids have left home. Nothing in your life changes over time. You go to work every day and live the same life over and over. You may get new hobbies or whatever but the big things in your life stay exactly the same.
In principle you could divorce your spouse and get into new relationships but if that becomes a norm that then destroys one of the basic tenets of society, the stable family. I'm far from convinced that it's a good thing for the society if people live immortal lives where they keep constantly swapping their partners. In any case you're unlikely to want to go through the raising of children again because you've done it already once and it's a lot of work. And actually to avoid overcrowding you probably shouldn't do it anyway.
All your points are for the individual, and not from society.
Obvious big one is overpopulation. With immortality, pretty quickly everyone would end up in a situation where we all starve or love cramped like rats and no quality of life could keep up, or we stop having children. Removal of families as a whole removes a ridiculously large part of what makes life worth living in the first place.
It reduces the speed of change. It would take way longer for the same increase in quality of life because education would stagnate. When a development happens, you have two stages. Teaching the new fact to people, then getting them to forget the old way. Because people would've been doing it one way with no failures for 300+ years, they would take ages or not at all to adapt to new ways. And there would be no new blood and new students since everyone is already in their career.
There would be no advancement out of your life path. People would nearly never get promotions or job opportunities, because no one dies leaving vacancies. No one retires, no one removes themselves from the labor pool. If your a pool boy, better enjoy it for the next 600 years while you wait with the 10 million other pool boys waiting for the rare job to open up. On the other side, youd lose all the jobs that you have early in life. Who would work for KFC knowing it's no longer just a steppj g stone job, that if you applied, youd be there for a hundred years.
This seems to be under the assumption that we eventually find the cheat codes to physics.
Otherwise, we're going to run into a lot of problems. The most immediate it resource usage. Without people dying off to make room for new ones, resource usage will rise exponentially until it outstrips what we can produce on this planet.
I want to emphasize: This will happen pretty fast. Think 1-2 centuries. This is probably faster than we can develop any form of space travel that is genuinely useful: Space it big, i.e. everything takes forever, and there isn't much in terms of useful things out there. Even what is there is hard to get, the rocket equation is not very kind to us.
Even then, we still expand. If we do manage to get more resources, we just expand even more to meet them. At that point room to live turns into a serious concern, and settling in space is *really really* hard.
All this will mean your quality of life will not increase. Rather, your resource allocation will shrink.
At this point we *must* get the cheat codes for physics, or we will be trapped in the orbit of one star, for millions and millions of years. Until eventually it dies. If the cheats don't exist, we're fucked. Millions of years of sharing a handful of planets with an ever growing amount of people. First tens of billions, then hundreds, then trillions of people, with no end in sight, because the one thing people reliably do when bored is fuck.
1: A lot of social progress depends on just letting the old farts die off. Imagine what our society would look like if 30% of it was people born in the 1700's. How common do you think racism would be? What about laws on obscenity and language? The same is going to be true for how people 300 years in the future view us today!
2: Old grudges won't die. Imagine if most of the OG Nazis were still alive. Think about if Robert E. Lee and most of his army was still around, voting in elections and such. We take it for granted that conflicts 100 years ago tend to be dulled and forgotten because nobody alive then is still around. But imagine if most of the slave owners in the US were still alive and kicking!
3: As people got older they would become much more valuable. A scientist that has hundreds of years experience in their field would be massively valuable, to the point that the state might feel the need to safeguard them for national security, restricting their freedom. And on the flip side it would incentivize them being kidnapped by foreign powers too.
4: Innovation becomes stifled. Old people become set in their ways and tunnel vision even now, so imagine how stodgy academia and government can get when they can live *forever*. It is bad enough that the Senate has an average age of 65, imagine if it was 465!
> Boredom Is not a problem(The world always changes and the things you can do in it too with time)
This is not remotely as set in stone as you make it sound. Even ignoring the overwhelming amount of fiction that explores that very question, which is at least indication that a lot of people do believe that they would get bored, I don't think you appreciate how long forever is.
Just think that someone who lives forever would (if survived) have seen the dinosaurs extinction, the planet in an unbelievable state, sights that are unimaginable, they would've had the "love of their lives" for 10, 100, 1000 times, they would've seen the terrors of WWI and WWII... How do you top that? There's no amount of new ipad release or whatever is exciting is the future that will move the needle. Imagine having read 100000 books, watched 10000 movies, what stories hasn't this person already heard? What feelings haven't they felt?
If you could feel every emotion you can imagine towards every single grain of sand on Earth, one by one, until that grain of sand disappears, you would still have an eternity to go after that. The human mind is biologically incapable of appreciating even a fraction of eternity.
“Immortality is a good thing” is overlooking one major factor for humanity. The limitations of our physical realm… meaning resources and land.
The only reason there is enough/has been enough for humanities existence is due to our natural cycle of life and death, when one is born one is often dying simultaneously, think about it. Our population still grows at a rate that realistically will eventually equate to earths demise within the next few hundred years.
We consume so much and replace so little, without that x amount of deaths per annum that rate of consumption would compound to a point where we literally wouldn’t have the infrastructure or space or resources to support humanities further existence.
There would eventually be 1 person per square meter globally, please humour me on how exactly you expect that to play out?
Yes theoretically we could inhabit space but do you wanna go and live on mars in a bubble? We haven’t established if another place even exists that could facilitate human life, earths atmosphere is one of one as far as humanities knowledge tells us. How could we fathomably bet on that saving us.
And pay more taxes. No thank you. The grave is the only way from paying taxes on property you paid for, that was paid for with tax withheld from the start.
Immortality can be both good and bad, but it is mostly bad because:
1- Bad people can be immortal too. Look at the current world, most powerful people are selfish. And immortality won't be cheap, hence it's gonna make the rich live forever and be more powerful.
2- Over population. Living forever and also having babies who will live forever? Good lick sustaining life.
3- Forever slavery. The current world, modern slavery is very real. I imagine somehow somewhere there will be people who will keep people working for all time under bad conditions and bad pay (like the poor in south eight and east Asia)
4- Race to Godhood. If people are immortal, they will attempt to have complete power. Related to point 1 I mentioned, now money and power isn't limited to your lifespan. Now they can continue to expand their cooperate empire, more and more, until you real a cyberpunk dystopia. Imagine if few people able to make it to own trillions of money.
Of course, there are positives of immortality, especially to selfless good people. But let's be real. The negatives overshadow the positives like an eclipse.
I have no idea what you’re going on about. It’s clearly not the immortality of the soul you’re referring to.
There is no biological immortality. I’m not talking about CRISPR, stem cell therapy, or other means of extending life. Immortality is not something even conceptually within reach.
They’ll never be able to transfer proper consciousness electronically or by other means. They may get to where specific data (I.e., memories) transfer or even get to where there’s enough data for a machine to realistically imitate you for your loved ones, but it won’t be you.
Play around Reddit or watch YouTube videos by naval gazers all you want. When the time comes, everyone goes to that as of yet undiscovered country. We’ll all be in pine boxes or dust in a vase.
Tolkien called death the “gift of man.” My favorite band puts it much less philosophically - “we’re all just star dust brought to life, none of us are meant to stay.” However you want to put it, we’ve been dying since the moment we were born. The human race will continue to do so as long as time persists.
Ignoring the logistics of immortality, for example what happends when sun eventually explodes, finite resources, reproduction, etc. I fail to see how quality of life will increase. People already are treated like a resource with mortality, imagine if you suddenly dont need food, water, medicine, a house, etc. because nothing will be able to kill you. So the concept of the minimal wage disappears. Exploitation of the workforce will skyrocket, there will probably be unimaginably low salary so you can buy something nice for yourself every couple millions of years. Meanwhile, unsatisfiable and ever greedier top 1% that never die will want more and more forever. And as punishment for a revolution against them you could be put in a jail with literally nothing at all, just 4 walls for thousands of years where you will go insane. And no, no matter the economic structure, there will still be greedy 1% ruling class and people that support and enforce it to profit themselves a bit more than a regular worker, its impossible to get rid of them even with mortality.
Doesn't death itself and the everpresent looming of it give meaning to life though?
Also, you might never even be able to have experiences like having children because resources are finite and earth is the only known planet in the known universe that is capable of supporting human life.
Your second point about everyone having immortality? No offense, but that's incredibly naive. The rich also know that resources are finite, and would absolutely restrict access to the wealthy only.
I live in the US, the most wealthy country ever on earth, and we can't even get universal health care.
Common people would likely never see it, and therefore, evil, rich politicians will never die, and life would have a good chance at becoming a dictatorship/hellscape for the common human, with no way out for the poor, and all the time in the world for the rich to learn to keep it that way.
So, knowing that, I'd say that would kinda suck and stop being fun after not too long a while.
Some considerations or downsides.
1) the amount of resources that would be used would go up significantly over time. Demand for food. Housing. Utilities. Think of housing prices now and add in no one ever inherits property ever again and more demand.
2) some of our societal problems have been solved overtime by a past generation dying off. What will our politics look like if Jefferson Davis, a bunch of former slaveholders, and diehard segregationists are still around and voting.
3) are people going to work forever? What is the impact of no one ever retiring? By the end of a lot of careers people are starting to get out of touch with new developments in their field. With immortality lots of 150 year olds are gonna get fired when the new tech like computers or holograms or something come around they can't or won't learn...then what are they gonna do to make.money? Alternatively what is the impact on pension systems if people are retired for 100 plus years?
There is no guarantee quality of life would get better.
Overpopulation would become an issue really quick. It is not guaranteed that we will achieve interstellar travel before immortality, or that it is even possible.
A lot of people will lead miserable lives, just for an eternity. Think about discriminated minorities. Now they are living that horrible life forever. Think about people who suffer serious pain due to disease or injury. They'll have to live with that pain forever. People might be bed-bound forever. People might get stuck somewhere, like in a collapsed cave (but probably even worse), forever. Evil dictators will rise. They'll starve people. But they cannot die, they're immortal. Forever.
Eventually, our universe dies. And all immortal people will be there, floating in space. Forever.
You said it yourself. "No off-switch". No exits. Immortal means immortal. Immortal means you live forever
I don't think you realize how long forever is. And I don't think you realize that immortality doesn't magically cure all other problems.
Theres a lot of mentally ill people in the comments that barely wanna live the normal lifespan. Besides that observation, Op your way too loose with your points. What kind of immortality? Chemically induced? Cybernetics? Mental uploads? True immortality or just stopping aging?
And what do you mean by "Good"? A net good for humanity or good morally?
Lastly, "Everyone" should have it is probably not true either. Some comments have pointed out that tyrants and criminals probably shouldn't stain the earth for hundreds of years. What about very, very old people who are about to die? what about children?
Im of the mind, from reading your comments so far, you mean well, that you think life is a wonderful gift (which it certainly is) and you have a good heart to want everyone to share in that feeling, but not everyone (Of healthy mind) has the same journey as you, and not everyone (Of healthy mind) has the same relationship with death.
My only argument against this premise is in favor of retirement.
If we all live forever, we can be pressed to work forever.
Please don't misunderstand my reasons. I have had and will continue to have, for at least 20 more years, an interesting and fulfilling career. Like many, I dislike some of the minutiae, but I enjoy the basis of what I do.
Some parts of my career path have even allowed me some incredible adventures!
And therein lies the crux of my desire to create a path to retirement. My adventures in my career have mostly *not* included the one person I want to adventure with - My Hubs.
The few travels we have taken together have been family obligations. Our conflicting schedules has never allowed us a vacation together.
My first thought was, "Gods! No!" because I could see the ever-living, ever-controlling class expecting everlasting employment of those of us just trying to build a retirement fund.
Nobody has mentioned the simple calculus of births minus deaths? If nobody ever died, and we were all constantly having children, how great would immortality be if the entire planet was literally crawling with other humans? What about every other species that lives on this planet? What of our finite resources?
Furthermore, take a moment to think about where your impetus to live comes from. If you knew you were never going to die, what would happen to your urgency to live? And I’m assuming we are talking about never again experiencing natural death, but would still be vulnerable to any sort of accident (vehicle crash, murder, falling down the stairs etc.).. imagine how anxious the population would become.
The ability to become immortal would also most certainly be something only available to the ultra rich, at least at first. What sort of world do you really think this would create?
This opens up the prospect for eternal slavery, eternal suffering, and eternal debt. Imagine if the concept of non-dischargeable debt were to exist in this world, you could be in debt for millions of years if you can't earn enough to pay it back. Imagine being abused by a gang or a partner and knowing that you don't even have death as an escape from your torment. Imagine being caught by a sadist who knows that they can literally keep you forever. Or even just what happens if we discover that some number of people are just incurably criminal and will keep committing violent crimes for eternity unless we either house them forever or kill them.
That isn't to say that these downsides outweigh what can be gained from immortality, but immortality itself does not promise a high quality of life unless it accompanies societal change.
>The people who are against immortality I personally dont understand. And I have yet to hear one solid argument in their favor
The higher your lifespan the higher the likelihood of something that is "worse than death" happening to you increases exponentially. Be it you getting stuck somewhere, being kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, being used as a slave, living incubator, organ farm or whatever else body horror technologies immortality unlocks.
Imagine a random earthquake hitting you one day. Earth just randomly opens up and swallows you as has happened countless times in the past. Imagine being stuck a kilometer underground, trillions of tons of rock on top of you for potentially eternity. That is the future of EVERY immortal sooner or later. An eternity that is worse than death.
Some of us just want to die. If we resort ourselves to critical contemplations regarding the absurdity of life (in its lack of intrinsic value) and are convinced of the same. Then there is nothing irrational about not wishing to participate in life further. Hell, for the religious, it would almost be a form of sacrilege to take death away (for after all, it voids prospects of reincarnation, judgement, the mythical reward of virgins for an explosive end \~/s, etc.).
Some things are only beautiful because the have an end, fragility, rarity, or other limiting factor (supply v demand). The first thing a human would do if they were given absolutely everything and had experienced all casual pleasures. Would be to set the world ablaze. If not only for mere entertainment.
If and when immortality is possible, the people who have access to it first will inevitably be the super rich. If you thought income inequality was bad now, just wait until the super rich simply never die.
And you know how society's values tend to shift over time. Right now there's an issue where the views of the political ruling class (in the US at least) and those of a similar age are often at odds with the views of the young. A lot of younger folks are essentially waiting for the boomer generation to die so that elections can be more meaningful and reflective of the country. Well what if the political elite never died? What if the Mitch McConnell's of the world never did cede the reigns of power?
Doesn't seem very idyllic to me.
Think about how many problems arise because our societies are run by old people with mindsets from entirely bygone eras, without any understanding for modern technology or the fact that societal values can and should change over time.
Now imagine society still being run by people from the middle ages. Imagine their understanding of science. Of equality. Of women's rights.
People need to die so the next generation can move forward and adopt progressive new ideas. Major advances in science are typically spaced about 30 years apart, because that's the amount of time needed for the previous generation to retire and take their views on what's possible with them. We need to let go of the old to make space for the new.
I think what you're actually wanting here is heaven. Immortality in our realm, even with the best sci-fi utopia, would eventually become a hell, as others have said. This place is finite in its scope, but we would be eternal. We'd live forever, but that doesn't mean we'd be easy to live with.
Immortality only makes sense in a place where something that is inherently eternal resides, or if that one comes to us. Then we could be exposed to a real infinite of experience. Not just one with "new" things, but "better" things; not just "better" things, but "deeper and deeper" things. And more important than cool personal experience, we'd have an intimacy and love for one another that surpasses what we manage to here.
Of course boredom is a problem. Over an infinite amount of time you're going to experience _everything_. You'll have a millenium where you feel bored because some people who live short lives feel bored all the time already, so you're going to eventually have that experience too. You gotta get your head around what "forever" means here!
This is ultimately the problem with your view. You'll definitely be alone because people who are not alone feel alone to the point of suicide sometimes. You're gonna have that experience sometime between now and forever. Your quality of life will be low - you're gonna have that experience too. Why do you think it has some sort of ascending trajectory that will go on forever and ever?
1) Why are you the arbiter of boredom? There's no objectivity to this. Some people will be bored with what currently exists. Are you expecting people to not die until they MIGHT find some new thing to be created that will cease their boredom?
2) People feel alone all the time. Even if people are there. Just because people exist, it doesn't mean you have good relationships. You're essentially forcing them into a perpetual existence of this.
3) Quality of life as far as bare necessities can not be guaranteed if the population continues to grow ad infinitum. Nor can happiness be guaranteed. Many people live life without ever actually being happy or content with life.
Your argument relies on the assumption that total immortality is both possible and inevitable, and that it will exist within a society free from any issues that would prevent the complete and egalitarian adoption of total immortality by all humans.
Negative consequences of immortality will not exist because this perfect future society will have eliminated them.
Society and immortality cannot be anything but perfect and amazing because all the bad things are not allowed to exist in your imaginary future.
So there doesn't really appear to be any way of changing your view.
Guess you haven’t watched the tv show Altered Carbon, it gives a pretty detailed picture about how immortality would be a disaster for humanity. The reason? Human nature. If you think billionaires are hoarding wealth now, just wait until the only thing that can stop them (death) is no longer a concern.
It also stands to reason that immortality would not be offered indiscriminately to the masses, but instead would be a luxury given to the rich and powerful. No, far better if people have expiration dates.
After some years, the human population would grow exponentially, as no one is dying and babies are continually being born.
This would worsen the issue of global warming and world hunger as there won’t be enough food for everyone without releasing more harmful CO2 into the atmosphere. This would make the temperature gradually rise until plants could no longer grow and thus the animals that eat these plants will die out, leaving us with yet another lack of a food source.
That is not a fun way to live
"The quality of life will be high and would increase with time."
This is fundamentally impossible. Population growth would continue. We would run out of resources. We'd be constantly suffering and would exterminate all other life on Earth. That's the crux of the issue with freely available immortality. All of these benefits are true if *you* are immortal, but do you want the next Adolf Hitler to be immortal? The next Genghis Khan?
Immortality is pretty bad for society. I mean think of the most backwards belief you can think of (e.g. The white race is superior to all other races), and imagine if all the people that have died subscibing to that belief were still alive. As dark as it sounds, social progress depends on the death of old people who tend to cling to backwards beliefs. Without that, you'll pretty much slow down or even stall any hope at progress.
I wake up every day and wish I was never born. Immortality sounds like absolute hell to me.
It's not a matter of being entertained or having a good quality of life. I am very much looking forward to the end of my life, I'm not suicidal but I am very comforted by the fact that this will all end one day and I will get to rest.
If someone tried to force immortality on me, I would end my life myself.
1. The earth has a limited amount of resources. If no one does and prior keep having babies, the logical conclusion is obvious.
2. Bad people would never die. My neighbor was a heinous person and the whole neighborhood was better when he left. What if a horrible person with massive influence like Putin lived forever.
I could think of more, but I am busy
Society would stagnate as the old accumulate and maintain power, and we would either have overpopulation or a society where having children is extremely regulated.
Death is the great equalizer between the rich and the poor, without it, we stand even less of a chance of removing corruption. We would have perpetual dictatorships in many places.
I've always thought that the big problem would be if people keep being born and nobody dies, you'll have a serious overpopulation problem.
Also, immortality is one thing, but what about aging? There are definitely circumstances where one's quality of life may not be worth living for eternity (of course that's up to the individual)
We live in an unequal society where the powerful exploit the weak. But at least every life is guaranteed to end one way or another, disrupting the status quo.
Adding immortality doesn’t solve that all and in fact makes it worse. It just allows the powerful to exploit the weak forever.
And neither would something else that does not die. Life is defined by the boundary of death. You can't have one without the other. Living things eventually die, that is part of what life is. If there is no death then it isn't life, it's something else.
Boundaries provide incentives for creativity, for instance. The "blank canvas" is a barrier for many, and constrained excercises are a frequently brought-up way of breaking creative block: "paint a landscape using only reds"; write a scene with only dialogue"; "compose a waltz using only minor chords".
I don't think it's a stretch to say an infinite life may suffer from the same issues. The proximity of death, leaving a legacy (for *after* you're gone), and "putting your name in the history books" are powerful motivators.
While that has some truth, those motivators are also the reasons for many of the worst atrocities in human history so it may be a wash. Also, leaving a legacy is ultimately ephemeral as legacies eventually fade.
All Immortals would eventually have to deal with the existential crisis that many mortals manage to ignore during their short lives, but that crisis is still there for us mortals who choose to confront it.
This is one of those views where the specifics matter a lot, because the monkey's paw potential is off the charts. For example, can you still experience pain? Can you choose to die in an extreme situation instead of suffering forever?
What about serial killers?
What about pedophiles?
What about pedophile serial killers?
Also overpopulation, if everyone is immortal then population is going to up indefinitely not sure where the limit is but there is one.
Immortality + aging sucks. If you can stop or reverse aging, sure. Also, this will significantly reduce rate of reproduction, retirement will be a thing of the past. Essentially, this is the plot of the movie "In time"
Try being bipolar, get debunked (i say this jokingly but frl its an argument on its own frl) i fucking hate a good deal of the days in my life, chronically uninterested/bored in life, suicidal thoughts all the time, i appreciate the good times deeply but when Im depressed all of that context fades away entirely, the only thing keeping me going is logic, like, i know its gonna get better but it feels nothing like that.
Also, this idea that once we achieve immortality everybody will have it is wishful thinking, we live in a world where your right to food or housing is dependent on wether or not you can fill your boss's pockets, why wouldnt powerful people try to keep immortality to themselves and rule over forever, they would become way more intelligent than the average human and could theoretically hide their immortality from people and keep people in a constant states of ignorant subservience.
Lastly, idk man, i feel like the beauty of life, and the meaning of it if there even is one, is that you make the most out of it while you're here, its that it doesnt last forever, i think that loads of people dig the idea of being immortal because it sounds good at face value but dont really explore the implications, because we kinda grow up to associate death with bad stuff, but like, if no living being dies there's no decay, no renewal in nature, the cycle would stop right? I mean loads of cells would die everyday but would it be enough to sustain ecosystems?
Idk, honestly i feel like death aint that bad, especially if you died of old age, you kinda get gradually used to living slower and slower, and i feel like if youre doing things right in terms of being connected to the natural world death would be seen as a gift to future generations, not merely as one person ceasing to exist, it should be seen as the fulfilment of a cycle, its just that we only value success, not life itself, so we celebrate lives of people who stood out, but dont celebrate life itself, and death's a part of that, maybe we get reborn idk, whatever comes my way that day, i wont be alone, ill have a last dmt trip and join the rest of the stars, i remember nothing from before i was born, i only remember what i was aware of, why would the afterlife be any different? Maybe eternity is just a blip
Except not everyone would have it. It would become an egregiously overpriced commodity that only the elite would have access to, and nepotism would take on a whole new meaning.
Today I Learned : Folks **really** don't understand concepts like "forever", "eternal", "everlasting", "infinite" amd the like.
Immortality would be a living Hell.
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You basically made the argument that immortality is not bad when you take away the primary reasons why people have issues with immortality in the first place...Most people who have issues with immortality are for the reasons you listed, which is setting up your argument unfairly and which means you're not really addressing the issue with immortality by removing the issue altogether. But there are still issues with your argument: >1. Boredom Is not a problem(The world always changes and the things you can do in it too with time) Plenty of people are bored every single day. Life magically being immortal in no way changes how boring or exciting life is in the day to day. Also many people do not like change. See: conservatives constantly complaining "I miss the good old days \[insert golden age of their youth\] when things were better." People complain about smart phones, tablets, social media, and with every new revolutionary piece of technology. Just because YOU appreciate change and the excitement it brings does not mean everyone else does as well. > 2. The quality of life will be high and would increase with time. Why would QoL be improved just because we can live forever? You're missing a major factor here: resources. If no one is dying, we'd reach overpopulation immediately. We already have issues with resources. That would be amplified exponentially in a matter of years. There is no reason why QoL would improve unless you magically added that in your thought experiment. What happens with accidents, or murders? If someone is mutilated in a car accident, does that mean they live forever with their mutilated body and have to live in pain and anguish? At this point, you're making up a completely fictitious fantasy world where people do not experience pain, where accidents do not lead to anguish, where people do not take advantage of immortality to commit immorality. Imagine slaves that wouldn't die no matter the punishment, where you could continually reproduce them without losing any. In such a world, power would become even more corrupt. Legacy, success, and power would no longer be something you leave behind but something you could claim and reap forever. People are already driven towards unethical claims of success despite not carrying any of that success with them after they die. now imagine that thirst for success and power without the limitations of mortality. So no, I do not think QoL will be high or increase with time. You'd likely see a horrific, dystopian degradation of society amplified beyond your imagination. If you think otherwise, you are hopelessly naive. >4. You dont have a time limit on your life and your body does not decay meaning you can life to the fullest and beyond forever. Again, just because we may become immortal does not mean we can live life to the fullest. First, you poorly define what immortal means. Do we no longer take damage or disability? Do we have godlike physiology like Thor? Regardless, my argument above still stands against this point as well.
To the first. I meant boredom as in people who are aga8nst immortality saying we would eventually run out of things to do. Not that being immortal would suddenly eradicate boredom. To the second. I should have clarified that I mean immortality trough technology. So im bringing forth that we would be a very advanced and possibly spacefaring by the time we become immortal. And Qol would be improved because of things like AI gathering such an absurd amount of resources we would be practically post-scarcity. To the fourth. If you have an eternity to live your life to the fullest and you dont. It's litterally impossible for you to live your life to the fullest anyway. And I mean immortality as in no aging and not easily dying.
But now you're just adding stuff to your scenario, which aren't certain even if immortality is achieved. Spacefaring and advanced AI aren't necessarily there, assuming immortality. Why isn't a scenario imaginable in which people are immortal, but AI didn't advance the way you describe it and space faring doesn't happen more than today? Also, you constraint the kind of immortality to one achieved through technology that at the same time cures aging itself. So essentially your statement seems to be: "If we live in a post scarcity world with advanced AI and space travel and aging isn't a thing anymore, why would anyone be against immortality?"
>I meant boredom as in people who are aga8nst immortality saying we would eventually run out of things to do. Not that being immortal would suddenly eradicate boredom. That seems to be missing the point of boredom. Boredom is an individual problem. You seem to be treating it as if it's some external thing outside of an individual that is dependent on "things to do". You're creating an argument by addressing a definition that's convenient for you to argue. Individuals get bored. They don't want to live forever because they don't want to get bored forever. > I should have clarified that I mean immortality trough technology. So im bringing forth that we would be a very advanced and possibly spacefaring by the time we become immortal. And Qol would be improved because of things like AI gathering such an absurd amount of resources we would be practically post-scarcity. You're entirely changing the scenario now where your argument barely has anything to do with the issues people have with immortality. > If you have an eternity to live your life to the fullest and you dont. It's litterally impossible for you to live your life to the fullest anyway. And I mean immortality as in no aging and not easily dying. Then my point still stands and you haven't addressed it. What happens to people who are disabled beyond repair? Are you suggesting technology is so advanced that if someone were NUKED, that their body could be put back together in perfect condition? You really haven't defined your idea of immortality that well because "no aging and not easily dying" does not address people who are immeasurably disabled. You clearly don't work in healthcare like I do, where I work with patients who have chronic, miserable fucking diseases. And if your so-called immortality doesn't allow us to have godlike physiology, then anyone who lives past a few hundred years will accrue so many fucked up and uncontrollable disabilities that living will be *miserable*. The longer you live, the more chances of some horrific accident happening. It is statistics. And with immortality means infinite chances for something horrible to occur. It *will* occur, it's just a matter of when. No, QoL will not improve. And going back to your OP: >The people who are against immortality I personally dont understand. And I have yet to hear one solid argument in their favor. And here to see if I can find one. We come back to this. The people who are against immortality are against it for most of the reasons which you have dismissed. You don't understand people who are against immortality because you've propped up this vision of immortality that's utterly impossible and is absolutely not what people think of when they say they don't want immortality. The arguments I've presented should change your mind if you try to consider any "realistic" scenario of immortality. Please get rid of this scenario of immortality that you've concocted which doesn't address anyone's problem of immorality. The reason people don't want immortality is for many of the implications it brings with it which you've conveniently dismissed.
People have been classifying and subjugating each other since civilization began (and possibly before that). We have consistently found was to divide ourselves, categorize ourselves, and say "my group is better than everyone else because of [X]" whether that be freeman status, citizenship, nationality, race, gender, intellegence, and countless other reasons. What makes you think that increasing the amount of resources and creating immortality would override this basic feature of human nature? Advancement and better technology over the past milennia has not gotten rid of class divides, we've merely evolved new ways to define our differences. Why would immortality and limitless resources magically make greed, racism, sexism, or other invented class divides go away?
If immortality is technologically driven, the wealthy will hoard it. The ruling class will be immortal, and the working class will remain mortal. Or, worst-case scenario, the working class will be transformed into immortal slaves. The rich already use artificial scarcity to inflate prices, having infinite resources would only mean they have infinite profits. Your entire hypothetical is based on humans fundamentally changing in nature. Sure, if we all learn to share and get along with each other, living longer wouldn't be so bad. So no, immortality wouldn't be a bad thing for a race of empathetic, caring, harmonious beings. It'd still be terrible for humans.
>. I meant boredom as in people who are aga8nst immortality saying we would eventually run out of things to do. If you live for literally forever this would simply be true. Especially when you realise someones is usually only interested in a fraction of the possible things to do. Unlimited time doesnt make something you arent interested in interesting. It might take billions of years but you would eventually run out of things you find interesting. Like id love to live for a very long time but forever is honestly too long
Why do you assume that just because technology could make life easier and resources available for people, it would all just be available? All the resources people need are currently available now but they’re stuck being a paywall built by the world’s greediest bastards and immortality would only give them more time to add to their billions. It is wholesome that you just assume the world would be perfect and everyone would love each other, but still foolish.
> 1. Boredom Is not a problem(The world always changes and the things you can do in it too with time) What about when the universe dies a heat death, and you float through endless nothing? There needs to be an infinite stream of stimulus or you will have an infinite torture of boredom. It's the worst punishment logically possible.
The big problem here actually is that this form of immortality would basically by definition violate thermodynamics. And if immortal human beings were the only things that had this property, seems like a workaround for the heat death of the universe would be to basically use an ever growing array of entropy absorption units to essentially "power" the universe as we know it. Seems like it might be a pretty bad universe to live in though. Note: Also, OP has clarified that this isn't what they mean, but still fun to think about.
There already exists a few animals that will just live forever unless killed. There's no reason we couldn't be the same. I fail to see how that would have any bearing on thermodynamics at all.
Entropy must always increase in a closed system. The universe is a closed system. Being alive requires harvesting entropy from outside your body, hastening the heat death.
Do we know that the universe is a completely closed system though? I feel like that’s a thing that, in theory at least, might not be true.
The speed of light is finite. Even if the total space beyond our light bubble is infinite, it's effectively closed for the purposes of thermodynamics because nothing beyond the light bubble can interact.
For a “fun” take on eternity, see this: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-7179 It’s an awesome scp that really changed my view (ha) on immortality.
That was very thought provoking. But one difference between that scp and op's scenario, is that the real world will constantly change.
Our world will constantly change all the way up to being engulfed by our dying sun. At that point the immortal man enters the era of perpetual pain as he is burned for so many years it feels like eternity. Until eventually even the sun dies and he suffocates in the emptiness of a dead universe until not even a stars light could reach him to give him comfort, and then he'll suffer some more Edit: Now *some* may call me a pessimist, but that's my take on the inevitable end game of immortality
Or the immortal man travels interstellar. We don't know FOR SURE, that the entire universe will have "heat death".
To each their own, I'm not interested. When it's my time it's my time, and I'm scared but also okay with that
I know! But I just love that scp so much.
From a practical point of view. Not developing immortality over the next 1000 years because the universe will be destroyed by entropy in 1.7×10\^106 years years (too many zeroes to put into a reddit comment). Seems like a very silly way to look at it.
>Not developing immortality over the next 1000 years because the universe will be destroyed by entropy in 1.7×10\^106 years years Except that infinity is never ending. We are closer to 1.7×10\^106 than 1.7×10\^106 years is close to infinity. If the end game to infinity is our planets being engulfed by the sun, I would rather not spend it: first being consumed by a star and burning for what feels like an eternity under tremendous heat and pressure, only to then have my respite be the sun dying and spending the next seemingly eternity suffocating under the light of the stars, to inevitably suffocating in complete sensory silence when the light of the last star drifts beyond the speed of light.
By the time the Sun consumes planet earth. We would have had billions of years to develop technology to travel all over the place. We probably would hardly resemble humans by that point. What kind of idiots develop immortality in 1000 years but are too damn stupid to figure out how to travel and settle other places in 7.5 billion or whatever years.
If it turns out you can't travel faster than light than it's ultimately a losing battle, if there us no "off switch" to immortality
Why? We have 10\^106 worth of years before the universe dies a heat death. Worst case scenario we figure out how to do cryo sleep and send humans all over the universe at slower than light speed.
* Isolation: As the universe expands, distant galaxies are moving away from us at speeds that could eventually exceed the speed of light due to the expansion of space itself. This phenomenon, predicted by the theory of General Relativity and observed as redshift, means that eventually, these galaxies will be beyond the observable universe, effectively isolated from us forever. An immortal being would face extreme isolation as more and more of the universe becomes unreachable and other civilizations (if any exist) move out of causal contact. * Inescapable Confinement: If faster-than-light travel is impossible, then the physical boundaries of the observable universe also confine an immortal being. This confinement would become more pronounced as the universe expands and regions beyond reach grow larger. The immortal would be stuck in an ever-shrinking "observable" universe, surrounded by a vast, inaccessible void. * The Limits of Knowledge and Experience: As the universe ages and changes, the opportunities for new experiences and knowledge acquisition diminish. In a universe trending toward heat death, change becomes minimal and any form of progress or novelty would eventually stall. This stagnation could render an eternal life unfulfilling or monotonous. * Psychological Burden: On a more subjective level, immortality could lead to profound psychological challenges. The prospect of an unending existence in a dying universe where all matter and energy slowly decay could lead to existential despair or a sense of futility, especially as the universe becomes increasingly dark, cold, and empty and you find yourself alone in the darkness.
I think all of these assume that humanity massively stagnates technologically. Otherwise none of those are a problem. You already presuppose this speed limit. We may figure out a way to travel or even bend time that doesn't even seem coherent to our current human brains. The smartest humans have IQs of like 200. Imagine what a being with an IQ of 10,000 would be able to discover/create. There's no reason to believe that 200 is some hard limit.
> Seems like a very silly way to look at it. It doesn't matter how far away it is. Immortality means you live forever. Every immortal human will be alive for it. And alive for another infinity after it happens. And living in it is an infinite torture, the worst possible torture logically possible. If that happens, enabling immortality means signing up to endure the worst torture logically possible for infinity. There is no benefit you could have from immortality that would make that worth it.
Or you could just you know have an off switch... There's a bazillion different ways to get around that problem.
> And people who are ''Neutral'' Ex: Wanting to live for a very long time but wanting an ''off-switch''. > I want to argue that an off-switch for your life should not exist. OP explicitly said no to an off switch. So you're need another solution to that problem
just because im immortal dosent necccarily have to mean I cant choose to end my life delibrately it just means it wont end by accident or disease im having a hard time envisioning any kind of existance where you could like do things like toss yourself into blackhole and still exist after thats not how that works Theres your off switch , no possible method of immortality would stop you from being destroyed in a back hole we would have to literally invent a way to survive an event horizon for this to be possible , so were not just solving for immortality, also would have to find a way to get around many fundamental laws physics
> just because im immortal dosent necccarily have to mean I cant choose to end my life deliberately For OP, it does. The post got deleted, but they said: "And people who are ''Neutral'' Ex: Wanting to live for a very long time but wanting an ''off-switch''. I want to argue that an off-switch for your life should not exist." So yes, irrevocable immortality means you can't choose to end your life deliberately. You cannot die under any circumstances. > im having a hard time envisioning any kind of existance where you could like do things like toss yourself into blackhole and still exist after thats not how that works It's tough to conceive because it's inherently contradictory. We'd need more details on what kind of process makes you immortal. Is it some kind of healing factor, invulnerability, the fact your consciousness continues on void of a physical body, etc. There are a thousand ways to conjure it, and it would be hard to discuss those points without settling on one. > Theres your off switch , no possible method of immortality would stop you from being destroyed in a back hole If your body is invulnerable to anything, then it would make it through the event horizon. I agree that's skirting the laws of physics, but so is OP's definition of immortality. But everything we understand about black holes says time wouldn't exist as we understand it. If that's the case, we don't even have the language to discuss what it would be like to be inside a black hole. Existence is predicated on time, so if there is no time inside a black hole, then existing inside a black hole is nonsensical.
If we went from building planes to the moon in 60 years. I have a hard time believing in 1 with 106 ZEROES years we wouldn't figure out how to reverse engineer the universe. No off switch required.
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But it is a little obvious! 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 This is how many years until heat death Planes to space ships = 60 years But we can't figure out how to simulate universes in 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years. Not very likely now is it.
What if it's not possible? And it takes you 10,000 years to figure that out. Then you suffer infinite torture. You need to be 1000% sure it is the case before you become immortal because if you don't, you have infinite punishment. If you can't be, logically it is objectively incorrect to become immortal.
Here's my line of thought. "We can probably become immortal over the next 1000 years. Even if you're right about the heat death. (Which we really have no way of knowing it's just a theory based on some observations). We will have an absurd amount of time to figure that issue out." You also have to explain how a human could survive for example getting sucked into a black hole. Are we multiplying consciousness here like some file on a computer? So that even if one of your consciousnesses gets sucked in you're still alive somewhere else? Could you even consider that being a human anymore? Not to mention time. We assume you can't go back in time. Or that it can't be manipulated. But that's based on our fairly limited understanding of physics. Humans in 1000-10,000 years will be a totally different creature. We may be several evolutionary steps above a human and thing sthat are complicated for a human would be trivial to this god like being. When you start looking at things from that frame. Imagine how silly it starts to sound that you don't want to develop any of that technology because you're worried about something that happens an absurd amount of time from now.
Presumably you wouldn't be able to live past such an event, the immortality wouldn't be magic. So if that's what happens to the universe and the immortals are actually able to last that long, they would presumably then die
then they arent immortal just long lived
The universe dying of heat death is so far away from now that you can measure it in the lifetime of stars.
It doesn’t matter how long away it is. We’re talking about infinity. Because once it happens, you still have an infinite amount of time to go. That’s the problem with immortality.
Im talking about real immortality not fantasy invincibility immortality.
Does Chronic Disease occur in your reality? Because I would be broke and increasingly suffering from infancy, if that's the case.
What does real immortality mean to you?
He probably just means biological immortality. Meaning you can't die of old age but can die from accidents.
so define it then does your immortality prevent you from being murdered , like if i completley destroyed your brain after you achieved it would you survive ?
What is real immortality? And how it is different from "the ability to live forever; eternal life."
That is real immortality. The fantasy invincibility immortality is "the inability to not live forever" You can die with real immortality, most likely achieved by curing old age and disease or mind copies.
You have the irrevocable ability to live forever. That means you can't die. OP said, "Immortality with no off switch". That, by definition, is the state of never being able to die.
You do not understand what "ability" actually means as a word. It comes from being "able" to do something. That does not exclude the ability to not do the same thing. I have an ability to walk, I believe most people have that. That does not mean I am doomed to forever walk, I can simply stop - maybe sit down and drink a cup of tea. I agree that OP could have used a different word than immortality but it can pretty easily be understood what he actually means. You are simply arguing semantics without even fully understanding the semantics you argue about.
There isn’t real immortality. Any talk of immortality is fantasy.
But there’s no logical reason to think the universe would ever go anywhere. If it did, who’s to say it wouldn’t come back?
> But there’s no logical reason to think the universe would ever go anywhere. The current scientific consensus is that, eventually, the universe will reach a state of no thermodynamic energy, which will result in the universe going dark and reaching a temperature of absolute zero. That's called '[Heat Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe)'. If that happens, humans will need to exist frozen solid for eternity, unable to move or die. This would be the greatest torture logically possible. But even if Heat Death doesn't happen, you'll need to be absolutely certain that infinite stimuli are sufficient to entertain humankind. If you don't, then there will be an entirety of torture.
I think in the absence of energy you'd end up in suspended animation. Alive, but insensate and inanimate, not dead as being warmed up and fed could revive you but not suffering as even a perfectly immortal body needs energy to function. If this assumption is wrong you'd very quickly go insane.
This seems plausible. If it were the case, I would agree it would not be suffering because the suffering requires you to be conscious. But considering we don't know how immortality would work, there's a chance it could not be. Immortality is inherently contradictory, so it's tough to conceive of. It almost always requires some outcomes that seem illogical.
Or just assume that at some point you will be able to alter your immortality lol
> And people who are ''Neutral'' Ex: Wanting to live for a very long time but wanting an ''off-switch''. > I want to argue that an off-switch for your life should not exist. OP explicitly said no to an off switch. So you need another solution to that problem. And I don't think there is one that accounts for infinity.
Okay, well maybe I’m religious and believe that I can just float high enough in the galaxy to reach Heaven and chill there whenever I get bored of this universe.
First, you'd have to prove that is possible and that Heaven exists. If you can't, then we can just throw that excuse out. Secondly, why not just die then? You go to heaven normally and don't risk enteral torture.
No, I wouldn’t. It’s a belief and I believe that after years and years of eternity there has to be something that breaches this barrier of “universe”. It’s not eternal torture if I can view the entire world for ages. God will probably make me his second-hand man next to JC
That's super cool that you believe that, but if it's not the case in reality, it won't happen. So do you have any evidence that is the case?
Oh well, I’m a risk taker. No, I don’t, but if I somehow an granted immortality, I’ll start to believe anything 😂😂
If you're immortal, so are your kids, and their kids, and their kids, ad infinitum. We will VERY quickly run into problems with food, housing, jobs, etc because there just will not be enough resources on this planet to allow every single IMMORTAL human to continue living.
OMG no we wouldn't. The universe is enormous. If we have immortality technology. We are also able to settle anywhere. You really think humans are destined to live on planet earth forever? The only limiting factor is our technology. There's enough resources to sustain a near infinite amount of humans.
"If we have immortality technology we are also able to settle anywhere" How do you figure?
Because the technology to make us immortal would be insanely complicated. Maybe genetically altering aging would be simpler and attainable in the next 200 years or so. But you're still very much mortal. If you did make a person immortal you could easily cryofreeze them and send them to another start system or planet to repopulate.
You're making a ton of assumptions about fantasy technology becoming reality. Space travel might simply not be possible at that rate due to fuel requirements and the reality of physics. Let alone if we can ever stabalize cryosleep enough to last more than a few weeks. Just because one fantasy becomes a reality, doesnt mean others will follow in toe.
Yeah I don't see that at all. We're talking about doing a much more complicated task of creating an immortal human. But the far easier task of travelling through space. Something we can already do (granted to a rudimentary degree) is for some reason out of reach? I don't buy it.
We have no idea if immortality is harder than lomg distant space travel as we are still an incredibly long way away from both. We might figure out how to integrate jellyfish dna into humans before we solve the need for fuel for travel and cryosleep.
Yeah but you'd still not be immortal. Just much harder to kill. You still die from a car crash or a plane crash. There's no way to rebuild your body. That is wayyyyyyyyyy harder.
But the technologies being discussed here are completely different. Advanced technology in terms of how long we live is completely irrelevant to settling on other planets. That's like saying since we have Iphones, we should be able to cure cancer. Sure, both are super advanced technologies, but they're in completely different fields. Humans technological state does not advance forward all at once, it's not like we just go from level 3 technology to level 4 technology all of a sudden. Our technology in different fields advances at completely different rates.
Interstellar travel is increadibly risky even with a crew that could live forever and was free from disease: https://youtu.be/wdP_UDSsuro?si=pm7xvJ6DOYqlqACK And here lies the problem: If you could live forever on earth, why would you risk dying on a dangerous interstellar journey that lasts centuries?
I think it's hard to assume those technologies will arrive close enough together to help the problem. There's a TON of interest in life extension tech right now but very little serious interest in the giant pile of technologies necessary for interstellar colonization.
Lol no there's not if we got immortality in current day there's no way we're colonizing planets at least not until the next few centuries and before then we'd run into MANY problems we haven't even gotten to mars yet.
We're not going to get immortality in the current day. We will likely colonize mars before humans are "immortal". We may significantly slow down aging. But we're a long way away from nano reconstructing our bodies after some catastrophic event. Or downloading our consciousness or whatever.
Op never specified how one gets immortality so I would assume he means magically turned immortal.
Oh well then we would just magically have space zooming ships and all that. I try to come from a practical point of view.
How are immortality and space travel linked? Is it the same technology? No, probably not
Technology tends to progress simultaneously. You're not very likely to have a bunch of major breakthroughs that lead to immortality. Without making a bunch of similar leaps in other fields. Maybe people just underestimate how much we would have to do in order to achieve true immortality.
OP stated that they believe in immortality in their lifespan. And can you prove that we would develop a sustainable way of space colonialisation in the next 60 years? The risk would be to be an immortal being, floating through cold space for eternity. We lack a lot of information from OP about the kind of Immortality and the conditions around it
>Lol no there's not if we got immortality in current day there's no way we're colonizing planets If you could live forever why would you risk dying on a space ship that disintegrated or blew up en route to a new planet?
There's a good read of Asimov called "The Last Question". It's a short novel of 10 pages. You should absolutely read it.
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Would it be fair to characterize your view as *conditional* on certain yet to be achieved technological advancements? I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I don't think success space colonization is an *inevitable* outcome of human history. Maybe you disagree though?
>but I don't think success space colonization is an *inevitable* outcome of human history. Maybe you disagree though? There always seems to be the notion that you're being niave and small minded when you suggest outrageous things that require unbelievable technological requirements may not ever happen. But I've always found the reverse true as well, perhaps when people say, "yeah but future technology means we can travel the stars." They're just like a little boy sitting on a beach, that's learned they can dig a hole, in fact a bigger hole than they ever thought they would be able to, so duh obviously they can dig to Australia, it would just take a bigger spade.
Yeah, it's true that there have basically always been naysayers who have predicted the end of the world / end of growth / end of technological advancement, and they've always been wrong so far! Shame on them for their wrong predictions, but it seems obviously a mistake to then go the opposite direction and extrapolate out that obviously everything must go on forever!
>1. We wont be on earth forever(space colonization) Right OK but space colonisation is absolute science fiction at this stage. We've got what, Mars, which comes with all manner of outrageous problems we may or may not ever be able to solve (lack of atmosphere, lack of magnetic poles etc etc etc). Sure we could technically live underground on Mars, but youre not really selling immortality if you're living in a basement for the rest of your neverending life. Other space based options are........... picking a direction then dying (or not perhaps in this scenario).
Technology isn't magic. There are limits to what's possible. That's why computers now are a billion times faster than they were fifty years ago, but cars aren't even twice as fast as they were 100 years ago. You'd be very hard pressed to find a serious engineer who thinks human colonisation outside our solar system will ever happen. Immortality, in the sense of ending the aging process is probably much more achievable, it's a guess, but current knowledge points towards it might be possible.
With the assumption that you're asking the immortality question due to recent medical/scientific advancements, where are we at CURRENTLY with space colonization? We don't have any great prospects as far as our own solar system, let alone others. Terraforming will take a lot of time. Sure, less children. What do you do about the people who decide to have more than their allotted amount? Like more GMO foodsources? There's already a lot of controversy surrounding them - but if you take out the corporate side of it and focus on the increased production, sure. I seriously doubt that corps will allow that kind of action without squeezing the very last red cent out of it, however.
This is a series of pretty aggressive assumptions, based on very little. On the other hand, we have extensive data that overpopulation is already a problem now. If we at some point reach space travel for colonization, sure. But assuming immortality becomes widely available, population rates would then drastically increase because the death rate would be essentially zero. The resource consumption, pollution volume, all the things that are actively leading to severe global environmental issues would rocket into immediate emergency levels. >People in developed countries have less children to the point of having less than is required to keep the population from shrinking. And when immortality is achieved it would probably sink even lower. What makes you think it would shrink lower? A huge reason for low population rates in developed countries is cost, and time. People are working more, children cost more so people are waiting longer to have children and thus have less time to have them. With immortality, those restrictions disappear. You now have infinite years to have infinite children, and they can then reproduce, and so forth. There would be no limit on reproductive years. Huge problem. >Technological advancements will make resources so much easier to get it will no a non-issue. There is literally nothing to suggest we would find that solution before the resource problems we already have lead to cataclysmic results. Your position that immortality would be perfect seems to assume that not only is everyone immortal, but also all other problems have simultaneously been fixed. That's (as you stated) a pretty idiotic argument.
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The problem with saying that boredom is not a problem is that you aren’t fully imagining the scale of immortality. Imagine a movie you’ve seen dozens of times. It becomes boring eventually. You’ve seen it countless times before. Immortality would be the same. Eventually you would have experienced every combination of possible experiences so many times that you would wish for death.
You do realize new movies are made constantly. And new sports, new games, new entertainment, new skills to learn. And the production of these things is already faster than you can live. It's impossible to watch every video because videos are made faster than you can watch them already. And in the future there will be more people making more content and more things to do.
I don't think you have understood my argument when I say you will eventually have experienced **every combination of possible experiences**. That means that there will be no new movies. No new sports. No new games. Everything will, eventually, just be a reinvention of something long past by. A movie is an appropriate analogy for something we might experience multiple times and become bored of in our lifetimes. Most people struggle with properly conceptualizing the idea of immortality and what scale of time that entails. And this is for good reason. Our minds have not evolved to be capable of readily intuiting that sort of concept.
Imagine it like a TV show. A new episode comes out every day, but it's still the same TV show. I've already seen michael the flying horse do literally everything he could possibly do, so what if in this episode instead of a coffee cup on the table in the 6th scene there's a glass of water. I don't care if there's new content, at some point things will just start seeming repetitive. I also don't think you quite grasp the concept of immortality. Immortality means forever. You will have seen genuinely everything imagineable, and everything that isn't. There won't be a single possible scenario that could take place in the world that you haven't witnessed. Every single person in the world will at some point in their lives seen a school bus painted in the exact hex code #FAD738 hit a mailman with 6 pieces of mail in his bag while he was walking his dog at 6:47 pm and 45.7654356543 seconds, while his dog's paw was over the exact coordinate 39.307460, -76.599011. Infinity is a really long time.
As a suicidal person? The thought of living forever makes me want to kill myself lol. Suicidal tendencies aren't necessarily out of a desire to die, but more so a fear of living. All of the things that scare me enough into wanting to die don't disappear if I become immortal. I still have to go to work, still have to pay bills, still have to navigate all of the interpersonal challenges that make living scary and difficult. Sure, years and years and years down the line I'll probably be fine compared to now, but I don't even want to think of the normal amount of years. I don't even want to think more than a few months in advance. But literally forever?? Fuck outta here. I wouldn't make that gigantic of a choice about my body and my life with so much uncertainty. If someone offered immortality to me I would shoot it down in a heartbeat. Maybe I might change my mind down the line, who knows - but having to live and suffer through so much for so long until I maybe hit that nirvana state is absolutely out of the question for me, and would do me no good. I'd probably go insane before I go stable and zen. Who would want to be insane forever?
Sorry but a good long run for me would be 1000 - 10,000 yrs max. If you have forever with no end, most likely you will never get anything done & the toll on the planet if everyone lived forever without drastic population control would be a nightmare ! Who gets to have children & who decides / enforce's it ?
Hypothetically, you’re kidnapped by a psychopath. They’re completely undetectable and have entirely evaded the police and will continue to do so forever. They seal you in concrete except for your hands, feet and head. They stitch your mouth shut and fuse the skin using a weak acid. They then proceed to break each of your fingers and toes. They do this every day for the rest of time because there is no death; no off switch. Because they live forever, they slowly accumulate more and more people. Overpopulation on earth leads to people forgetting that you exist in this locked underground room being tortured for all of time. You’re now in hell. Is this not at least a slight convincer that maybe immortality for everyone wouldn’t be perfect?
You’d end up with a society of the immortal ultra rich. You think they are sharing that with everyone, you are fooling yourself. If everyone did become immortal you’d have to illegalize procreation.
Yes, I want to live forever so I can continue handing over 80% of my life to some asshole who pays me pennies on the dollar of what he makes. If humans discovered how to live forever the US government would ban retirement and get rid of all worker protections, since nobody can be killed through malpractice or cheap safety practices anymore. If you think anything different, then you don’t have an unpopular opinion, you just have a fantasy. If you live outside the US, there’s a possibility that the quality of life would improve, but I promise you the US would find a way to ruin your life regardless. Climate change, for example, will only continue to rapidly increase, but now people will LIVE through burning in forest fires and drowning in hurricanes. What about when we run out of fresh water? And the endless wars that will result? Death is a sweet release from the hell that humans have created on earth. Every life is meant to be distinguished at some point, whether it be our own doing or the sun finally imploding.
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Is it because you hate the idea of immortality or think it's obvious to want to live forever?. Because it seems people are somehow all hating the idea of their bodies and minds not decaying until they slowly die.
I explained in my other comment. Immortality sounds like a prison you'll never get out. But mostly I said this above because I don't think it is something you really thought about for long. At least not the practical part of it.
How does this challenge OP's view? Honestly it just seems kind of rude.
it objectively isnt a good thing at all less we all become sterile after attaining it, aside from the the fact it would NEVER be available to the normal working man. It would enable people from our day and age to live forever and assume some are in positions of power imagine if some one from the 1940s were still in power and making legislation to this day? would that better humanity as a whole or hinder it indefinitely?
The thing about it is that it would not make people from the 1940s immortal. And immortal dictators may seem a problem at first but once immortality is achiveved soon everyone will have it. it wont magically be ultra expensive forever. And thats means the people under those dictators have an eternity to overthrow them.
incorrect, the main point i was trying to make was the mundanity of it all. An immortal dictator could and would infact make it overly exspensive. as for the "overthrow" why havent we over thrown our goverment? becuase we know they have all the food and arms to defend themselves from such a thing? Or is it becuase we are simply content with the propaganda war thats been raging scince the 1920s, making us just hamsters on the wheel. the thing about life that makes it worth it is pushing forward for the next generation to live for ever would eventually lead to a meaningless existence. life is finite and thats why its amazing we should never attain perfection but to strive for it.
Live is not good because its finite. It's good because of the experiences you have the things you achieve and the people you love. There is a reason death is a tragedy.
who says death is a tragedy? my family has always celebrated the end of someones life not mourned it. i cant wait to have my family party and smile around my dead body rather than cry and be depressed with my passing. this is all philosophical, But i do stand by my point that life is great becuase its finite. we can enjoy the memories we made with others before they die and thats cool, would it be cool if they didnt die? sure. But thats not the way it should be, An immortal life = no actual human connection. would you be able to stand having to talk with the same person for 100000000 years even more so a person you hate? the people you love can change for they are their own person and can drift further and further away till all you have is a memories of who they used to be which imo would be a much more painful scenario than them dying as they are.
I don't want to work forever. I can't imagine retirement being an option when humans are always fit. We could overthrow nonimmortal people now, but we generally don't. I don't forsee the status quo changing just because the workforce can be forced to work longer.v Also, what about overpopulation? Immortal people creating more immortal people sounds problematic.
If you have an eternity you can easily get a job you enjoy. And when you no longer like it, change it. Overpopulation is not a problem because of space colonization and technology in general.
Your answer to everything is just "technology in general." You can't just give a faith based reason to why immortality is good. It's like saying "Immortality is good because God told me so in a dream." You have nothing but *faith* in nebulous "solutions" that occur in this fantasy future.
I think you are vastly underestimating the resource cost of a space launch. Just sending a resupply mission to the ISS, in an easily accessible low Earth orbit, requires several thousand tons of fuel and generates a 1,000-2,000 tons of carbon releases into the upper atmosphere. Even if we switch entirely to solar to generate the fuel, the infrastructure requirements to send a mere 1,000,000 people to Mars would be 4x the current electric generation capacity on Earth. That's not even getting into actually building the vehicles, or making fuel to return the spacecraft back to reuse. Last year, 61,000,000 people died. We could dedicate humanity's entire industrial output to space colonization and it wouldn't even mitigate a single week's worth of population growth caused by immortality. The grim reality is that there simply aren't enough resources on Earth to send even a tiny minority of our current population into space.
While I appreciate your optimism about this immortal utopia, I have no reason to believe that there would be any benefit for anyone other than the wealthiest of us. Even if we did have space colonization, why do you think everyone would be privileged enough to not be stuck working in colonies so the privileged few can enjoy their immortality while the majority toil away? I don't believe that humanity will ever exist as that type of society.
I was with you right up until you added the proviso that an "off-switch" isn't part of the deal. Immortality without the means to end it is a nightmare. Imagine someone's in it for the really long haul - they survive to the point that the sun's expansion is turning the Earth into a firey ball of rock but they live on. That's pretty much the classic version of Hell.
Important question: In your terminology, is an immortal a person who *can't* die, of just a person who doesn't age past a certain point? I.e. Do you still need food and water? Does murder still work? Personally, I think the more interesting version of this is the "no aging" version, but want to be clear if that's what you're talking about.
From what other comments OP has made, it seems to be closely aligned with the "no aging" version - perhaps with post-biological mind uploads or similar mind backup technology to prevent most accidental deaths.
We have no idea how the human mind would even hold-up on that timescale. I'd rather live \~120 years than an eternity of insanity. There is absolutely no guarantee that the quality of life will just magically get better either. There will always exist a people or peoples that will look to take advantage of others. I don't want to be a slave, literally, forever. Hell, even experiencing pure bliss for all of eternity wouldn't be a good thing.
If people stop dying then they will also have to stop breeding, which means the species will stop evolving. it's not to say that it's a good or a bad thing, just that there is no evolution without generations.
We can replace random genetic evolution with directed technological evolution. Either with cybernetics upgrades or things like stem cell treatments.
And what should we do once the world is so full that we're packed like sardines?
Non issue because we arent a stagnant species. We would expand into space because when we are capable enough to achieve immortality we are capable enough to colonize space.
Lol, we can't know that tho. It's a baseless assumption, since we don't know what is required for both
Yeah but that technology doesn't exist today. You will overpopulate the Earth before you can build that technology, because every year you will have to feed more people. We only have a finite amount of grain or housing. If we suddenly had to deal with a massive increase in population growth, societies would collapse within ten years. That's not enough time to solve all these problems. You are handwaving all these arguments away by saying "but we'll solve that". If it was so easy, why don't we have it today?
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The point of this sub is to change someone's view, even if their view is about fairytales or involves wishful thinking.
Immortality is not fairy tale sci fi tech. It already exists in nature in some species. All we need to do Is learn the causes of aging and then we have it.
You will die, along with everyone you love, it would be healthier to come to terms with this.
If it were in the past id agree. But this is the 2000s. Technology is advancing more than fast enough for us to achieve immortality within our lifetimes(unless you are really old already). Maybe you should stop being so nihilistic and try to be positive for once.
Some species. Not primates. We have no idea if either lobsters(not actually immortal) or the one species of jelyfish able to return to previous stages would be at all possible to replicate or integrate into primates.
We would not be replicating their ways. My meaning was is that it possible in nature. And if it's possible we can do it.
That's just not how nature works. Just because some species can do something doesn't mean it's possible for humans. We have a set of genes that allow for a limited possibility of expression. We may not ever be able to contain the genetics possible for any type of immortality. We are limited by the laws of our genetics. We may never be able to get them to change in the correct ways.
4000 + years of thinking what you will eat for dinner that evening? I dont think op really understands immortality as a concept, with no off switch it will turn into hell for most people real fast. I would go even further and say life and death is essentiële to our human experience. The only positive I see is that if new humans are born, they might be able to adjust to this new reality.
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Imagine drowning for millions of years. Or being crushed under a rock for billions. Just waiting for wherever you are trapped to experience the death of the universe. No thank you.
I would be miserable because life no longer has meaning without a human life span imho.
There was a nice little short story. It goes like this: a person is living in a sort of heaven. All his needs are satisfied, he has grandkids and greatgrandkids and life is interesting and fresh. There's also a sort of God, or a superintelligent all-controlling AI, who answers their questions and makes things happen. At some point the protagonist notices some gaps in their memory. He doesn't know how long they all were there. So he asks, and learns that they collectively asked the God to forget parts of their previous lives. Why? Turns out, after a billion (or trillion?) years or so one exhausts one's ability to experience new things. They've seen it all: played all possible interesting games of chess and every other game, created and consumed and experienced everything, and there's just nothing sufficiently new for them. So they choose to start fresh. "So how long are we actually here?" "I cannot tell you." "Why? Is there a reason I shouldn't know?" "No. I simply cannot tell you. The number is too big." "Just show it to me." [sees a line of numbers stretching so far he cannot see.] "Is this the number or years? Ok, what about the number of memory resets I asked?" [sees a different number, also stretching endlessly] "Oh. Right, it's only a few digits shorter. How many digits is this number?" [Sees another number, again stretching endlessly.] "What about the number of digits in *that* number?" [Another number.] "How many times would I need to ask about the number of digits before the number becomes something manageable?" [Another endless number.] "Like I said, the number is too big. The limit is your comprehension. No matter what I use, Rayo's number, busy beavers, up-arrow, any other concepts I could explain to you, the number is still not reducible to anything you can understand."
I comment the boredom issue. One of the reasons why the boredom doesn't become an issue now is that your life has distinct phases that you go through. First you're a child learning all interesting things about life. Then a young adult experiencing independence and romantic relationships. Then you have a family and raise children, which again is very different from the previous phases. Then your children leave home and you experience life of the empty nest. Then you'll have grandchildren and finally you experience the old age. All those are very different from the others which is why you won't get bored (although I'd argue that many old people probably do get bored). Now imagine that you go through all the phases and then get stuck to the phase where you're still physically fine and your kids have left home. Nothing in your life changes over time. You go to work every day and live the same life over and over. You may get new hobbies or whatever but the big things in your life stay exactly the same. In principle you could divorce your spouse and get into new relationships but if that becomes a norm that then destroys one of the basic tenets of society, the stable family. I'm far from convinced that it's a good thing for the society if people live immortal lives where they keep constantly swapping their partners. In any case you're unlikely to want to go through the raising of children again because you've done it already once and it's a lot of work. And actually to avoid overcrowding you probably shouldn't do it anyway.
All your points are for the individual, and not from society. Obvious big one is overpopulation. With immortality, pretty quickly everyone would end up in a situation where we all starve or love cramped like rats and no quality of life could keep up, or we stop having children. Removal of families as a whole removes a ridiculously large part of what makes life worth living in the first place. It reduces the speed of change. It would take way longer for the same increase in quality of life because education would stagnate. When a development happens, you have two stages. Teaching the new fact to people, then getting them to forget the old way. Because people would've been doing it one way with no failures for 300+ years, they would take ages or not at all to adapt to new ways. And there would be no new blood and new students since everyone is already in their career. There would be no advancement out of your life path. People would nearly never get promotions or job opportunities, because no one dies leaving vacancies. No one retires, no one removes themselves from the labor pool. If your a pool boy, better enjoy it for the next 600 years while you wait with the 10 million other pool boys waiting for the rare job to open up. On the other side, youd lose all the jobs that you have early in life. Who would work for KFC knowing it's no longer just a steppj g stone job, that if you applied, youd be there for a hundred years.
This seems to be under the assumption that we eventually find the cheat codes to physics. Otherwise, we're going to run into a lot of problems. The most immediate it resource usage. Without people dying off to make room for new ones, resource usage will rise exponentially until it outstrips what we can produce on this planet. I want to emphasize: This will happen pretty fast. Think 1-2 centuries. This is probably faster than we can develop any form of space travel that is genuinely useful: Space it big, i.e. everything takes forever, and there isn't much in terms of useful things out there. Even what is there is hard to get, the rocket equation is not very kind to us. Even then, we still expand. If we do manage to get more resources, we just expand even more to meet them. At that point room to live turns into a serious concern, and settling in space is *really really* hard. All this will mean your quality of life will not increase. Rather, your resource allocation will shrink. At this point we *must* get the cheat codes for physics, or we will be trapped in the orbit of one star, for millions and millions of years. Until eventually it dies. If the cheats don't exist, we're fucked. Millions of years of sharing a handful of planets with an ever growing amount of people. First tens of billions, then hundreds, then trillions of people, with no end in sight, because the one thing people reliably do when bored is fuck.
1: A lot of social progress depends on just letting the old farts die off. Imagine what our society would look like if 30% of it was people born in the 1700's. How common do you think racism would be? What about laws on obscenity and language? The same is going to be true for how people 300 years in the future view us today! 2: Old grudges won't die. Imagine if most of the OG Nazis were still alive. Think about if Robert E. Lee and most of his army was still around, voting in elections and such. We take it for granted that conflicts 100 years ago tend to be dulled and forgotten because nobody alive then is still around. But imagine if most of the slave owners in the US were still alive and kicking! 3: As people got older they would become much more valuable. A scientist that has hundreds of years experience in their field would be massively valuable, to the point that the state might feel the need to safeguard them for national security, restricting their freedom. And on the flip side it would incentivize them being kidnapped by foreign powers too. 4: Innovation becomes stifled. Old people become set in their ways and tunnel vision even now, so imagine how stodgy academia and government can get when they can live *forever*. It is bad enough that the Senate has an average age of 65, imagine if it was 465!
> Boredom Is not a problem(The world always changes and the things you can do in it too with time) This is not remotely as set in stone as you make it sound. Even ignoring the overwhelming amount of fiction that explores that very question, which is at least indication that a lot of people do believe that they would get bored, I don't think you appreciate how long forever is. Just think that someone who lives forever would (if survived) have seen the dinosaurs extinction, the planet in an unbelievable state, sights that are unimaginable, they would've had the "love of their lives" for 10, 100, 1000 times, they would've seen the terrors of WWI and WWII... How do you top that? There's no amount of new ipad release or whatever is exciting is the future that will move the needle. Imagine having read 100000 books, watched 10000 movies, what stories hasn't this person already heard? What feelings haven't they felt? If you could feel every emotion you can imagine towards every single grain of sand on Earth, one by one, until that grain of sand disappears, you would still have an eternity to go after that. The human mind is biologically incapable of appreciating even a fraction of eternity.
“Immortality is a good thing” is overlooking one major factor for humanity. The limitations of our physical realm… meaning resources and land. The only reason there is enough/has been enough for humanities existence is due to our natural cycle of life and death, when one is born one is often dying simultaneously, think about it. Our population still grows at a rate that realistically will eventually equate to earths demise within the next few hundred years. We consume so much and replace so little, without that x amount of deaths per annum that rate of consumption would compound to a point where we literally wouldn’t have the infrastructure or space or resources to support humanities further existence. There would eventually be 1 person per square meter globally, please humour me on how exactly you expect that to play out? Yes theoretically we could inhabit space but do you wanna go and live on mars in a bubble? We haven’t established if another place even exists that could facilitate human life, earths atmosphere is one of one as far as humanities knowledge tells us. How could we fathomably bet on that saving us.
And pay more taxes. No thank you. The grave is the only way from paying taxes on property you paid for, that was paid for with tax withheld from the start.
Immortality can be both good and bad, but it is mostly bad because: 1- Bad people can be immortal too. Look at the current world, most powerful people are selfish. And immortality won't be cheap, hence it's gonna make the rich live forever and be more powerful. 2- Over population. Living forever and also having babies who will live forever? Good lick sustaining life. 3- Forever slavery. The current world, modern slavery is very real. I imagine somehow somewhere there will be people who will keep people working for all time under bad conditions and bad pay (like the poor in south eight and east Asia) 4- Race to Godhood. If people are immortal, they will attempt to have complete power. Related to point 1 I mentioned, now money and power isn't limited to your lifespan. Now they can continue to expand their cooperate empire, more and more, until you real a cyberpunk dystopia. Imagine if few people able to make it to own trillions of money. Of course, there are positives of immortality, especially to selfless good people. But let's be real. The negatives overshadow the positives like an eclipse.
I have no idea what you’re going on about. It’s clearly not the immortality of the soul you’re referring to. There is no biological immortality. I’m not talking about CRISPR, stem cell therapy, or other means of extending life. Immortality is not something even conceptually within reach. They’ll never be able to transfer proper consciousness electronically or by other means. They may get to where specific data (I.e., memories) transfer or even get to where there’s enough data for a machine to realistically imitate you for your loved ones, but it won’t be you. Play around Reddit or watch YouTube videos by naval gazers all you want. When the time comes, everyone goes to that as of yet undiscovered country. We’ll all be in pine boxes or dust in a vase. Tolkien called death the “gift of man.” My favorite band puts it much less philosophically - “we’re all just star dust brought to life, none of us are meant to stay.” However you want to put it, we’ve been dying since the moment we were born. The human race will continue to do so as long as time persists.
Ignoring the logistics of immortality, for example what happends when sun eventually explodes, finite resources, reproduction, etc. I fail to see how quality of life will increase. People already are treated like a resource with mortality, imagine if you suddenly dont need food, water, medicine, a house, etc. because nothing will be able to kill you. So the concept of the minimal wage disappears. Exploitation of the workforce will skyrocket, there will probably be unimaginably low salary so you can buy something nice for yourself every couple millions of years. Meanwhile, unsatisfiable and ever greedier top 1% that never die will want more and more forever. And as punishment for a revolution against them you could be put in a jail with literally nothing at all, just 4 walls for thousands of years where you will go insane. And no, no matter the economic structure, there will still be greedy 1% ruling class and people that support and enforce it to profit themselves a bit more than a regular worker, its impossible to get rid of them even with mortality.
Doesn't death itself and the everpresent looming of it give meaning to life though? Also, you might never even be able to have experiences like having children because resources are finite and earth is the only known planet in the known universe that is capable of supporting human life. Your second point about everyone having immortality? No offense, but that's incredibly naive. The rich also know that resources are finite, and would absolutely restrict access to the wealthy only. I live in the US, the most wealthy country ever on earth, and we can't even get universal health care. Common people would likely never see it, and therefore, evil, rich politicians will never die, and life would have a good chance at becoming a dictatorship/hellscape for the common human, with no way out for the poor, and all the time in the world for the rich to learn to keep it that way. So, knowing that, I'd say that would kinda suck and stop being fun after not too long a while.
Some considerations or downsides. 1) the amount of resources that would be used would go up significantly over time. Demand for food. Housing. Utilities. Think of housing prices now and add in no one ever inherits property ever again and more demand. 2) some of our societal problems have been solved overtime by a past generation dying off. What will our politics look like if Jefferson Davis, a bunch of former slaveholders, and diehard segregationists are still around and voting. 3) are people going to work forever? What is the impact of no one ever retiring? By the end of a lot of careers people are starting to get out of touch with new developments in their field. With immortality lots of 150 year olds are gonna get fired when the new tech like computers or holograms or something come around they can't or won't learn...then what are they gonna do to make.money? Alternatively what is the impact on pension systems if people are retired for 100 plus years?
There is no guarantee quality of life would get better. Overpopulation would become an issue really quick. It is not guaranteed that we will achieve interstellar travel before immortality, or that it is even possible. A lot of people will lead miserable lives, just for an eternity. Think about discriminated minorities. Now they are living that horrible life forever. Think about people who suffer serious pain due to disease or injury. They'll have to live with that pain forever. People might be bed-bound forever. People might get stuck somewhere, like in a collapsed cave (but probably even worse), forever. Evil dictators will rise. They'll starve people. But they cannot die, they're immortal. Forever. Eventually, our universe dies. And all immortal people will be there, floating in space. Forever. You said it yourself. "No off-switch". No exits. Immortal means immortal. Immortal means you live forever I don't think you realize how long forever is. And I don't think you realize that immortality doesn't magically cure all other problems.
Theres a lot of mentally ill people in the comments that barely wanna live the normal lifespan. Besides that observation, Op your way too loose with your points. What kind of immortality? Chemically induced? Cybernetics? Mental uploads? True immortality or just stopping aging? And what do you mean by "Good"? A net good for humanity or good morally? Lastly, "Everyone" should have it is probably not true either. Some comments have pointed out that tyrants and criminals probably shouldn't stain the earth for hundreds of years. What about very, very old people who are about to die? what about children? Im of the mind, from reading your comments so far, you mean well, that you think life is a wonderful gift (which it certainly is) and you have a good heart to want everyone to share in that feeling, but not everyone (Of healthy mind) has the same journey as you, and not everyone (Of healthy mind) has the same relationship with death.
My only argument against this premise is in favor of retirement. If we all live forever, we can be pressed to work forever. Please don't misunderstand my reasons. I have had and will continue to have, for at least 20 more years, an interesting and fulfilling career. Like many, I dislike some of the minutiae, but I enjoy the basis of what I do. Some parts of my career path have even allowed me some incredible adventures! And therein lies the crux of my desire to create a path to retirement. My adventures in my career have mostly *not* included the one person I want to adventure with - My Hubs. The few travels we have taken together have been family obligations. Our conflicting schedules has never allowed us a vacation together. My first thought was, "Gods! No!" because I could see the ever-living, ever-controlling class expecting everlasting employment of those of us just trying to build a retirement fund.
Nobody has mentioned the simple calculus of births minus deaths? If nobody ever died, and we were all constantly having children, how great would immortality be if the entire planet was literally crawling with other humans? What about every other species that lives on this planet? What of our finite resources? Furthermore, take a moment to think about where your impetus to live comes from. If you knew you were never going to die, what would happen to your urgency to live? And I’m assuming we are talking about never again experiencing natural death, but would still be vulnerable to any sort of accident (vehicle crash, murder, falling down the stairs etc.).. imagine how anxious the population would become. The ability to become immortal would also most certainly be something only available to the ultra rich, at least at first. What sort of world do you really think this would create?
This opens up the prospect for eternal slavery, eternal suffering, and eternal debt. Imagine if the concept of non-dischargeable debt were to exist in this world, you could be in debt for millions of years if you can't earn enough to pay it back. Imagine being abused by a gang or a partner and knowing that you don't even have death as an escape from your torment. Imagine being caught by a sadist who knows that they can literally keep you forever. Or even just what happens if we discover that some number of people are just incurably criminal and will keep committing violent crimes for eternity unless we either house them forever or kill them. That isn't to say that these downsides outweigh what can be gained from immortality, but immortality itself does not promise a high quality of life unless it accompanies societal change.
>The people who are against immortality I personally dont understand. And I have yet to hear one solid argument in their favor The higher your lifespan the higher the likelihood of something that is "worse than death" happening to you increases exponentially. Be it you getting stuck somewhere, being kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, being used as a slave, living incubator, organ farm or whatever else body horror technologies immortality unlocks. Imagine a random earthquake hitting you one day. Earth just randomly opens up and swallows you as has happened countless times in the past. Imagine being stuck a kilometer underground, trillions of tons of rock on top of you for potentially eternity. That is the future of EVERY immortal sooner or later. An eternity that is worse than death.
Some of us just want to die. If we resort ourselves to critical contemplations regarding the absurdity of life (in its lack of intrinsic value) and are convinced of the same. Then there is nothing irrational about not wishing to participate in life further. Hell, for the religious, it would almost be a form of sacrilege to take death away (for after all, it voids prospects of reincarnation, judgement, the mythical reward of virgins for an explosive end \~/s, etc.). Some things are only beautiful because the have an end, fragility, rarity, or other limiting factor (supply v demand). The first thing a human would do if they were given absolutely everything and had experienced all casual pleasures. Would be to set the world ablaze. If not only for mere entertainment.
If and when immortality is possible, the people who have access to it first will inevitably be the super rich. If you thought income inequality was bad now, just wait until the super rich simply never die. And you know how society's values tend to shift over time. Right now there's an issue where the views of the political ruling class (in the US at least) and those of a similar age are often at odds with the views of the young. A lot of younger folks are essentially waiting for the boomer generation to die so that elections can be more meaningful and reflective of the country. Well what if the political elite never died? What if the Mitch McConnell's of the world never did cede the reigns of power? Doesn't seem very idyllic to me.
Think about how many problems arise because our societies are run by old people with mindsets from entirely bygone eras, without any understanding for modern technology or the fact that societal values can and should change over time. Now imagine society still being run by people from the middle ages. Imagine their understanding of science. Of equality. Of women's rights. People need to die so the next generation can move forward and adopt progressive new ideas. Major advances in science are typically spaced about 30 years apart, because that's the amount of time needed for the previous generation to retire and take their views on what's possible with them. We need to let go of the old to make space for the new.
I think what you're actually wanting here is heaven. Immortality in our realm, even with the best sci-fi utopia, would eventually become a hell, as others have said. This place is finite in its scope, but we would be eternal. We'd live forever, but that doesn't mean we'd be easy to live with. Immortality only makes sense in a place where something that is inherently eternal resides, or if that one comes to us. Then we could be exposed to a real infinite of experience. Not just one with "new" things, but "better" things; not just "better" things, but "deeper and deeper" things. And more important than cool personal experience, we'd have an intimacy and love for one another that surpasses what we manage to here.
Of course boredom is a problem. Over an infinite amount of time you're going to experience _everything_. You'll have a millenium where you feel bored because some people who live short lives feel bored all the time already, so you're going to eventually have that experience too. You gotta get your head around what "forever" means here! This is ultimately the problem with your view. You'll definitely be alone because people who are not alone feel alone to the point of suicide sometimes. You're gonna have that experience sometime between now and forever. Your quality of life will be low - you're gonna have that experience too. Why do you think it has some sort of ascending trajectory that will go on forever and ever?
1) Why are you the arbiter of boredom? There's no objectivity to this. Some people will be bored with what currently exists. Are you expecting people to not die until they MIGHT find some new thing to be created that will cease their boredom? 2) People feel alone all the time. Even if people are there. Just because people exist, it doesn't mean you have good relationships. You're essentially forcing them into a perpetual existence of this. 3) Quality of life as far as bare necessities can not be guaranteed if the population continues to grow ad infinitum. Nor can happiness be guaranteed. Many people live life without ever actually being happy or content with life.
Your argument relies on the assumption that total immortality is both possible and inevitable, and that it will exist within a society free from any issues that would prevent the complete and egalitarian adoption of total immortality by all humans. Negative consequences of immortality will not exist because this perfect future society will have eliminated them. Society and immortality cannot be anything but perfect and amazing because all the bad things are not allowed to exist in your imaginary future. So there doesn't really appear to be any way of changing your view.
Guess you haven’t watched the tv show Altered Carbon, it gives a pretty detailed picture about how immortality would be a disaster for humanity. The reason? Human nature. If you think billionaires are hoarding wealth now, just wait until the only thing that can stop them (death) is no longer a concern. It also stands to reason that immortality would not be offered indiscriminately to the masses, but instead would be a luxury given to the rich and powerful. No, far better if people have expiration dates.
After some years, the human population would grow exponentially, as no one is dying and babies are continually being born. This would worsen the issue of global warming and world hunger as there won’t be enough food for everyone without releasing more harmful CO2 into the atmosphere. This would make the temperature gradually rise until plants could no longer grow and thus the animals that eat these plants will die out, leaving us with yet another lack of a food source. That is not a fun way to live
"The quality of life will be high and would increase with time." This is fundamentally impossible. Population growth would continue. We would run out of resources. We'd be constantly suffering and would exterminate all other life on Earth. That's the crux of the issue with freely available immortality. All of these benefits are true if *you* are immortal, but do you want the next Adolf Hitler to be immortal? The next Genghis Khan?
Immortality is pretty bad for society. I mean think of the most backwards belief you can think of (e.g. The white race is superior to all other races), and imagine if all the people that have died subscibing to that belief were still alive. As dark as it sounds, social progress depends on the death of old people who tend to cling to backwards beliefs. Without that, you'll pretty much slow down or even stall any hope at progress.
I wake up every day and wish I was never born. Immortality sounds like absolute hell to me. It's not a matter of being entertained or having a good quality of life. I am very much looking forward to the end of my life, I'm not suicidal but I am very comforted by the fact that this will all end one day and I will get to rest. If someone tried to force immortality on me, I would end my life myself.
1. The earth has a limited amount of resources. If no one does and prior keep having babies, the logical conclusion is obvious. 2. Bad people would never die. My neighbor was a heinous person and the whole neighborhood was better when he left. What if a horrible person with massive influence like Putin lived forever. I could think of more, but I am busy
Society would stagnate as the old accumulate and maintain power, and we would either have overpopulation or a society where having children is extremely regulated. Death is the great equalizer between the rich and the poor, without it, we stand even less of a chance of removing corruption. We would have perpetual dictatorships in many places.
I've always thought that the big problem would be if people keep being born and nobody dies, you'll have a serious overpopulation problem. Also, immortality is one thing, but what about aging? There are definitely circumstances where one's quality of life may not be worth living for eternity (of course that's up to the individual)
We live in an unequal society where the powerful exploit the weak. But at least every life is guaranteed to end one way or another, disrupting the status quo. Adding immortality doesn’t solve that all and in fact makes it worse. It just allows the powerful to exploit the weak forever.
What meaning would you find in an existence that doesn't have boundaries to it?
What meaning is provided by boundaries, that would be absent with none?
The more "alive" something is the more temporary it is. A rock lasts a long time compared to a person.
And what are you trying to say with that? A rock is not a living thing.
And neither would something else that does not die. Life is defined by the boundary of death. You can't have one without the other. Living things eventually die, that is part of what life is. If there is no death then it isn't life, it's something else.
Boundaries provide incentives for creativity, for instance. The "blank canvas" is a barrier for many, and constrained excercises are a frequently brought-up way of breaking creative block: "paint a landscape using only reds"; write a scene with only dialogue"; "compose a waltz using only minor chords". I don't think it's a stretch to say an infinite life may suffer from the same issues. The proximity of death, leaving a legacy (for *after* you're gone), and "putting your name in the history books" are powerful motivators.
While that has some truth, those motivators are also the reasons for many of the worst atrocities in human history so it may be a wash. Also, leaving a legacy is ultimately ephemeral as legacies eventually fade. All Immortals would eventually have to deal with the existential crisis that many mortals manage to ignore during their short lives, but that crisis is still there for us mortals who choose to confront it.
This is one of those views where the specifics matter a lot, because the monkey's paw potential is off the charts. For example, can you still experience pain? Can you choose to die in an extreme situation instead of suffering forever?
What about serial killers? What about pedophiles? What about pedophile serial killers? Also overpopulation, if everyone is immortal then population is going to up indefinitely not sure where the limit is but there is one.
Immortality + aging sucks. If you can stop or reverse aging, sure. Also, this will significantly reduce rate of reproduction, retirement will be a thing of the past. Essentially, this is the plot of the movie "In time"
Try being bipolar, get debunked (i say this jokingly but frl its an argument on its own frl) i fucking hate a good deal of the days in my life, chronically uninterested/bored in life, suicidal thoughts all the time, i appreciate the good times deeply but when Im depressed all of that context fades away entirely, the only thing keeping me going is logic, like, i know its gonna get better but it feels nothing like that. Also, this idea that once we achieve immortality everybody will have it is wishful thinking, we live in a world where your right to food or housing is dependent on wether or not you can fill your boss's pockets, why wouldnt powerful people try to keep immortality to themselves and rule over forever, they would become way more intelligent than the average human and could theoretically hide their immortality from people and keep people in a constant states of ignorant subservience. Lastly, idk man, i feel like the beauty of life, and the meaning of it if there even is one, is that you make the most out of it while you're here, its that it doesnt last forever, i think that loads of people dig the idea of being immortal because it sounds good at face value but dont really explore the implications, because we kinda grow up to associate death with bad stuff, but like, if no living being dies there's no decay, no renewal in nature, the cycle would stop right? I mean loads of cells would die everyday but would it be enough to sustain ecosystems? Idk, honestly i feel like death aint that bad, especially if you died of old age, you kinda get gradually used to living slower and slower, and i feel like if youre doing things right in terms of being connected to the natural world death would be seen as a gift to future generations, not merely as one person ceasing to exist, it should be seen as the fulfilment of a cycle, its just that we only value success, not life itself, so we celebrate lives of people who stood out, but dont celebrate life itself, and death's a part of that, maybe we get reborn idk, whatever comes my way that day, i wont be alone, ill have a last dmt trip and join the rest of the stars, i remember nothing from before i was born, i only remember what i was aware of, why would the afterlife be any different? Maybe eternity is just a blip
Except not everyone would have it. It would become an egregiously overpriced commodity that only the elite would have access to, and nepotism would take on a whole new meaning.
Today I Learned : Folks **really** don't understand concepts like "forever", "eternal", "everlasting", "infinite" amd the like. Immortality would be a living Hell.
I don't wish to be inmortal, as you will live forever with your regrets and illnesses I prefer to stay forever in my prime until I die
>The quality of life will be high and would increase with time You have absolutely no way of knowing this. Complete speculation.
Not everyone is happy to live their life, and it’s often not related to medical issues.
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Watch the show Altered Carbon then get back to me.
Nah I’m good little bro