Immortality: Why don't you want it?

After the first billion trillion years I think it would get a bit boring. The next billion trillion years would be even more boring. After that, I would go into a bit of a decline...

And I'd still have an infinity of time left to fill!

I find it odd, in the first place, that you ask this in the LGBT section. I assumed when I read the title that you were some Christian freak trying to suggest that gay people aren't going to heaven.

I don't think anybody would have a problem with never growing old. We accept (most of us) aging as part of the human experience, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't prefer youth and health. But "immortality" is another matter. What in hell do you mean by "it is clear that much of humanity will eventually be able to and will choose to leave the Earth for the high frontier"?

I second the opinion of many answerers that life would become stale after a few hundred years in the same "incarnation." And the earth itself is not immortal - I don't personally doubt that human beings will make the earth uninhabitable within a few centuries, and what then?

After so many years you get tired and are ready to go. My great-grandpa just passed away at the age of 106 and he said he was ready, he was tired. He was not sick, no illness, he was actually dancing at a wedding just a few months before, perfectly fine. It's just a feeling like your finished, done in life. I agree that this life does go by way too fast, but there is no way I would want to be here forever. Also, you would be young and healthy, but you would still have to go to work everyday to earn money to live, who wants to do that? That's why so many older people look forward to retirement because they are so tired of working even after 40 or 50 years, let alone 100 or 200....no thank you.

Wow, good question.

I think that I operate best with a deadline (if you'll pardon the word), and if I knew I had all the time in the world, I'd never get anything done. Besides, I am curious about what comes next. I just want to feel ready when it is my time to find out. I love to learn, and I would love to have a lot longer that most people get (especially if I am guaranteed good health for the duration), but I think my greatest fear would be that at some point, I would get bored. I hate to be bored!

I just don't wont to live forever. If there is an afterlife, I want to experience it. I want to grow old and sit around on the porch talking about how things ''used'' to be. I feel like it's an achievement to live a long time....naturally.

I look at my grandparents, and other older people and I envy them, in a way. They have lived their whole lives and know so much. I think it would be an honor to be placed in the same ranks as those people. And I want to pass on and let someone else take control.

To live on, never changing even if learning, to watch the brief spans of humanity passing and dying ? This would be living eternally the suicidal depression I fell into when my partner died but without the chance of ending it.

I was helped and saved and will live on with friends and family and can only hope I will be remembered as a good woman who loved and was loved.

Enough.

Rose P.

first and foremost, i would hate to see everyone i care about die. secondly, while i would like an extended life rather than the typical 70ish years, i think immortality would def get boring (at least, without a companion). plus if someone thought to look close enough, how would i explain in the year 2120 that i was boring in the 1980s and still look this youthful? and since immortality isnt granted to just anybody, i imagine it to be a very lonely lifestyle.

Humanity is driven by it's mortality. It is what pushes us.

"Why wait till tomorrow, what you can do today"

This notion comes from our sense of mortality. As an immortal, we would still be a medieval state. We would never feel the urge toimprove or change, we would become stuck in a rut.

I would never want immortality.... I think it would cheapen my life, and other's lives. I think that you have roughly 70-100 years to get things done on this earth. Prolonging life doesn't make it more fulfilling. Also, why would you not want your life to end eventually? Aren't you curious about what happens after you die?

After several hundred years of age other people would be expecting me to be very knowledgeable and have all the answers and the paparazzi would be relentless.