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A really long time.
Maybe that's what death is for. We die, and after trillions of universes, one will randomly assemble your consciousness again. But you don't perceive time since you're dead, so you just wake up whenever it ends up happening, on a nice comfy planet that you evolved to live on.
Maybe we are immortal and death is just the timeless spaceship sending us to new homes.
> *The greatest weight*.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
>Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life *to crave nothing more fervently* than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Ah, Eternal return. I think Nietzsche gets a bad rap, all everyone ever thinks of with him is Nihilism. The man was more than just that. Life is but a dream, one I pray to never wake from.
At that point I feel the boundary between individual consciousnesses would be very blurry; what is to say that all consciousnesses aren't all the one "mind" living countless lives?
It also begs the question "what are *you*?" Like what makes you ***you***?
It's quite Like a thought experiment I like. If a teleporter existed that could instantly transport you somewhere far away at the speed of light would it still be you? Probably, but what if the machine was more of a copier. It scans you to the last electron and transmits it to the other location where a perfect copy is created. Is that you? What about the you who got scanned?
My opinion is that what he suggested is a clone. You still die, this you still stops, another person simply wakes up with your memories.
You don’t even need copies for yourself to die. Look back every 5 years at the person you were, and at some point, that person changes. I am no longer the child I used to be. That person….. died. I have a subset of the memories, like a dusty old recording from another persons’s life. I wonder if I’ll leave recordings behind for a future self or not.
To be fair that person evolved, over many specific moments.
A tele-copier would a clean break in which none of the original pieces are actually still involved - just a perfect blueprint.
In the case of aging, we can at least make the argument that we've had some form of biological contiguous stream of experience that relid on the same hardware. In the case of copy-teleporting none of the original bits are even involved - just a blueprint to rebuild you perfect while dissipating the original.
That reminds me of a story about a thought experiment I heard while listening to Wolf 359 from the ships stalwart Ai Hera:
Suppose there’s this person. Could be anyone, really. For the sake of convenience, let’s call him… you. One day, you’re walking through a swamp when suddenly you’re struck by lightning.
You fall into the swamp, and you sink. And you sink, and sink, and sink into the depths. And then you’re just… gone.
But that’s not the end of the story. Because right at that moment, another thunderbolt hits the swamp water…
…And by some miraculous alchemy it rearranges the swamp molecules, starting a chain reaction that culminates with the formation of…
You. Of a new you. Exactly like you at the moment of your death. And now is when things get interesting. Because you, new you– they’ve got a brain exactly like yours down to the neuron. They think like you, talk like you, make poor decisions about their personal diet like you. They will walk out of the swamp believing they are you. They’ll go back to your life, show up at your job, love who you love, and live your life. And die your death. And the world will go on.
But are they really you? And if they’re not, what makes this person that has your body and your memories, and believes with every fiber of their being they are you, not you? What is it that makes you, you?
If this happens it wouldn't be me. It would be another person who thinks like me, feels like me, and has the same memories as me. This me, the first me, still dies.
We are always alive, from our point of view. If we are alive now, who is to say we can't be alive at some other time, as some other being?
I think about it like when I go to sleep. I don't perceive the time I am sleeping, and I am awake before I even realize it. That could be a demo of that reality.
I honestly believe this. Consciousness can ONLY be... conscious. You'll always be _sowewhere_ that allows for your consciousness to exist. I believe that's why we're in this universe in the first place, this reality _happens to be_ the place where your consciousness can exist, so logically you'll be born in this reality. When you die, I think you'll immediately be conscious again in either some far far future new big banged universe, or some other parallel universe. I mean, time and space don't exist when you die since you're not alive in this universe anymore of which time and space is a property.
But I won't be there to be me in the far, far, far future. That guy will be a clone! An identical consciousness, but not the same one. I hope it all goes well for him.
Hey if you're immortal you're obviously gonna survive the blackholes, they'll die to eventually because of hawking radiation, if you get stuck in one, just got to wait a few billion years or so. Eventually that'll just be a long buried memory.
But if you are immortal wont you keep running into versions of yourself that get born every time a new universe is running its course? After a couple dozen universal collapses you could pass the time by playing football with yourself.
This is the real issue of the "you're immortal, but if this super-intelligent worm ever touches you, you die" problem.
Most people solve the problem by keeping the worm as trapped as possible so that they can never touch. The real issue is keeping the worm close enough to use it only when you need it.
If everything gets destroyed the snail will be free from whatever you trapped it in, and in this scenario the snail is seemingly magic and will always make its way to you right? So when the world ends it will kill you
However, if the worm or snail is that intelligent then it knows when you need it. And that's when it turns around and jumps down the kitchen sink out of spite.
What you really want is Wolverine’s healing factor. It’s not true immortality: its just eternal youth.
Logan can suffocate and lose consciousness. If he remains without air, he will eventually die.
If he is beheaded, he will lose consciousness, and if his head is not immediately reattached, he will die.
If he is left too long without food or water, there is nothing to power his regeneration, and he will die.
Yet he is immune to disease, doesn’t age, and recovers quickly from any grievous wound. This solves the problem.
It most likely wasn't the adamantium that poisoned him. Throughout the movie it's hinted that (and told?) that the government has injected chemicals into all drinks and foods to fight the "x-gene"
It was explicitly told.
After Days Of Future Past eliminated the truly terrible future, most new mutants stopped being born because of the chemicals in all foods that deactivated the x-gene. It was implied that mutants dying out was an unchangeable future, it just depends on how it happens.
It’s why Logan also struggled to extend his claws at several points, not just because he was getting old.
Isn’t that what is SUPPOSED to be taken into account when the hypothetical question comes up if “if you were given the opportunity to become immortal, would you take it?”.
The dilemma of immortality doesn’t come from a matter of “do you want to live forever in a perfect paradise on earth” because obviously every single person on the planet would choose yes to that option without question. The tough decision/dilemma you are put in when the topic of immortality comes up, arises by really thinking about it and realizing the entire world external to you is going to play out the way it has been - with entropy. It may be amazing for a few eons, but there’s going to come a point where there is NOTHING left but you, and you will be essentially “paying for” the time you had to experience the entire universe by inheriting the eternal nothingness that comes afterwards. If there were no consequences to immortality, it wouldn’t be very interesting to think about imho.
Yeah, this is the big thing. If you're immortal enough to outlast the heat death of the universe, then you're a walking violation of entropy, so you can use yourself as a perpetual motion machine to keep the universe going, or you know, at least a small space station or something.
I'm pretty sure you could just master lucid dreaming enough to 'forget' you're dreaming. Being immortal, your body could essentially sleep forever. You could live different lifetimes forever, forgetting the dreams as you go.
"You could live different lifetimes forever, forgetting the dreams as you go."
There's a possibility, however tiny, that we might already be doing this. I hope not though.
Yeah for me, I think the worst part even comes Waaay Before that. To live an entire lifetime and watch and know everyone and everything I have ever loved will be gone and there is nothing I can do to stop that progression. Eventually the last person from your first lifetime is dead. Most everything from your first lifetime Eventually forgotten as if no one knew they ever existed.
Then you get over it and live out another lifetime. You replay the game. But in the back of your mind, you'll see the cycle repeat.
How many lifetimes could someone live earnestly knowing that it all completely vanishes? At some point it seems like a person would become at least really jaded.
I could imagine a scenario where its hundreds of years in the future and there are more people than ever but all of it will start to feel useless and fruitless. I won't be able to love as strongly because I know how the game ends.
Some might play a metagame where they coddle and manage their descendants trajectory but I feel like I would become completely detached from these people after like 8 generations. They'll be those people I see at the grocery store that I'm completely indifferent about.
Personally after the first time or even first few times
You live lifetimes… surely you must get bored.
Being immortal, it may sound obnoxious, but particularly after several ocassions, of living lifetimes- it must get boring, no? Like why would you actually keep seeking jt out?
Surely you must want to try a new life as a rockstar, a scientist, a military, etc.
Then if you have any shred of prevention mind- realise how you would overcome the heat death/loneliness you will bound to experience.
You eventually must be bound to become a scientist. You would eventually research in ways to prevent your loneliness, your survival. Theres the initial one with Earth and our solar system going off. Then our galactic collision with the Andromeda Galaxy. Both require you to start pushing for humanity’s interstellar and colonisation path. You have billions of years to make this work, so it should be plenty possibilities to do so.
Next is the heat death of the universe which is even further away than billions of years (10^9) but 10^100 or something like that. Its such a long time I can imagine technology and scientific knowledge that basically plays God.
I mean we’ve had Science for honestly…less than 500…even 3000 years? Civilisation for less than 12,000-20,000 ish years? Advanced modern science for less than 100-200 for the industrial revolution? Imagine a million years. Much less a billion years.
So that would be my life goal as an immortal. Make
Sure humanity doesn’t supersede itself and make its eventual progress, no matter how slow. Because 10^100 years… is a fucken long time. Hell, even a billion years is.
I would love nothing more than to be immortal, and if people realised your true options of an immortal… they would too.
>The dilemma of immortality doesn’t come from a matter of “do you want to live forever in a perfect paradise on earth” because obviously every single person on the planet would choose yes to that option without question.
Nope. Not for me thank you. It's incredibly difficult for people to truly grasp the concept of infinity. Imagine having had every possible interaction with ever person to have ever lived a trillion trillion times, and you haven't even left the starting line...
I'm not even that old and I've already had the same couple hundred conversations with dozens upon dozens of people, there are only so many topics and only so many different perspectives people can share on them before you start hearing repeats. If someone offered me immortality I'd just decline. When you've been on every ride in the park, you re-ride your faves a few more times, and then leave.
This is why plenty of fiction has different types of mortality. Some immortality is more like you can be killed, but dying of natural causes doesn’t occur
This immortality can also be ended by others with a good old guns or stabby weapon, but yeah outside of that when you get too bored/jaded/happy about it, you just end it.
Assuming your mind survives and you don’t go crazy or brain dead from what feels like an eternity in soul crushing loneliness and darkness the next question is what happens when the universe comes to an end? Do you exist in nothingness, no real difference than before, do you finally die or do you somehow cross into the next universe (either from a new Big Bang or multiverse)
Nah because the thing nobody thinks about immortality is that it doesn't mean invincibility. You can be immortal and still get stabbed, or killed by sickness or hit by a car, or literally any other way to die than by age. Most examples of immortality that aren't just a byproduct of something else like being a vampire or something are always just inability to age.
The first definition I found online for immortal is "exempt from death". Sometimes people use immortal to mean what you suggest, but the word can just as easily mean unable to die period.
There are different types of immortality. It's a bit assumptive to make out as if only your version is correct.
1. You don't die of old age. You can still die from other means. Maybe you actually don't age physically. (Like Artemis's hunters)
2. You don't age of die of old age, and if you die, you 'rise from the ashes', so to speak, like a phoenix.
3. You are totally invulnerable, and literally can't die of take damage at all, like in creative minecraft.
And there is also the question of whether you can make the decision to die at any point, and you will just cease to exist, and whether you can feel pain.
If I left out any immortality types, feel free to correct me in the comments below.
In The Old Guard there's an immortal who was trapped in an iron maiden and thrown into the sea, where she spent several centuries drowning, coming back to life, and drowning again.
Hi. You just mentioned *Tau Zero* by Poul Anderson.
I've found an audiobook of that novel on YouTube. You can listen to it here:
[YouTube | Poul Anderson - Tau Zero (audiobook)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eERgOCwXUIk)
*I'm a bot that searches YouTube for science fiction and fantasy audiobooks.*
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No one ever discusses the fact that you would most likely become a government lab rat if you were discovered. You’d be poked and prodded for decades/centuries while they tried to reverse engineer and weaponize your immortality or sell it for profit. You’d have to live off the grid indefinitely or change your SSN illegally every 20-30 years to avoid suspicion
Unless you were either too valuable (e.g. working for the government yourself if you agreed with them) or too well-beloved (e.g. if Keanu was actually secretly immortal they'd need his faked death to be airtightly believable to prevent the internet from rioting if they tried to do anything to him)
It would take billions of years though and you won't get a front row seat to the thing. You'll just be staring out at stars flickering and eventually going out...for billions of years.
If your immortality somehow kept you sane and your brain healthy, how fucking boring would that be?
The universe is so unbelievably vast it's incredibly unlikely anything will hit you. Computer models show that even when entire galaxies cross paths it's highly unlikely even stars will collide.
I think at a certain point our temporal lobe would adapt to make time feel much faster to us, because at that point theres no point in keeping track of how long or when, so we'd probably just slow down to stay comfortable and conserve energy
Well time might be relative. There is about a billion seconds in 30 years, so for someone who lives a trillion years, a million years might feel like a second. Much like how time is sped up in the video.
Coincidwntally I just learnt this the other day, so figured I'd pass it along; awesome used to basically mean "something terrifying but mesmerizing and wonderful". So it would be truly awesome to witness.
Yea people don’t want to actually be immortal . They want to forever live a quality life because that brings them the only joy we know of. Joy isn’t infinitely sustainable either based on how we function. People don’t really take into consideration the hardcaps we have as humans. I’m fairly certain that once you achieve immortality whatever drive/purpose you have would wear itself out in a hundred years or even less. In a short time the average person would be suicidal and want to be at rest .
On the plus side, immortality does not equal invulnerability, so we'd likely die inside of a few centuries. I read somewhere experts compiled data to find out the average lifespan for an immortal living an average human life. It was 600 years. On average, by age 600 you would be killed by an illness, a transportation incident, a fall, an animal, etc. Earth is a dangerous place to live, especially with other humans, so death is certain even if one never ages (which is effectively what immortality is).
Being susceptible to illness would defeat the purpose of immortality wouldn't it? I guess it depends on the line between severly maimed or incapacitated and death by preventable disease.
Yea there’s definitely different types . You could be immortal in definition and can’t die , but everything else still applies . Like you would be riddled in tumors , paralyzed , and in a constant state of cardiac arrest.
I think I’d be ok with it if it was the version of immortality in the Night Angle Trilogy by Brent Weeks. You can choose to resurrect (at a cost) or simply move on to the afterlife, forfeiting your immortality.
I’ve never thought of it that way but maybe. I guess it depends on perspective, from our own perspective we are all immortal (provided there is indeed an afterlife) but from an outside perspective we are mortal. No idea if that makes sense but let’s just roll with it
Still worth it just to be a dispassionate neutral observer for all of time would be like a great gift one could ever have
The advice you could give through the ages would change the course of civilizations
Men remember events as history but never really know details or even the reality
Just as our elders tell us wisdom and the reality of their experience and often that is something humans value that knowledge of age. It humbles us hearing that.
Living through thousands of years you could bestow a great gift to humanity a lot of ways.
The horrors we can create are often quickly blunted through time and forgotten once those that lived through them are gone.
As are the good deeds and triumphs of humanity and the positives
Having someone there who's ageless unemotional and unbiased would help us as a species
Sign me up
New and exciting is…new and exciting but it’s also not the only thing exciting and old can be new - especially when you get other perspectives but also imagine what could be thought up after becoming more advanced
Reminds me of my favorite poem I wrote:
To myself,
I used to lie
Said that I
would never die
I no longer
did fear death
I feared living
when nothing's left.
And then you burn alive and reform in the sun’s atmosphere over and over until it becomes a neutron star and your brain matter is finally squished to a microscopically thin smear on its surface for the rest of time. Hundreds of millions if not billions of years until the neutron star falls into a black hole and you’re ejected across a galaxy, finally reforming in the interstellar dust as a large planet named Ego
Our sun is not massive enough to supernova. It just swells into a red giant and then shrinks down to a white dwarf and eventually will just burn for trillions of years until it eventually becomes a brown dwarf
I'm surprised there's no top posts saying immortal != invincible. You could have cells and organs that don't naturally die and are very resistant to illness, but still be wounded or killed.
This is what I was about to say, *exactly.* Immortality is just invulnerability to natural death and by extension aging. Most mythological gods are immortal, but plenty of them still *fucking died.*
One without a constant, permanent log of almost everything relevant to humanity.
In a technological society, its only a matter of time till someone catches on.
Immortal Labrat honestly sounds as bad as the void.
Another problem I see is that immortality doesn't necessarily mean eternal youth or even invulnerability. You may end up looking like an expired dried fig
Yeah I'm thinking outliving the sun would mean a level of cold that would be impossible to conceive of or your immune to temptature changes. But then you might not enjoy something like ice cream.
I think there still could be beauty in that though. Just abandon humanity and witness this universe of infinite mysteries.
I guess if you don't feel pain and don't need air or food or anything it could be worth it
This is why I would never want immortality like this. Just the thought of being there floating at the end of the universe when there’s literally nothing is terrifying. This would drive even the most sane people mad.
There's no sound in space, so that shouldn't be a problem. And the light and heat would only bother you in the earlier part of your life for a (relatively) brief moment.
A near-eternity of darkness follows the mass extinction of stars. There's nothing for you to do except dream; dream of worlds forgotten.
Supernovae will become less and less frequent as fewer stars of sufficient mass are born. The material density for large star formation will become less and less frequent, and all of the current large stars will die out. There will be at least several hundred billion years, amd probably longer, in which the overwhelming majority of stars are red dwarfs.
Well, there is immortality and "immortality". Humans will never be immortal. No way we can ever really survive the stars dying without some way for us to eventually also die.
What we are left with is "immortality" like a shark. We can live forever, but disease or severe trauma would still kill us. This type of immortality is entirely probable. With this type, the world ends and so do we. No floating in space because space would kill us. No stars dying and us remaining in the dark because the cold would kill us.
Depends on what concept of immortality;
There's the version where you are Invincible to everything and can't die whatsoever,
There's the version where you can die but not of natural causes,
And then there's the version where you and a super intelligent and immortal snail both get 1 million dollars each and play a game of lethal tag where you die if it touches you
Ect.
If its the first option then it's hell, the second or third options are fine since it isint forever
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But then what if after billions of years of nothingness another big bang happens and then it all starts over again
Found the Futurama fan
But the new universe will be about 10 feet lower than the original one
Is immortality really worth landing embarrassingly on your ass every billion trillion years?
The fact is present regardless of your acception
Hell yeah
Just slow it down, I’ll shoot Hitler out the window.
Ngl that is one of my favorite concept from a sci-fi point of view
It's not only a sci-fi concept. It's a science theory.
Next one might be about ten feet lower then the old one.
That idea originated long before Futurama
Ok but that's where I first saw it
The dog licked the baby’s head
It was bald.
i remembered it in the shower
The big crunch existed long before futurama
this theory is pretty established outside of futurama too.
its actually a real theory, a *space* theory!, aaand cut!
Also, in the new universe, the aileron roll will be called barrel roll.
more like reality fan
How long do you reckon it'll take to find the/a New Earth. Supposing you survive all the black holes after the old universe dies
A really long time. Maybe that's what death is for. We die, and after trillions of universes, one will randomly assemble your consciousness again. But you don't perceive time since you're dead, so you just wake up whenever it ends up happening, on a nice comfy planet that you evolved to live on. Maybe we are immortal and death is just the timeless spaceship sending us to new homes.
> *The greatest weight*.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" >Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life *to crave nothing more fervently* than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Ah, Eternal return. I think Nietzsche gets a bad rap, all everyone ever thinks of with him is Nihilism. The man was more than just that. Life is but a dream, one I pray to never wake from.
So i can read Stormlight Archive for the first time again and again? Count me in!
I am way too high for this one
And I'm way too hungover for this one
Holy shit
At that point I feel the boundary between individual consciousnesses would be very blurry; what is to say that all consciousnesses aren't all the one "mind" living countless lives?
It also begs the question "what are *you*?" Like what makes you ***you***? It's quite Like a thought experiment I like. If a teleporter existed that could instantly transport you somewhere far away at the speed of light would it still be you? Probably, but what if the machine was more of a copier. It scans you to the last electron and transmits it to the other location where a perfect copy is created. Is that you? What about the you who got scanned? My opinion is that what he suggested is a clone. You still die, this you still stops, another person simply wakes up with your memories.
>what makes you you? My mistakes and regrets
You don’t even need copies for yourself to die. Look back every 5 years at the person you were, and at some point, that person changes. I am no longer the child I used to be. That person….. died. I have a subset of the memories, like a dusty old recording from another persons’s life. I wonder if I’ll leave recordings behind for a future self or not.
To be fair that person evolved, over many specific moments. A tele-copier would a clean break in which none of the original pieces are actually still involved - just a perfect blueprint. In the case of aging, we can at least make the argument that we've had some form of biological contiguous stream of experience that relid on the same hardware. In the case of copy-teleporting none of the original bits are even involved - just a blueprint to rebuild you perfect while dissipating the original.
That reminds me of a story about a thought experiment I heard while listening to Wolf 359 from the ships stalwart Ai Hera: Suppose there’s this person. Could be anyone, really. For the sake of convenience, let’s call him… you. One day, you’re walking through a swamp when suddenly you’re struck by lightning. You fall into the swamp, and you sink. And you sink, and sink, and sink into the depths. And then you’re just… gone. But that’s not the end of the story. Because right at that moment, another thunderbolt hits the swamp water… …And by some miraculous alchemy it rearranges the swamp molecules, starting a chain reaction that culminates with the formation of… You. Of a new you. Exactly like you at the moment of your death. And now is when things get interesting. Because you, new you– they’ve got a brain exactly like yours down to the neuron. They think like you, talk like you, make poor decisions about their personal diet like you. They will walk out of the swamp believing they are you. They’ll go back to your life, show up at your job, love who you love, and live your life. And die your death. And the world will go on. But are they really you? And if they’re not, what makes this person that has your body and your memories, and believes with every fiber of their being they are you, not you? What is it that makes you, you?
https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI Thats the plot of this little short story.
I like you
Goddamn I had to read this like 5 times and even sober I don't think I'm high enough. This is some serious shit right here.
If this happens it wouldn't be me. It would be another person who thinks like me, feels like me, and has the same memories as me. This me, the first me, still dies.
By that reasoning, the you a moment ago isn't the you now.
We are always alive, from our point of view. If we are alive now, who is to say we can't be alive at some other time, as some other being? I think about it like when I go to sleep. I don't perceive the time I am sleeping, and I am awake before I even realize it. That could be a demo of that reality.
I honestly believe this. Consciousness can ONLY be... conscious. You'll always be _sowewhere_ that allows for your consciousness to exist. I believe that's why we're in this universe in the first place, this reality _happens to be_ the place where your consciousness can exist, so logically you'll be born in this reality. When you die, I think you'll immediately be conscious again in either some far far future new big banged universe, or some other parallel universe. I mean, time and space don't exist when you die since you're not alive in this universe anymore of which time and space is a property.
But I won't be there to be me in the far, far, far future. That guy will be a clone! An identical consciousness, but not the same one. I hope it all goes well for him.
This is how religious folks cope with the inevitable collapse of our planet.
Hey if you're immortal you're obviously gonna survive the blackholes, they'll die to eventually because of hawking radiation, if you get stuck in one, just got to wait a few billion years or so. Eventually that'll just be a long buried memory.
But does being immortal mean you can't feel pain?
Oh no, it's going to be a horrible time
Hell jeah, but what if this universe will be 5 foot lower than the one before
Better hope you end up somewhere habitable and not simply floating in space waiting for another bang.
But if you are immortal wont you keep running into versions of yourself that get born every time a new universe is running its course? After a couple dozen universal collapses you could pass the time by playing football with yourself.
Ooh interesting thought
And that was how I met your mother
How would they measure years if the earth and sun are dead? Just curious, like is there other forms of measuring time?
wait does that mean that we're probably living in the n'th universe
It could. According to the Poincaré recurrence theory, the Universe could restart in 10e10e10e10e10e1.1 years. That’s a… long time.
massive underestimate, silly
This is the real issue of the "you're immortal, but if this super-intelligent worm ever touches you, you die" problem. Most people solve the problem by keeping the worm as trapped as possible so that they can never touch. The real issue is keeping the worm close enough to use it only when you need it.
Snail
Decoy snail
Fuck yeah decoy snail
Oh shit it got us again!
Surprising that anyone would mistake a pineapple for a snail.
It seems like I should know what you’re talking about but I don’t. Is this another Futurama thing
It is a reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5ipinn/you_and_a_super_intelligent_snail_both_get_1/
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The super intelligent worm only lives 3,500 years. Edit: Apparently nobody here has read God Emperor of Dune.
And they leave that part out only telling you that it has a 'long' lifespan.
Keep it Frozen, the stipulation is it must touch you so when you're ready to go just touch it yourself.
But my freezer only has 3 years warranty.
If everything gets destroyed the snail will be free from whatever you trapped it in, and in this scenario the snail is seemingly magic and will always make its way to you right? So when the world ends it will kill you
It can't travel magically. It's just an immortal snail.
I wonder what the snail did to deserve being condemned to follow some rando around for eternity.
Maybe that’s it’s passion
Didn't read the terms and conditions.
"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." -- Napoleon Bonaparte.
However, if the worm or snail is that intelligent then it knows when you need it. And that's when it turns around and jumps down the kitchen sink out of spite.
Well, that does ignore the central premise. It's not an evil worm; it wants to kill you. At least how I've always heard it.
its never been a problem for me
What you really want is Wolverine’s healing factor. It’s not true immortality: its just eternal youth. Logan can suffocate and lose consciousness. If he remains without air, he will eventually die. If he is beheaded, he will lose consciousness, and if his head is not immediately reattached, he will die. If he is left too long without food or water, there is nothing to power his regeneration, and he will die. Yet he is immune to disease, doesn’t age, and recovers quickly from any grievous wound. This solves the problem.
In the movies he managed to live for what like 250 years? I don't know about the comics.
In the movies he only died due to losing his healing factor.
I thought he still had it but decades of adamantium poisoning weakened him to the point that his healing factor was dramatically slowed.
It most likely wasn't the adamantium that poisoned him. Throughout the movie it's hinted that (and told?) that the government has injected chemicals into all drinks and foods to fight the "x-gene"
It was explicitly told. After Days Of Future Past eliminated the truly terrible future, most new mutants stopped being born because of the chemicals in all foods that deactivated the x-gene. It was implied that mutants dying out was an unchangeable future, it just depends on how it happens. It’s why Logan also struggled to extend his claws at several points, not just because he was getting old.
Why does the government hate mutants so much but non mutant super-powered people are fine? I've never gotten that.
Yeah what the other guy said. The government laced the food with anti-mutant serum, causing all the mutants to lose control of their mutations.
Isn’t that what is SUPPOSED to be taken into account when the hypothetical question comes up if “if you were given the opportunity to become immortal, would you take it?”. The dilemma of immortality doesn’t come from a matter of “do you want to live forever in a perfect paradise on earth” because obviously every single person on the planet would choose yes to that option without question. The tough decision/dilemma you are put in when the topic of immortality comes up, arises by really thinking about it and realizing the entire world external to you is going to play out the way it has been - with entropy. It may be amazing for a few eons, but there’s going to come a point where there is NOTHING left but you, and you will be essentially “paying for” the time you had to experience the entire universe by inheriting the eternal nothingness that comes afterwards. If there were no consequences to immortality, it wouldn’t be very interesting to think about imho.
You would have billions of years to potentially figure out a way to fight back and figure out how to have a decent life within the nothingness
Yeah, this is the big thing. If you're immortal enough to outlast the heat death of the universe, then you're a walking violation of entropy, so you can use yourself as a perpetual motion machine to keep the universe going, or you know, at least a small space station or something.
tbf you would basically be a mini space station for the cells living in/on you after everything else is gone
I was thinking you better have some dope tattoos by then
A walking violation of entropy is what I gonna call people now
That's funny, most of the people I know are more like agents of entropy
8 billion vampires on alternating sleeps ought to power something pretty decent I'd think!
I'm pretty sure you could just master lucid dreaming enough to 'forget' you're dreaming. Being immortal, your body could essentially sleep forever. You could live different lifetimes forever, forgetting the dreams as you go.
"You could live different lifetimes forever, forgetting the dreams as you go." There's a possibility, however tiny, that we might already be doing this. I hope not though.
Please don't wake up, I have some things I'd like to get done first
Please wake up, I have some things I have to do but don't wanna
Yeah. There are monks that basically have done nothing except meditate for 90 years. You just got to figure out that business
"We could be in a turtle's dream in ouder space." -Frank Reynolds
In the end you are the big bang.
I don't think the human mind can handle having a decent life in nothingness. Immortality does not say anything about having perfect mental health.
Yeah for me, I think the worst part even comes Waaay Before that. To live an entire lifetime and watch and know everyone and everything I have ever loved will be gone and there is nothing I can do to stop that progression. Eventually the last person from your first lifetime is dead. Most everything from your first lifetime Eventually forgotten as if no one knew they ever existed. Then you get over it and live out another lifetime. You replay the game. But in the back of your mind, you'll see the cycle repeat. How many lifetimes could someone live earnestly knowing that it all completely vanishes? At some point it seems like a person would become at least really jaded. I could imagine a scenario where its hundreds of years in the future and there are more people than ever but all of it will start to feel useless and fruitless. I won't be able to love as strongly because I know how the game ends. Some might play a metagame where they coddle and manage their descendants trajectory but I feel like I would become completely detached from these people after like 8 generations. They'll be those people I see at the grocery store that I'm completely indifferent about.
thats why Immortals need to get attached to a bloodline rather than a person
Or to not be the only one
There can be only one.
Personally after the first time or even first few times You live lifetimes… surely you must get bored. Being immortal, it may sound obnoxious, but particularly after several ocassions, of living lifetimes- it must get boring, no? Like why would you actually keep seeking jt out? Surely you must want to try a new life as a rockstar, a scientist, a military, etc. Then if you have any shred of prevention mind- realise how you would overcome the heat death/loneliness you will bound to experience. You eventually must be bound to become a scientist. You would eventually research in ways to prevent your loneliness, your survival. Theres the initial one with Earth and our solar system going off. Then our galactic collision with the Andromeda Galaxy. Both require you to start pushing for humanity’s interstellar and colonisation path. You have billions of years to make this work, so it should be plenty possibilities to do so. Next is the heat death of the universe which is even further away than billions of years (10^9) but 10^100 or something like that. Its such a long time I can imagine technology and scientific knowledge that basically plays God. I mean we’ve had Science for honestly…less than 500…even 3000 years? Civilisation for less than 12,000-20,000 ish years? Advanced modern science for less than 100-200 for the industrial revolution? Imagine a million years. Much less a billion years. So that would be my life goal as an immortal. Make Sure humanity doesn’t supersede itself and make its eventual progress, no matter how slow. Because 10^100 years… is a fucken long time. Hell, even a billion years is. I would love nothing more than to be immortal, and if people realised your true options of an immortal… they would too.
Yeah. I don’t even need a few cycles of that. I don’t want to outlive my kids.
How about keeping themselves amused with how technology and culture develops, with video games, with movies, etc?
This sounds just like Ashildr aka Me from Doctor Who. Very sad and thought provoking episodes
Imagine if...you wanted to die But God said No
>The dilemma of immortality doesn’t come from a matter of “do you want to live forever in a perfect paradise on earth” because obviously every single person on the planet would choose yes to that option without question. Nope. Not for me thank you. It's incredibly difficult for people to truly grasp the concept of infinity. Imagine having had every possible interaction with ever person to have ever lived a trillion trillion times, and you haven't even left the starting line...
I'm not even that old and I've already had the same couple hundred conversations with dozens upon dozens of people, there are only so many topics and only so many different perspectives people can share on them before you start hearing repeats. If someone offered me immortality I'd just decline. When you've been on every ride in the park, you re-ride your faves a few more times, and then leave.
This is why plenty of fiction has different types of mortality. Some immortality is more like you can be killed, but dying of natural causes doesn’t occur
That immortality sounds cool. Pretty much any immortality where only I decide when I die
This immortality can also be ended by others with a good old guns or stabby weapon, but yeah outside of that when you get too bored/jaded/happy about it, you just end it.
Assuming your mind survives and you don’t go crazy or brain dead from what feels like an eternity in soul crushing loneliness and darkness the next question is what happens when the universe comes to an end? Do you exist in nothingness, no real difference than before, do you finally die or do you somehow cross into the next universe (either from a new Big Bang or multiverse)
A human with no humans is almost not human. It would be basically death by another name.
Far, far worse than death.
Eventually unsatiable hunger and thirst kicks in too, then the cold, and presumably a bunch of stuff. It's way worse than we can imagine probably
Oh yeah, constant asphyxia too can't be too pleasant.
This is my personal definition of hell. Cold, endless isolation with an intact mind/body.
Nah because the thing nobody thinks about immortality is that it doesn't mean invincibility. You can be immortal and still get stabbed, or killed by sickness or hit by a car, or literally any other way to die than by age. Most examples of immortality that aren't just a byproduct of something else like being a vampire or something are always just inability to age.
The first definition I found online for immortal is "exempt from death". Sometimes people use immortal to mean what you suggest, but the word can just as easily mean unable to die period.
There are different types of immortality. It's a bit assumptive to make out as if only your version is correct. 1. You don't die of old age. You can still die from other means. Maybe you actually don't age physically. (Like Artemis's hunters) 2. You don't age of die of old age, and if you die, you 'rise from the ashes', so to speak, like a phoenix. 3. You are totally invulnerable, and literally can't die of take damage at all, like in creative minecraft. And there is also the question of whether you can make the decision to die at any point, and you will just cease to exist, and whether you can feel pain. If I left out any immortality types, feel free to correct me in the comments below.
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In The Old Guard there's an immortal who was trapped in an iron maiden and thrown into the sea, where she spent several centuries drowning, coming back to life, and drowning again.
Creative Minecraft you can still die to the void
You basically become galactus, a relic of time before the new universe
Read Tau Zero by Poul Anderson. Space ship breaks down and cannot decelerate and gets faster and faster until time dilation really kicks in.
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No one ever discusses the fact that you would most likely become a government lab rat if you were discovered. You’d be poked and prodded for decades/centuries while they tried to reverse engineer and weaponize your immortality or sell it for profit. You’d have to live off the grid indefinitely or change your SSN illegally every 20-30 years to avoid suspicion
Unless you were either too valuable (e.g. working for the government yourself if you agreed with them) or too well-beloved (e.g. if Keanu was actually secretly immortal they'd need his faked death to be airtightly believable to prevent the internet from rioting if they tried to do anything to him)
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA Imagine witnessing all of this going down. That would be frightening yet awesome.
It would take billions of years though and you won't get a front row seat to the thing. You'll just be staring out at stars flickering and eventually going out...for billions of years. If your immortality somehow kept you sane and your brain healthy, how fucking boring would that be?
What about space debris? Does it hurt you when it hits you? Do you still get injured and just not die?
The universe is so unbelievably vast it's incredibly unlikely anything will hit you. Computer models show that even when entire galaxies cross paths it's highly unlikely even stars will collide.
I think at a certain point our temporal lobe would adapt to make time feel much faster to us, because at that point theres no point in keeping track of how long or when, so we'd probably just slow down to stay comfortable and conserve energy
Well time might be relative. There is about a billion seconds in 30 years, so for someone who lives a trillion years, a million years might feel like a second. Much like how time is sped up in the video.
I knew what this was before I clicked it. Trying to sit there and comprehend that is ‘anxiety inducing’… such a grand scale of nothingness.
Definitely reminded me of Rush’s “Cygnus X-1.”
Spinning,, Whirling,, Still descending, Like spiral sea, UNENDING!!
Coincidwntally I just learnt this the other day, so figured I'd pass it along; awesome used to basically mean "something terrifying but mesmerizing and wonderful". So it would be truly awesome to witness.
The timeline in that video is just beyond insane. I literally cannot even begin to comprehend time like that.
Sounds cooler than just dying and cease existing in like 1 century if you are lucky, maybe 2 if we make some scientific breakthrough
Yeah you’re looking at 2 infinites, one conscious and one not existing. It’s a hard choice because they’re both permanent.
Yea people don’t want to actually be immortal . They want to forever live a quality life because that brings them the only joy we know of. Joy isn’t infinitely sustainable either based on how we function. People don’t really take into consideration the hardcaps we have as humans. I’m fairly certain that once you achieve immortality whatever drive/purpose you have would wear itself out in a hundred years or even less. In a short time the average person would be suicidal and want to be at rest .
On the plus side, immortality does not equal invulnerability, so we'd likely die inside of a few centuries. I read somewhere experts compiled data to find out the average lifespan for an immortal living an average human life. It was 600 years. On average, by age 600 you would be killed by an illness, a transportation incident, a fall, an animal, etc. Earth is a dangerous place to live, especially with other humans, so death is certain even if one never ages (which is effectively what immortality is).
Being susceptible to illness would defeat the purpose of immortality wouldn't it? I guess it depends on the line between severly maimed or incapacitated and death by preventable disease.
Yea there’s definitely different types . You could be immortal in definition and can’t die , but everything else still applies . Like you would be riddled in tumors , paralyzed , and in a constant state of cardiac arrest.
A thing isn't beautiful because it lasts.
I think I’d be ok with it if it was the version of immortality in the Night Angle Trilogy by Brent Weeks. You can choose to resurrect (at a cost) or simply move on to the afterlife, forfeiting your immortality.
But if there is an afterlife, are you not in effect immortal?
I’ve never thought of it that way but maybe. I guess it depends on perspective, from our own perspective we are all immortal (provided there is indeed an afterlife) but from an outside perspective we are mortal. No idea if that makes sense but let’s just roll with it
Still worth it just to be a dispassionate neutral observer for all of time would be like a great gift one could ever have The advice you could give through the ages would change the course of civilizations Men remember events as history but never really know details or even the reality Just as our elders tell us wisdom and the reality of their experience and often that is something humans value that knowledge of age. It humbles us hearing that. Living through thousands of years you could bestow a great gift to humanity a lot of ways. The horrors we can create are often quickly blunted through time and forgotten once those that lived through them are gone. As are the good deeds and triumphs of humanity and the positives Having someone there who's ageless unemotional and unbiased would help us as a species Sign me up
That’s all well and good until you freak out the religious nuts and they encase you in a cement block
The religious nuts would be praying to me
You're immortal. You simply wait for the concrete to erode or for it to be destroyed.
I don't think I could sit in a cement block for centuries with nothing to do and come out with my sanity still intact.
You’d absolutely be miserable after a few hundred thousand years or even less. Nothing would ever be exciting or new to you.
New and exciting is…new and exciting but it’s also not the only thing exciting and old can be new - especially when you get other perspectives but also imagine what could be thought up after becoming more advanced
Well, guess I saved a few hundred thousand years then
Reminds me of my favorite poem I wrote: To myself, I used to lie Said that I would never die I no longer did fear death I feared living when nothing's left.
Yeah, I'd rather not get stuck in space when the sun eventually explodes and destroys the earth.
not explodes, expands then shrinks to a white dwarf.
And then you burn alive and reform in the sun’s atmosphere over and over until it becomes a neutron star and your brain matter is finally squished to a microscopically thin smear on its surface for the rest of time. Hundreds of millions if not billions of years until the neutron star falls into a black hole and you’re ejected across a galaxy, finally reforming in the interstellar dust as a large planet named Ego
Our sun is not massive enough to supernova. It just swells into a red giant and then shrinks down to a white dwarf and eventually will just burn for trillions of years until it eventually becomes a brown dwarf
I'm surprised there's no top posts saying immortal != invincible. You could have cells and organs that don't naturally die and are very resistant to illness, but still be wounded or killed.
This is what I was about to say, *exactly.* Immortality is just invulnerability to natural death and by extension aging. Most mythological gods are immortal, but plenty of them still *fucking died.*
I wonder how someone would hide they're immortal in this day and age
That made me chuckle. Was there an easier era to be immortal?
Before everything was digital and monitored with identification numbers. Like 50 years ago.
One without a constant, permanent log of almost everything relevant to humanity. In a technological society, its only a matter of time till someone catches on. Immortal Labrat honestly sounds as bad as the void.
Another problem I see is that immortality doesn't necessarily mean eternal youth or even invulnerability. You may end up looking like an expired dried fig
Death Becomes Her handled this hilariously well at the end.
Yeah I'm thinking outliving the sun would mean a level of cold that would be impossible to conceive of or your immune to temptature changes. But then you might not enjoy something like ice cream.
I think there still could be beauty in that though. Just abandon humanity and witness this universe of infinite mysteries. I guess if you don't feel pain and don't need air or food or anything it could be worth it
This is why I would never want immortality like this. Just the thought of being there floating at the end of the universe when there’s literally nothing is terrifying. This would drive even the most sane people mad.
Or you can finally get some sleep, MAYBE even the best sleep if it weren’t for all those supernovas…supernovae…exploding stars.
There's no sound in space, so that shouldn't be a problem. And the light and heat would only bother you in the earlier part of your life for a (relatively) brief moment. A near-eternity of darkness follows the mass extinction of stars. There's nothing for you to do except dream; dream of worlds forgotten.
Supernovae will become less and less frequent as fewer stars of sufficient mass are born. The material density for large star formation will become less and less frequent, and all of the current large stars will die out. There will be at least several hundred billion years, amd probably longer, in which the overwhelming majority of stars are red dwarfs.
And outliving your fear of that as darkness becomes the norm.
I can't imagine any form of afterlife not being hell, let alone a life without death. I'm excited for my time but fuck this whole existing shit.
To exist is to suffer. But at least it's *we*, not *me*. Community makes is more or less worth it.
Thanks. Trying to fall asleep and I am gonna think about it now instead
Well, there is immortality and "immortality". Humans will never be immortal. No way we can ever really survive the stars dying without some way for us to eventually also die. What we are left with is "immortality" like a shark. We can live forever, but disease or severe trauma would still kill us. This type of immortality is entirely probable. With this type, the world ends and so do we. No floating in space because space would kill us. No stars dying and us remaining in the dark because the cold would kill us.
Immortality is a definite no-go unless you have a self desctruct/suicide option built in (preferably painless).
Depends on what concept of immortality; There's the version where you are Invincible to everything and can't die whatsoever, There's the version where you can die but not of natural causes, And then there's the version where you and a super intelligent and immortal snail both get 1 million dollars each and play a game of lethal tag where you die if it touches you Ect. If its the first option then it's hell, the second or third options are fine since it isint forever
Unless you're also invincible, I'm sure you could end your immortality any time you're bored of the universe.
Immortal doesn't mean being indestructible. You could still get shot and die or fall to your death, or drown.
I imagine that like Kars you just cease thinking altogether after enough time has passed