The hidden price of Immortality

Immortality.   Sounds too good to be true and when you think about it there is a hidden price to be paid.

I actually wondered what you would spend your time doing. Maybe you would spend the first hundred years learning everything you could a bit like being in school for your youth. Then a kind of trek around the world, or galaxy or universe depending on where we were with space travel. Followed by err… What?

Some people find their later years boring and uneventful now. I suspect that is because the either can’t afford or just don’t have the capability of doing what they want to do. If we were immortal we would be past the stage where we couldn’t do things. We would either have repairable organs or replacement parts so doing what you wanted would be limited by what advances we have made and what you could do.

Want to spend time playing God? Seed a few planets and play SimEarth with them. Watch them, and make a few earthquakes or whatever. A few tens of thousands of years later, where does the time fly and you want to do something else. Perhaps play them off with your friends and see whose society wins. Read all the books ever written? You must have read them whilst waiting for your early life forms to evolve to the industrial age. Watch all the movies made? Ditto. Well all except for Al Gore’s anyway. But with total recall you won’t be able to watch them twice and if they are implanted maybe not even once properly. So run your own economy and see if you can ever screw it up as much as Gordo has done. It’ll take a while because you won’t have the mindset. Simply make the right decision and then swap it for the opposite one. That is all it takes. Over a decade of the wrong decisions.

Well that basically just leaves talking, exploring and playing. Well can you imagine five minutes talking to Gordo? That would cause you to hit your own off switch and I would imagine even the most interesting people would get boring after a few hundred years. Travelling all over the universe should cover a few million years and I would envisage that the travelling would get monotonous and even the most interesting sights, the seven billion wonders of the universe, would get boring after a while. After all even jumping from a plane would get mundane if you did it often enough. Eventually the most exciting thing you can think of will become boring and you can do anything you ever want to until you eventually get fed up of everything. Then what? Play VR games where you do what you want all day every day. Playing James Bond or the Hedgehog all day every day. Even that would get boring after a while although it seems that the Hedgehog has been going for over thirty years and the James Bond actors seem to pack it in every few years so I would guess super hero isn’t as exciting as we think it would be. Be a billionaire and run a global company, a warlord and conquer a planet, a dictator and control a universe wide empire. You could even spend a few millennia in your own version of Heaven and Hell. Learn the Harp and try a bit of S&M.

Just dropping to another quick topic. What would you do to punish anyone? ‘We sentence you to 1 million years in limbo for speeding.’ ‘Hah’ you reply. ‘I’ve listened to all Gordo’s speeches. Nothing can frighten me after that’

Maybe people evolving and extending life in increments would have plans for more time than I can think of but even then, it is doubtful.

Immortality. Should be OK for the first few thousand years but what do you do for the rest of your life?   All those trillions and trillions of years.

One final thought. Imagine the horror if when we die there is an afterlife. Wham, you are slotted into Heaven or Hell. Only this time it would be a one way trip. For eternity and never again playing the Hedgehog. I think I’ll lean towards being a Buddhist. Even the same 72 converted virgins would get a bit boring after a while.