Monday, December 29, 2008

What Immortality Might Really Be Like


Jeanne Calment, aged 20, the world's oldest verified human, who died at age 122

Now to address a topic that most everyone on Earth thinks they already know the answer to, but almost literally no one has actually thought much about from a practical perspective: would immortality, either physical immortality in this life or spiritual immortality in the next (for those of faith) actually be desirable?

Almost everyone, with very few exceptions, would say not just yes it would be great, but hell yes it would be the greatest thing ever, bar none, allowing for a couple of caveats:
- For physical immortality, that the quality of life could be preserved, which essentially means, as long as we remain eternally youthful, that living forever would be wholly awesome.
- For spiritual immortality (for those of faith, at least Western faiths), that as long as we went to Heaven, that living forever in the afterlife would be wholly awesome.

I am going to question both of these instinctive assumptions, but in a careful way; I am attacking neither of these outright - I understand them entirely. But I bring new ideas as well.

What Spiritual Immortality Might Be Like

What Physical Immortality Might Really Be Like (Coming Soon)

The Implications of Physical Immortality for Human Civilization (Coming Soon)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting stuff, though surely life extension is more appropriate than immortality since if one thing is true of all that exists that is it is impermanent.