I’d take immortality—you can always “give back the gift” (to quote Aragorn in Lord of the Rings).
A Highlander-style immortality is likely impossible.
Getting hit by a bus or crashing your spaceship into the sun will likely forever be a cause of permanent death.
Hopefully, this age increasing technologies come after the Baby Boomers all die. That group has caused and will continue to cause enough damage already. They don’t need to be here much longer than they already will be.
I also see people who work so hard to stay in shape and stay young, only to suffer Alzheimers and dementia. Why be in great shape if your mind's gone? Finally, without Christ living is just a day-to-day plod with no purpose to your life.
It is a subject which has been looked at surprisingly many times in literature and movies, TV shows and even art.
It is a gift chosen by an ancient Greek but he forgot the good health part and eventually shrunk into a grasshopper.
I think if I could be guaranteed good health, that would be enough for me to choose immortality.
Of course one would outlive all your loved ones and that might be more difficult than dying but like I said, the good health part makes it a good choice.
I do not think literally all disease will ever get licked on this mortal coil.
An older, God centered point of view acknowledged, however uncomfortably, that humanity comprises a group of sinners who fell into sin on some mystical plane that predated their physical conceptions. We can’t “live forever” here and we would not WANT to “live forever” here. This present world is a transitional abode. Some vaguely get the idea of “going to heaven” but think of heaven as something that is full of fluff and cotton candy. That’s misleading, I aver. Heaven is more like full of dynamite... especially when it happens to intersect with this world.
“Everybody wants to go to heaven,
but nobody wants to die.”
A thousand years of watching the M’s blow a lead in the 9th inning? Just kill me now.
Whether we like it or not, we will all live forever. As one who believes in the promises of Jesus, I am eagerly waiting the “far better” time of my life, as did St. Paul (Phill. 1:23).
” And what if the only choices were natural death or Highlander-style immortality?”
My sister at 70 b*tches and moans about every little thing. She hates cooking. She hates eating. I love every little thing, cooking, eating, sitting and thinking. Writing. But what good is immortality if everybody you know dies? In watching the Avengers Thor is a friend to humans. Really? How? To him we’d be like mayflies. What would you talk to somebody about when, to you they’ll be dead before you finish the conversation?
Once I had a particularly annoying boss. Oh, he was horrible. When the subject of immortality came up I said, “Do you realize that you might end up working for Bill forever? Would you rather die?” Well, yes.
The question can’t be answered without a lot of qualifiers. If I can have my family forever, maybe. But only if I can get along with them. And, provided I’m not mired down in some godawful circumstance, like a boss who literally feels he has to explain every aspect of a job I know better than he. So, do I have plenty of money too?
Now, if I get to spend life doing something significant, so much the better. But to be an immortal janitor, not so much.
For a worldly view of this read Time Enough for Love with Lazarus Long.
Remember back in the 60’s when the first heart transplants and artificial hearts were being used. Little known is that the recipients had a “suicide” switch if pain was too great or “something” was not right. It was new territory back then. Can’t doc it but remember reading it.
It all depends on who all comes along for the ride. If it’s just you immortality would get old fast as everyone you love dies and the world you knew and understood passes from memory. If it’s a good chunk of society, including presumably some of your loved ones, then you lose a lot of that time displacement. Even then though you’ve got the brain problem, the human brain has serious issues internalizing the passage of time, the older you get the faster time seems to move, when I was a kid looking forward to 2000 and the dawn of a new century it seemed like forever in the future even though it was less than 20 years, now it’s 14 years in my rearview and feels like a couple weeks ago, got reminded yesterday this bicycle I ride I bought 7 years ago and was just stunned. That telescoping effect would get pretty scary as your age climbs into multiple centuries and even a millennia, you’d blink and a whole other century would fly by.
Immortality sounds good on paper but the logistics of it aren’t so exciting.
Deep
Author: Phil Plait
The flash was barely noticeable, seen askance. Ancient reflexes acted; I whipped my arms to turn myself. Maybe I did. I couldn’t perceive it. The light was gone before I could react, and all was black once again.
I sighed in mind if not in practice. Another black hole evaporating catastrophically as it reached the Hawking limit. That last made one billion exactly. Hurray.
It must’ve been a supermassive one in the core of some long-dead galaxy; they’re all that’s left now. Besides me of course. The last one blew up over 10^92 years ago.
Time is long. Idiot.
I swore in a trillion languages, taking my time, stretching out each syllable in my head, letting each last a year. Then I did it again.
I remember everything. I was an idiot.
Sure, I’ll make a deal, I said. I’ll be specific, I said. No aging. No insanity. My memory will be perfect. Nothing will be able to hurt or kill me.
Nothing.
Idiot. Even the Devil himself must have long ago disintegrated. All that’s left is me. And the black holes.
Idiot.
Last nights Twilight Zone on MeTV addressed that, for enough $$$ they could make the old young again.
So one old couple only had enough $$$ for one of them so they both decided to stay old.
But it seems that they could wait till one dies first and then other gets the treatment to be young, but naturally that wasnt part of the plot.
In the not too distant future it may be possible to just have your brain connected to a psuedo-cyber body or container and stay that way until the sun burns the earth to a cinder in a few billion years. How many would choose that form of immortality?
NO WAY!
WE already have the choice of life immortal or death immortal. Just not here in this world.
I’m not fanatical about immortality, but it’s so much better than the alternative.
To be or not to be, that is the question.