Thread: Eternal Life, Would You?

This is a difficult question. Pretty much if you choose life over reproduction you are assuming that you are greater than anything you could spawn, which is pretty arrogant and selfish. On the other hand, most of us are pretty used to living and aren't exactly looking forward to death.

Personally, even though it is arrogant and selfish, I would choose eternal life. I can always adopt for the experience of fatherhood, and with eternal life I would have plenty of time to find enlightenment and, eventually, learn everything that I ever wanted to know. Imagine how better off the world would be if our leaders had hundreds of years of experience under their belt and had been able to remove themselves from under the burden of their ignorance and prejudices through that experience.

Originally Posted by Mr. E

This is a difficult question. Pretty much if you choose life over reproduction you are assuming that you are greater than anything you could spawn, which is pretty arrogant and selfish. On the other hand, most of us are pretty used to living and aren't exactly looking forward to death.

Personally, even though it is arrogant and selfish, I would choose eternal life. I can always adopt for the experience of fatherhood, and with eternal life I would have plenty of time to find enlightenment and, eventually, learn everything that I ever wanted to know. Imagine how better off the world would be if our leaders had hundreds of years of experience under their belt and had been able to remove themselves from under the burden of their ignorance and prejudices through that experience.

Thats kind of what I was thinking. Eternal life brings infinite enjoyment to the self because anything is better than nonexistence and thus seems like the obvious choice. Adoption seems to be a way around the idea of infertility, but that draws into the debate of nature vs nurture. Adopting isn't the passing of successful genes, its just raising one in a successful environment, is that the same thing? Another problem is that assuming this was possible and you got it done, and then 5 or 10 years later while enjoying your sustained youth, you might get hit by a bus. During that time in a regular life, you could have passed on your genes, a net gain for the gene pool. Since you didn't, your genes are removed and its a net loss on the gene pool. En mass, this would be a terrible prospect for humanity.

From a pragmatic viewpoint, most of the problems with a population of immortal, infertile people could probably be resolved technologically within the next century, so I'm not sure it would really be that terrible a prospect for humanity.