Hi everyone, question for you.
Imagine that you have become immortal. No one and nothing will kill you + you will never get old.

For you is immortality a gift or a curse?

Gift but first century will be rough as you see everyone else die. Then better to be a loner at that point unless you can handle the inevitable deaths of anyone you'll meet.

Also you could potentially be caught in a bad situation like tortured or imprisoned for eternity or large amounts of time which would suck.

But avoiding that you could accomplish a lot if you dedicated yourself to certain tasks. You could also be used as a weapon like a suicide bomber who survives but if you ever got captured by the enemy GG.

Numerous works of fiction from Tolkien's legendarium to The Magicians & The Good Place have a take on this, but the extremely common theme, which I have to agree with, is that there's a diminishing return to existing, especially among mortals/in any near-naturalistic context, as you keep adding time behind you - you'll love, but your lovers will inevitably die as you carry on, eventually the loss as well as the increasingly wide age+knowledge difference (to the point that mortals are more animals than equals) will take that joy from you; you'll enjoy hedonistic pleasures, but even in a single lifetime those will grow old; you'll learn, but whether you try to guide it or not the world won't truly learn with you...

Moreover you've been granted immortality, but not infinite capacity, your body might be raging with every disease and cancer known to man, your mind could be long gone from dementia; but if you're also granted health forever a problem remains: you'll fill your head, your head can't hold the possibility space that is everyone elses head & the universe, maybe you'll find a way to choose what you keep, or maybe you lose memories at random, either way I see the end as going mad like Cortana.

But the true kicker - the earth will die, the universe will fade, the last atom decay - you'll be floating listlessly in the void, anything you've created, any potential enhancements to your capacity, gone.

Immortality sucks.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 17 2021, 4:47 pm by jjf28.

True immortality would be a curse, under the assumption you lived past the heat death/implosion/whatever of the end of the universe. That said, if you were truly immortal and able to live past the heat death of the universe, that implies there is some force which is able to survive the heat death of the universe, and if you could somehow capture that force and use it to NOT make the heat death of the universe happen, maybe you could build some kind of utopia and make it therefore a gift.

Just here to be contradictory

I think it would only be a gift if I had the freedom to choose when to end my curse.

That's a good question for a poll!, Alex :]
I'm a physicist and more than halfway to my PhD, so I'm very aware that the increase of entropy is inevitable for the entire Universe. Oversimplified, energy will tend to disperse indefinitely over space and time. That means every energy transformation will be impossible in the far distant future, so no life and nothing else to do, really.

In the sense I think you're describing which is immortality for this incarnation, this body, I'm with Renato, it would be a curse unless I could choose to end the immortality whenever I wanted.


In a more spiritual sense, I believe we all have immortal souls which choose to incarnate here and elsewhere to forget their immortality for a spell and get to live, play, learn and experience in a physical form without the burden of all that previous experience. Much better deal than an immortal body imo.

I am not a physicist but I do think it's premature to be making big calls about the inevitably of entropy and what not without knowing the full picture or having a Theory of Everything.

For instance, there is often talk of the Black Hole Era, where all the suns have died out and only Black Holes are left. If life was to evolve to sapience in that era (leaving aside questions of if it's possible for life to originate in the Black Hole Era), how would they ever know that there once were stars in the universe? It would surely be impossible to derive that conclusion from the information they will have available to them.

So all I do is ask you to consider that we could very well be in that same situation. What events have we not witnessed in the earlier era of the universe that we cannot possibly know about by observing what we see in the sky today?

_________

As for the origin and death of the universe, I simply can't believe logically that the universe began with a Big Bang and will end with Heat Death. There are two options, maybe more than two but I can't conceive of them: that the universe is either infinite or it is finite with a definitive end and beginning. Both options are not satisfying to me even if we were to definitively prove one or the other, but logically it makes more sense for the universe to be infinite because how can something come from nothing? But an infinite universe is also something I simply can't understand, but I suspect that is because I am a finite being with a beginning and an end. I can, however, accept logically that the Big Bang and Heat Death could be a finite event in a greater infinite landscape (multiverse theory).

_____

So if you are immortal and in the multiverse you could find a way to explore new universes forever so it wouldn't be a curse like people say.

We could already be immortal without even knowing it. There's a chance that the Universe could be cyclical, with endless big bangs followed by big crunches, at which point the question would be if the new Universe is different or identical to the preceding one. Given the misery of existence in general, I wouldn't be surprised if we were doomed to sit through the same ordeal over and over again in a kind of "self-reincarnation" process (this could also account to some extent for deja vus, though I'm inclined to prefer the temporal lobe paroxysm explanation, because the other idea is too horrendous for me to contemplate).

For such beigns, and for any exotic life forms, it would be impossible to study the past. That's for sure. So I agree with that.


Some stars have died long ago and some were born. As time goes by, it becomes more and more difficult to investigate the events from the past. But that's not the real issue for today's astronomy, precisely cosmology. The main problem is to understand the early stages of the Universe, because the Big Bang theory is reliable. It's just that we barely know what happened in the first seconds.


It's good to see different views on it, doesn't matter if you're not a physicist. I stated the inevitable heat death of the Universe because thermodynamics is a well established theory. That doesn't mean that something different can happen. Science is for debate, for sure. After all, we don't know what we might find out in the future =)

Something I forgot to say in my previous comment is that immortality is not for everyone. Dying is bad, of course. But by dying you make room for someone else of the next generation =)
Having said that, I found the answer "curse" to be more accurate than "gift".

nobody going for both?
Also bad poll for not allowing that and not having an "other" option.

Its for careful choice so to speak. Moreover, people talk about both version =)
And I am glad that this topic interests them. I will think of new topic later.

My answer is a bit of both. The way C(a)HeK presented the scenario, I feel it would be a curse. But in reality I believe we're all already immortal, just not in this particular physical form and I believe both facets of that to be gifts.

I suppose the scenario you're pointing out is someone who would consider physical immortality to be both a blessing and a curse simultaneously? I can see it feeling that way at first, but I imagine as time wound on and you became more and more tired of living this particular life it would become only a curse. Immortality is just too infinite in a world where everything else is finite. It's hard for me to imagine any years beyond the first few thousand feeling anything other than cursed. At that point you would have lost all your loved ones many times over, mastered and likely improved upon every skill, probably forgotten most of what you know.. for me it wouldn't take long for loneliness and boredom to set in.

It's the law for SEN polls to include an "other" option.

Remember your other poll where everyone went for the "~~~~~~~~~~~~" option? Now you know why.

sorry about that, i didn't know it.
+ when i wrote ~~~~~ i thought it will separate other answers
next time i will write "other" as answer

It's all good. That rule is not srs bsns.