(07-07-2012 10:50 PM)BumblebeeCody Wrote: (07-07-2012 11:21 AM)Sirion Wrote: (07-07-2012 10:05 AM)BumblebeeCody Wrote: (07-07-2012 09:47 AM)zspartancats Wrote: I would love to have the power of immortality. I couldn't die or age, so I could do what ever I wanted.
I would ultimately end up having 10% of the population of earth, being related to me.
I often thought that the power of immortality would be pretty good. But imagine never being able to die and living forever. The amount of suffering you would go through like having a relationship in which they would die, you'd find someone else, they'd die etc. It'd be fun in the short term but not in the long run.
Teleportation. I could travel the world without the boundary of money being involved.
Stop time would be cool but I think you'd end up ruining all of existence.
But being immortal doesn't mean you would be able to remember all the course of your life. Because, even if your body doesn't change at all, your memory works the same way any memory does. An old man with 80 years or more usually forgets some moments of his life, as well as remembers stuff that was forgotten maybe decades before. And it all might get mixed up and turning into confusion. As an immortal man starts surpassing human life expectacy, I imagine a similar effect would happen. So many events and so many people would come and go that eventually many important things would just be lost. Only the most truly remarkable events and persons would remain. It's like a journal becoming a history book.
But that's the thing. You said an old man starts to forget part of his life (mainly due to how Humans work) but that's because he actually grew up. You wouldn't. You'd be a [insert your age] for the rest of your life therefore, not forgetting those people. You would never grow old and not have that issue.
Growing or not, time goes on and events occur. Do you really think your mind would be able to stack all memories without throwing "garbage" away to make room for more? In the course of some centuries, if you learned to play a guitar, for example, and stopped playing it in 50 years, you'd have to have lessons from start all over again. And while you re-learned to play guitar, you could start to forget how to speak spanish or how to cook a certain meal, if you stopped doing it on your everyday life. That's how memory works. It throws up supposedly useless information to get room for more. If it retained every single moment of your life, not only would you have extreme headaches, but be a sad, recentful and traumatized little man because of the bad things of the world, despite the good things that happen in your life, just because you wouldn't be able to forget an, thus, forgive or simply go on with life. Also, birth trauma.*
And man, we're talking about an IMMORTAL person living like that. Just so sad.
Summarizing, I think it's only nice to have a big life expectancy increase, like to a centuries-old level. But no farther than that. In the end immortality is not cool.
*Could you imagine how awkward would be everyone's relationship with their mothers if they remembered the day they were pulled out of their vaginas? OH GOD NO!
