Musings on Immortality

If you are the only human on this earth who is given the option to live forever, would you choose to do so? I suspect that many people might not want to, not when you are the only immortal and you have to watch all your loved ones age and waste away. What if beside yourself, your life partner is also given the gift of immortality, would you take it? I suspect that some people who said "no" to the first scenario might then change their minds. Afterall, the burden of living becomes more tolerable when there is someone who can share your life and understand you for what you are.

Of course cynics might point out that given enough time, there is no marriage that can last for eternity. When you have an eternity with your loved one, would it not increase the likelihood that you really would be sick of each other? So does it mean that oaths of love till eternity is possible because everybody knows that someday it would all end in death, so making the relationship much more precious? A counterargument to the cynics would be that, yes, no doubt given an eternity, the law of diminishing marginal utility (the inescapable economic law) would eventually set in and yes, you would really be sick of each other, there would not be much choice but to stick to each other simply because no one else can understand what it is like to live forever. The possibilities for what might happen and the various arguments for these possibilities are endless, mainly because no one can ever be proved to be right or wrong....

For me, there is one reason why I think immortality is tempting and that is curiosity. What would the world be like in 2100? Would Singapore still exist for instance? Would humans be able to teleport like in Star Trek? But curiosity is a double-edged sword, it might be a cause of wonder or of despair. Imagine having to witness the kind of holocaust in "Deep Impact" in 2110 when you could have been spared the horrors if you had been dead....

I know this statement sounds strange, but the fact is all adults take death for granted (no I didn't make a typo, I did not intend to say "take life for granted"). I said it because not many people stopped to question why all living creatures are built to be perishable with an expiry date. I once read an interesting hypothesis that attempts to answer this from the "gene's eye view". The body of humans and other animals are built from a genetic blueprint and bodies exist for only one purpose and that is for the genes to spread through another body created through copulation and reproduction. Once the "gene has been passed on", from the "gene's perspective" the body is no longer as useful. So an efficient body from the perspective of the genes is not one that lasts infinitely since it would then probably require much more resources to sustain its youth through perpetual renewal of all cells, tissues and organs. An efficient body is one which should be programmed to live long enough to have the opportunity to spread the genes and then be allowed to waste away (that is age) as it would be a waste of resources to maintain. A most interesting and elegant hypothesis but one that totally trashes the human ego. So up to you if you are able to swallow something like this even if proven to be true.... oh well....... who says life is easy?