1 The GURPS RPG distinguished between "unaging," "unkillable," and "immortal." Unkillable was that age was the only thing that could do you in, so immortal was the combination of the two.

2 I'd settle for either one...

3

I dunno. Being unkillable without being unaging sounds hellish to me. As you get older and older and more and more feeble, it's going to be terrible.

But being unaging also sounds pretty hellish to me. Watching friends and loved ones age and die; making new friends and then watching them in turn age and die.

And boredom would be terrible, almost poignant. After a couple of thousand years, what could there be to do that you hadn't done a hundred times before?

I think immortality would be just about the worst curse imaginable.

Alan E. Nourse wrote a book which included a story about immortality. The basic hook was that they had discovered how to make people immortal, and the government decided it would only bestow that "blessing" on great scientists, great artists and composers and writers, and the like.

The main character in the story was someone who was picked for this, and refused it. Because he noticed that the people who got it became perfectionists and never finished anything.

I hope the human race never achieves immortality. One problem with it is that it means people like Fidel Castro would live forever. In our world, if there's no other way to get rid of maggots like that we can at least outlive them. But if they are immortal, then what?

But an even more important reason: if it becomes widespread, necessarily that would mean no more children.

And a world without children would be a world not worth living in.

4 "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

The Misenchanted Sword made use of the "unkillable but not unaging" problem, and between Highlander and all the vampire series, the problems of the unaging have pretty much been milked dry. And of course the central problem of Time Enough For Love is giving an immortal a reason to live (and I must admit, as lifelines go, "boinking hot redheads" is a pretty good one).

-j

5

In the anime Strike the Blood there's a character named Vatler who is a vampire and whose main character motivation is that he's bored stiff and looking for things to entertain himself. Sometimes he helps the good guys and sometimes he impedes them, entirely as a function of how complicated and exciting he can make the situation.

6 A space opera series I read a few years ago featured a humanity that had achieved immortality.   They dealt with it by spending centuries or even millennia asleep.  When they woke up, the universe was a different place each time.  Kind of hand-wavey, but at least the author acknowledged the problem. 

7 That's "The City and the Stars" by Clarke.

8 Niven's Known Space eventually got into the ageless range, and not all the characters he wrote dealt with it well.

Banks' Culture had a population which was effectively ageless, but society tended towards "allow yourself to age gracefully and die in the mid-four-or-five-hundreds" though anything from instant suicide to complete functional immortality (both senses) was available.

Unkillable is -hard- for science to do; if you can do unkillable, then at that point any aging you do is purely voluntary.

Ageless works a lot better in an environment where scarcity is at a minimum. Ageless plus Earth-only turns into dystopia scenarios right quick.

9 Yeah. If I were ageless I'd end up sitting here until that Sleeping With Hinako animation that just popped up in Steven's banner came around  again.


That would not be productive.

10 You can see it here.