Foreign Perspectives

Leaving aside the religious approach, supposing that someday it becomes possible for people to live forever, would you actually want to? In principle I would have always said that my answer would surely be “yes” but one of the odder Star Trek episodes has me thinking about that.

For a first premise, the assumption is that in living forever you’d want to live in a healthy state ie no sliding downhill into nursing home territory as we see these days when people get old. Obviously, living forever and gradually sliding downhill like that through illness and disease isn’t an overlly appealing prospect. However, even if you were perfectly healthly, would you want to do it? Let’s say the life was in the body of you as you were in your 20s ie no aging beyond that.

Forever is a very long time. It’s not 100 years or 1000 years or even a million years. Thus, if you were to try out different walks of life over time you’d eventually have done pretty much everything. Assuming that you were in a society that also lived forever then over time they’d collectively reach the point where everything was known. I imagine that there’d be new species turning up as time went by but aside from that all of science would be known, presumably also the society would stablise after a time so even the likes of movies would pretty much all have been done. Pretty much nothing would change.

How many of us would actually want to live in a society where everything that could be known already was known, where there was nothing new, where nothing changed?