I think immortality will be good in the long run.

In the short run, we will see the problem of overpopulation and dwindling of life-sustaining resources on Earth, but in the long run we will see a tremendous speed increase in the progress of humanity.

Imagine learning physics from an Issac Newton lecture at Multimedia University instead of getting it from a dude who cant teach to save his life, my god that would be fantastic.

Immortality will grant us a continuity of knowledge, we don't need to pick up the pieces from where some great mind left off, we can join them and work with them.

The knowledge of the devastations of war will prevent another from happening, finally giving us lasting and perhaps permanent peace.

It would be awesome for mankind if we didn't die and as I understand it, we're about 30 - 40 years away from it

The short run problems can be overcome by advancing technology. Eventually those problems I mentioned will be a problem no more.

And honestly, I don't really have any concerns about "appreciating life'. There's nothing to appreciate in life except ones achievements. If you lived all your life in some jungle isolated from society, nobody is really going to give a crap whether you live or die.

Michael Jackson is being appreciated because of his work in the music industry, in pop and in bringing a new light to black musicians in the US. If he was a road sweeper, do you think he'll get the great "send off" he's getting now?

So with this in mind, the achievements of individuals will always be appreciated as long as it works out for the better.

And if you are concerned about death being irrelevant in the future, don't worry, it still will be. If advances made it such that humans become immortal, people become used to the concept of eternal life and death will be perceived in a far scarier way than us now because it's not normal and it'll be strange and unbelievable. To highlight this, I give you an example. Take as an example our situation now, our average mortality rate is 78 years old, but about a century or two ago, the mortality was 36 years old. At 30, you would have been considered as a wise old man in the past, but today you are considered still young. So now if I come and tell you that the average mortality of the people living in Nigeria is 35, you'll be shocked and you'll find that it's unbelievable. That's how it will be in the future when the future when someone dies. It might make it onto CNN when someone dies somewhere in the world...

Hey, just because someone is biologically immortal in their natural state, doesn't mean the death penalty would no longer hold sway. Electric chairs will still kill, decapitation will still kill, poisons, bullets, injuries and all that will still kill. It's just that diseases might be less lethal, HIV might have no effect, cardiac arrests will be unheard-of and cancer will be like flu now. Also it'll be such that brain neuron cell death and stagnation can be prevented and reversed, organs that fail can be easily replaced with stem-cell clones, animal-human hybrid organs or synthetic organs and so on.

Sure, prison sentences like 200 years prison and so on now means the person can actually make it out, but it'll be enough time to completely change a persons mindset (for better or worse).

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Jul 14 2009, 11:55 PM