If Offered Immortality In This Physical Universe, Would You Accept It?

I’ve just finished reading a good Sci Fi novel by Peter F. Hamilton, "Pandora’s Star", and am ready to immediately jump into the sequel "Judas Unchained". There’s a lot there, from intergalactic battles, huge cast of characters, high tech marvels, and fascinating ideas.

Taking place in 2380, people can pop over to anywhere in the known universe through wormholes. There are giant ones to small personal ones. Anyone can do this traveling everywhere for centuries because they can live forever if they wish. A technology allows people’s memories to be stored, and every 60-70 years their bodies go through rejuvenation and their new young bodies get their memory cells planted in their new brain.

I was wondering all through this read, would I want to live for centuries untold? Would I want others to live for centuries?

I’ve stumbled upon an English writer and researcher, Aubrey de Grey, pictured above. He thinks we’re within a quarter century of “curing” aging, and if we choose to do so, live a thousand years. He’s the Chief of Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) project. His purpose is to stop aging, and even rejuvenate one’s body and remain at a specific age indefinitely. Same as the Sci Fi novel I just finished reading.

How wise and desirable is it live that long? We each of us have limited abilities. I know, for instance, that no matter how much I study over however many years, I’m not a mathematician, physician, or physicist. I simply don’t have the mindset to be an astronomer or astronaut, surgeon or scam artist. There are some horrible people too. Would we want someone like Stalin, Hitler, or Mao perpetuating their slaughter and enslavement of people longer than they did?

British novelist Susan Ertz: “Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon”.

Can a person continue evolving or is he\she limited in our given bodies? What about disease? Will you have the same illnesses, or if you have a disability will you be able to shed it? What about a growing population that doesn’t die in its natural progression? What will that do to our resources? Will society and culture evolve if new minds, new thoughts, new people, don’t replace the old? Would the “old order” ever go away? Would humanity get stuck? de Grey answers some of these questions here.

As to personal development, being a religious person, I believe that we are here to learn lessons while in this corporeal body, and that our life spans are limited so we can go on to the next stage. There are many views of afterlife, but I’ll just state my Christian belief here. There’s a plan for our Eternity. That place is personal and accepting. It’s a place for personal growth that fulfills an eternal purpose; immortality without the limitations and boundaries we have in this life. We have been offered “Everlasting Life”, and I’ll take mine by following Christ, where there will be limitless, unceasing discoveries and wonders forever.