by Nick Roy

Created on: July 13, 2008

Living forever isn't a good idea because if all of eternity were in front of us we would quickly get bored of it. Immortality would remove any sense of meaning and purpose in our lives as any goals we undertake would be completed, any sensory input would be experienced, and every dream fulfilled with an infinite amount of time to work with. This would leave us... with nothing to do. Humans thrive on new experiences, and wither when our lives become static and unchanging. After eons of immortality we would be begging for death to set us free from everlasting ennui....

...and that death would eventually come. Another reason why living forever isn't a good idea is because living forever is impossible, so there's no reason to get our hopes up. One day, billions of years from now, the universe will end, either with the "Big Freeze", the "Big Rip", the "Big Crunch" or some other equally unpleasant-sounding event (see Wikipedia's "Ultimate fate of the universe" article for more). There's certainly nothing we can do on a universe-wide scale (we can't even see to the other side of the universe because of the way the speed of light works), so there's nothing we could possibly do to prevent the end of everything. "Living forever" is a misnomer. So-called "eternal life" is nothing but living for a really, really long time....

...and we wouldn't be able to live with ourselves by the end of it. Immortality would allow us to eventually amass god-like power, and what prevents us from doing so without the essential balance of god-like wisdom that a god needs to use god-like power responsibly? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. An immortal human race means that the darker side of human nature would be irresistibly unleashed across the galaxy. Are we prepared for the consequences even one immortal tyrant could wreak upon all other forms of life? What of an immortal altruist using raw power to "improve" the lives of mortal beings? An immortal human might end up wishing for the one thing they can't have, death, upon looking behind their shoulder and seeing their path of destruction....

...and what's so terrible about death, anyhow? The truth is that we just don't know. Maybe we go to heaven, maybe we go to hell, maybe we go to the beer volcanoes and stripper factories of Pastafarianism. Or maybe we return to the way we were before we were born: non-existence. Either way, living forever would be one long, boring exercise in procrastinating our inevitable demise, and we'd spend the entire time with a lingering curiosity in the back of our mind, wondering what we might be missing out on in death.

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