Would you choose immortality if you could?
A discursive composed by Finn (Year 11)
Would you choose immortality if you could?
As an impulsive and illogical child nothing appears more appealing than the thought of living forever, eternal life. Being immortal is an ancient concept that brings with it both positives and negatives to think about, with it you are able to remove the one factor that makes life important: the looming darkness of death that clouds everyone. What is life without death, how will it end?
There is certainly no shortage of downsides when thinking of living for all eternity. You alone will inevitably lose everyone you have ever loved and be forced to watch death take its course on everyone but you, leaving you the option of closure impossible, and having an everlasting burden of trauma. And earth won’t last forever which is why our time here is precious, which is why every minute we are alive should be used to the fullest, the Beauty of death is that it motivates us, and gives us motivation to have a fulfilling life. This begs the question, without death what purpose in life do we have? You could accomplish everything you want to, but what comes next is unknown, as no one has ever lived has done - everything.
Really the worst case scenario would be the world ends in front of you and you are left in the cold vacuum of space, but what if it never did? If you could stay youthful forever and see the Earth's story through to the end, our discussion becomes incredibly interesting. Let’s say we save earth and continue to thrive for thousands of years and the concept of utopia becomes a reality, with the rate we are developing some form of immortality will then, also become a reality. Pop culture has established that the most realistic option of this would be to integrate the human mind with machinery, in other words a cyborg, maybe everyone on earth could then theoretically have access to eternal life. But all of this may be sooner than we think, as the line between fiction and reality becomes even more blurry.
Stephen Hawking once said that “It’s theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer, and so provide a form of life after death,” which does bring hope that one day we may be able to have a second life after death, in one way or another. But what if I told you there are already organisms on earth that have the ability to simulate immortality. The ‘Immortal jellyfish’, also called the Turritopsis dohrnii is a jellyfish that could technically live forever due to its unique ability to bring itself back to the first stage of its life an infinite number of times. Now obviously this wouldn’t be possible for humans as we are unmatched when it comes to complexity, but it is something interesting to think about. But as disappointing as it may sound, eternal life biologically speaking is not and most likely will never be obtainable without the assistance of technology, and even then death would most likely come in another form.
Knowing all of this I don’t think immortality could ever be a possibility for me to choose even if miraculously given the opportunity, it simply defeats the point of life and makes time an abstract concept which no longer will affect you. But who knows, someone with the right mindset and will power could save the world given the ability and become a real life superhero.
