If you could be immortal... (poll)

[Pyrrho]

If you could take a pill that would cause you to stop aging and render you immortal until the end of the world (whatever this means to you), would you take it?

Please explain your answer.

Your question is contradictory.  "Immortal" means living forever.  Not just living until the end of the world.

Assuming that the earth is not destroyed by a meteor or some other such thing, all life on earth will end within about 2.8 billion years, due to the sun:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...e-science/

See also:

http://www.universetoday.com/18847/life-of-the-sun/


So someone who does not want to be actually immortal might take you up on the offer, depending on more details that you have not specified (not aging does not mean that one cannot lose a limb, for example, nor does it mean that one cannot be captured, anesthetized long enough for the concrete to dry and be put into wet concrete and stuck that way for the duration).

However, from looking at the above articles and thinking about the gradual heating of the earth, it would not be a fun thing to experience, so one may still decide to reject the offer, even if otherwise it were acceptable.


Also, the immediate thought from the title was that this seems a ploy to pretend that atheists are just people who do not want the reward of heaven, and so they reject Christianity.  The thing is, when I was a Christian as a child, I did not want to die (or, at least, I did not think about it deeply enough to want to die).  It was only after becoming an atheist that I thought much about what it means to not have an afterlife, and how that really compares with the idea of living forever.  As things are, I very much agree with Epicurus on death:


Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html


Was the year 1800 bad for you?  That is what the year 2200 will be like for you.  Death is not a bad thing at all.  Bad things only happen to the living.