If you could be immortal... (poll)

[nihilistcat]

Assuming everyone else had access to the pill, absolutely. Although, anti-aging therapies probably won't work that way. You have to restore telomere, and therefore you'd have to get at least one of the subunits of the telomerase enzyme into all of our cells (incidentally, there was a study that did this in rats and it worked, and another study that was able to reverse aging in mice). But then the problem in this case is a problem that permeates molecular biology, how do we deliver these therapies to our cells? We can use viral vectors or design novel vacuoles, but so far success with these techniques has been somewhat limited (although research is ongoing). You run into all sorts of problems, like immune response and viral replication rate and so on. But with the technology where it is today, this sort of development is inevitable. So the real question will be ... what will we do once we develop the ability to reverse aging and prevent age related death? I'm of the opinion that humans can and would adapt to this, but of course many of my fellow scientists disagree (but it's all pretty much speculation at this point).

But then, I don't think of this in terms of how I would keep myself entertained for thousands of years. I mean, biology can't really deal with traumatic death (unless we became cyborgs or some shit), and we would still die from other things (aging is only one of many causes of death). I think of this in terms of facing death and being given the chance not to die, which is I think a more realistic way to think about this. Under those conditions, I think most people here would choose to live. Granted, there would be certain preconditions to wanting to live for a really long time (e.g. most of my loved ones would still have to be around for me to have any will to live).

Sorry for geeking out ... but this is a fun question

[Pyrrho]

Death is not a bad thing at all.  Bad things only happen to the living.

Then death, by definition, is a bad thing, since death is something that only happens to the living.

Boru

No.  Not everything that happens to living things is bad.  So it most certainly is not by definition a bad thing.

You seem to be confusing "bad things only happen to the living" with "only bad things happen to the living."  The two mean very different things.  Word order matters for meaning.

[Tonus]

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.

Yeah. The end of the world would either happen when the sun finally starts dying and burns the Earth into a cinder, or when Andromeda 'collides' with the Milky Way, or maybe somewhere in between (say, if a large enough meteor/planetoid slammed into the planet, or the day after the last fire-breathing whore dies off). The end would probably be kind of sucky, but I'm just too curious to care. And living long enough to maybe see religion die off, or see humanity colonize the stars, might just be worth it all.

[rado84]

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.

Yes, I would. I wanna see all the man kind's technological progress, travel through space and even go to live on another planet.

[abaris]

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.

Curious question. And two different things.

A forever young pill would be something different than an immortality pill. To stay young or be young again seems pretty desirable to me. Immortality less so. Seeing everyone you love die like flies isn't such a great prospect.

[CapnAwesome]

I don't need to be immortal, but a few thousand years would be nice.

[emjay]

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.

No way. I think a much better pill would be one that ends consciousness instantaneously without any pain or suffering. That's the only part of death that I fear - the process - but that's something we all have to go through, even the religious. But where the religious see it as the transition to immortality, I see it as the last moments before non-existence. But non-existence is not some dark, scary void that we live in for eternity. It just means we cease to exist, just as we did not exist before we were born. There's nothing bad about it at all and it offers no vantage point from which to envy or miss anything about life or immortality. It helped me a lot when dealing with the prospect of death to think about this hypothetical kill pill (well I called it a kill switch, but same principle) - it made me realise that the only part I fear is the painful process of death, not the non-existence that follows, because if it weren't for my family and the people I care about I'd be happy to flip that switch right now. Not because I'm depressed but because even if I had the best life imaginable it wouldn't make any difference because I wouldn't be around to miss it.