If you could, would you live forever?

"...If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers ... who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no. And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum! So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing?"

-Harry Potter, kind of.

The idea that death is a part of life, that it somehow gives meaning to our accomplishments... it strikes me as the most egregious case of sour grapes in all of human philosophy. I haven't done any dying yet, and I still feel happiness and satisfaction when I accomplish tasks and create things. I certainly don't see how ceasing to exist would somehow increase my satisfaction with anything.

Death is kind of like a 0x multiplier to your total utility. You can certainly imagine horrible futures where your immortality has awful consequences, such that 0*x > x, but those consequences aren't an innate problem with life itself. Your achievements are forgotten? Write them down! Your friends and family are getting old and disappearing? Make them immortal, too! Your memory is getting too full and your perception of time is inexplicably distorted? See a neurosurgeon, or something! We have this cool thing called "all of human knowledge and power" that we can use to work on solutions to the problems that might arise for immortal people.

The universe has an annoying little quirk in the form of the second law of thermodynamics. Assuming we don't find a way past it, the universe might eventually reach thermal equilibrium, making the continuation of life impossible. The heat death of the universe would suck a lot- and if humanity were to be wiped out by it, or something else before that deadline, I might be like "dang, I wish I could die now, because the most interesting things in the universe are dead and there's literally nothing left for me to do", but that seems super unlikely because humans have done a pretty good job of not being exterminated over the past 300,000 years.

Entropy's a bitch, but we might as well fight her tooth and nail for as long as we can. If/when the universe decides I absolutely need to die, I don't plan to fall asleep and welcome it as closure. I'll go to the grave cursing Death's name and kicking myself for my failure to kill him first.

haha that was a rant wasn't it; what am i doing up at 4:30 in the morning