If you could, would you live forever?

Benedict forgot to mention Harry's argument for infinite boredom as long as we're quoting Methods of Rationality.

"What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

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While only a few chapters deal with immortality, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a great read and I highly encourage everyone who thinks Harry Potter as a scientist is an awesome idea to give it a read. It's pretty long though.

Concerning the heat death of the universe: I have no doubt in my mind that if humanity achieved immortality that we'd find a way to prevent, circumvent, or escape our universe's destruction. Humans are resilient and ingenious little bastards and we're already finding ways to distort and bend physical reality to our whim. Given infinite time, 100 monkeys will write Shakespeare and 100 humans will defeat entropy.