One aspect of immortality that never seems to be addressed, or rarely addressed, is the fact that not only will good persons become immortal, but so will the bad persons.
In the category of bad, I include the following human character traits; cruelty, sadism, spite, greed, thoughlessness, selfishness, etc.
I live in the increasingly ugly city of L.A., in California, and the thought of millions of mean-spirited, rude, crude, cruel, persons living for thousands of years, is a nightmare.
Of course there are millions of good persons too, but my question is, what about the bad person's we all encounter, and also the very bad person's in history, such as Stalin, Hitler, Manson, to name some of the worst.
And don't tell me that there will not be future Hitler's. If you belive that, then you are extremely naive.
Basically, this is a question about human nature.
We are 3 years into the new century, and already we have had the worst terrorist incident in history, another damn war, a world wide economic slump, due to greed, corruption, and economic mismanagement.
There is no evidence, anywhere, that human nature is changing for the best. It is the same old game, repeating itself it seems, for the next thousand years.
But, wait, there is a difference. Technology, that borders on magic, will be in the hands of humanity, including immortality.
If the choice is Linus Pauling, and Stalin, both living for a thousand years, or both dying before they are a hundred, I would choose the later.
If evil persons get thousands of years, then we had better keep life expetancy where it is; at about 80 years.
I regret not having a good person like Pauling live for a thousand years, but that is the price we will probably have to pay to keep human evil in check.
Edited by Casanova, 01 June 2003 - 12:44 AM.