I'm not a romantic or nearly as nostalgic as you seem to be, Olivier. Besides, we have photos, videos and other mementos (e.g. diaries, tattoos/scars, etc) of childhood (and adolescence) so that the autobiographical past need not be completely "forgotten" unless an "immortal" (capable of voluntarily dying in her sleep) prefers to live indefinitely within an ever-progressing "hundred year present" – that would be my preference.

I'm not a romantic or nearly as nostalgic as you seem to be — 180 Proof

Oh! But nostalgia is one of the most beautiful feelings of humans ever. It seems to be poetic and philosophical. Remember the classic Latin phrase: tempus fugit :flower:

Memento mori, memento vivere. :death: :fire:

I am interested in Transhumanist philosophies, and would consider myself a techno-optimist, for sure. And while I don't intend to live forever, I would like to live longer than is possible today. All of this is quite extropian, in my opinion at least.

Bret, I am jealous of how you see the life of long term distance. I am more existentialist (Kierkegaardian) on my own.
I think life is liveable when it is really worthy. It not depends on life expectancy

I'm not a romantic or nearly as nostalgic as you seem to be, Olivier. — 180 Proof

Guilty as charged.

to live indefinitely within an ever-progressing "hundred year present" – that would be my preference. — 180 Proof

That would not be mine, as it would imply a world without children, and without novelty. In any case your memories would die, hence you would slowly die too. There's no escape.

Why no more children? "Slow death" over millennia ...

nostalgia is one of the most beautiful feelings of humans ever. — javi2541997

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Peter de Vries

If immortals are having children, where do you put the excess population?

Why do you assume there would be an "excess population"? Why do you assume immortals are going to be "having children"?

First you asked: "Why no more children?", and now you ask: "Why have children?"

Dear friends, I want to quote and share this phrase of Yukio Mishima. (三島 由紀夫) with you:

The Japanese have always been a people with a severe awareness of death. But the Japanese concept of death is pure and clear, and in that sense it is different from death as something disgusting and terrible as it is perceived by Westerners. :death: :fire:

Death and night and blood

I just loved Mishima in my late teens. He must have known something about death. I can't imagine what it takes to kill oneself the way he did.

... as it would imply a world without children... — Olivier5

If immortals are having children ... — Olivier5

First you asked: "Why no more children?", and now you ask: "Why have children?" — Olivier5

:roll:

What I mean is:

EITHER your immortals are allowed to have children, in which case overpopulation ensues after a few eons, OR they are not allowed to have children, in which case their world is not worth living in. It's a dead world anyway, where a child is never born.

A few of your assumptions there seem arbitrary to me. My assumptions differ, O. For me, I imagine that immortality (if it even became a bio-technological thing) would be exclusive to the 1% (or 0.1%) capitalist class and not available to the masses for the 'Malthusian problem' you're suggesting; therefore, procreation would be tightly controlled by cloning instead of sexual reproduction and each immortal (whether mortal-born or a clone) would have to be made sterile. Also, immortality ideally would be developed for long-duration space travelers and exoplanet colonists. Such an elite, I imagine, would gradually eliminate the mortal population as the world becomes more and more automated and re-wilded, eventually with only a few to several million immortals living on Earth (maybe some millions more scattered throughout this solar system in orbital space habitats or on other planets & moons). Absent fatal misadventure, each immortal would live as long as she wishes to and then at some point centuries, even millennia, hence voluntarily die in her sleep (and more likely, when it's all said and done, having lived a more fulfilled and more meaningful life than the most fulfilled and meaningful life ever lived by any mortal human being). So yeah, immortality could be an 'existential nightmare' but, like mortal life (which all too often for far too many has been nightmarish), does not have to be.

Nothing odd there. If one suppresses death, one must also suppress life. They are two sides of the same coin. To live forever is exactly like being dead — Olivier5

:chin:

each immortal (whether mortal-born or a clone) would have to be made sterile — 180 Proof

And thus they won't be able to have children... You see? So your assumptions aren't that different from mine.

Clones develop through childhood, so yes immortals will (have to) be parents of their own genetic offspring. You seem stuck on this point due to a lack of imagination, Olivier, rather than some plausible extrapolation.

You seem stuck on this point due to a lack of imagination, Olivier, — 180 Proof

I don't need much imagination to picture what you have in mind, Proof, as I too saw Jupiter Ascending.

I never saw that movie, the trailer looked juvenile. My speculations are inspired in part by various fictions e.g. Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro), The Possibility of an Island (Houellebecq), "The Immortal" (Borges), This Immortal (Zelanzy), Death at Intervals (Saramago), Life After Life (Atkinson), Seed to Harvest (Butler), Latro in the Mist (Wolfe), The Culture Saga (Banks), Queendom of Sol (McCarthy), The Old Guard series (Rucka + Netflix film adaptation), Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch film), etcetera. "Immortality" has been a preoccupation of mine since I'd first read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a pre-teen (10/11) and also, around the same time, had watched a rerun of the 1969 Star Trek episode "Requiem for Methuselah". Most of these fictions are cautionary tales about the hazards of "living indefinitely"; thinking about work-arounds for these hazards, however, is mostly what informs my imagining a viable "immortal" life – as well as Nietzsche's (psycho-existential) conception of "eternal recurrence of the same".

Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro), — 180 Proof

This one sounds so interesting. I will check it out. Are you referring to Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ) right? The Nobel Prize of 2017.

:up:

Always the heavy reader... Anyway, Jupiter Ascending is made for teenagers, but it's surprisingly good, as far as these things go.

"eternal recurrence of the same". — 180 Proof

That's death's nickname. Life is about the not-so-eternal springing of the radically new.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

:fire:

Life is about the not-so-eternal springing of the radically new. — Olivier5

Do you work in sales or advertising, O? How decadent (e.g. commodity fetish) of you ... :mask:

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." ~L'Homme révolté

Do you work in sales or advertising, O? — 180 Proof

No, I don't.

Any other deep interrogation of yours I can help you with?

:ok:

If you ever doubt the power of evolution to create novelty, maybe consider that there's this new virus out there, called COVID 2019, and that it did change the world quite a lot already.

What does that have to do with anything I've written here? I've neither mentioned nor implied anything about "evolution" or "novelty".