To start with, the line of thought behind this post was inspired by a Web site I found. Located at http://www.longnow.com, it's the site of an organization called "The Long Now Foundation." The goal of the group is to promote thinking in longer terms than humans are used to.

To this end, they've got a few projects such as trying to build a clock that will last for 10,000 years with minimal maintenance as well as a really cool thing called the "Rosetta Project," which is an attempt to provide a modern-day Rosetta Stone that will last for millennia. What they're doing is trying to write, onto a stone disk, several hundred thousand pages of text that is readable without a computer (it requries a fairly powerful optical microscope, but is all human readable once magnified). They have the first chapter of Genesis in a thousand languages, as well as a wealth of other documents. The whole purpose is that if a civilization finds it that can only read a few of our modern-day languages, it will act as a cipher for the rest. Very cool, check it out.

Anyway, this got me thinking about humanity's future. I believe there is an outside chance that people from my generation (I'm 20, for those who don't know) will be immortal. I'm pretty sure that within the next century our technology will increase so exponentially that will conquer most of what we call "natural causes" of death. Even if this doesn't happen in that time frame, it is possible that people alive today will see their lifespans increased an order of magnitude to the point where de facto immortality is possible.

I don't really want to debate whether or not this is possible or likely (nobody can say for certain, obviously). What I'm more interested in is how humanity would deal with such an achievment. Imagine if you knew you would never die (ignore the fact that the universe will probably eventually end; a timeline of billions of years is long enough to be considered eternal for today). How would that affect you?

I recently read an interesting novella online (some of the material is quite graphic and offensive, so I won't post the link; if you really want it you can /memo or e-mail me) that was about humanity living in a simulated reality, run by an omnipotent computer that refused to allow anyone to die. Aside from that, though, humans could do whatever they wanted. The conclusion of the novel was that an unending existence devoid of any physical challenges would not be agreeable to humans. I'm not so sure I buy that. How would you react?

In a more physical sense, immortal (in the flesh) humans might have any number of physical challenges. This is the stuff science fiction is made out of: exploring the universe, discovering new technologies, etc. But would it be enough to keep us entertained forever?

There are some interesting physical problems with immortality, too. I'm not so sure how we'll cope with a population size when people are rarely removed from that population. Isaac Asimov wrote about a similar problem when the global population rate was growing steadily: if the number of humans around doubles every twenty years or fifty years, in almost no time we'd fill the projected size of the universe. Clearly population growth *can't* go exponentially for any length of time.

There are some very good things I could see for a race of immortal humans, though. Imagine how much wiser you would be if you had the equivalent of several of our current lifetimes. Just the amount of experience and knowledge you could accumulate would be incredibly beneficial. Not to mention the fantastic number of things to do or movies to see.

Anyway, I'm not sure why my posts to this Forum have been this sort of meandering, philosophical things as of late, but that's the sort of mood I've been in for the past few months. I thank everyone for indulging me and I look forward to responses.

Stephen