> If I choose the immortal life and later change my mind, that would leave me with suicide or being killed as my options to get out of it.

I assume that immortality, if it happens, will be through medical breakthroughs. It wouldn't be like taking an elixir of life that keeps you forever young, permanently. You could simply decide to turn off your nanobot life support system or whatever and die naturally if you wanted to. I'm not entirely sure I'd want to, though. If faced with a terminal illness today, would you choose not to seek treatment?

> If others could choose to be immortal and I choose otherwise, I sense abuses in the fold and being an outcast for the choice.

Possibly, but again I see it being more akin to people who choose not to seek medical treatment (and they exist today).

> Ultimately, I don't think humans could ever achieve anything close to a utopian society so I only see current abuses of our world continuing while adding new abuses.

I agree with you to some extent. Let me put on my Marxist hat and talk about dialectical materialism (the only part of Marxism I actually like). I would say it is better to be alive circa 2003 than it would have to have been alive circa 1003. In the last thousand years, the quality of life for the average person has increased. Education has increased. Freedom and tolerance has increased. History is in large part a history of things improving for the better. Yeah, sometimes there are dark ages and things regress, but overall I think it's better.

One can make a pretty strong inductive argument that things will continue to get better. They may never get perfect, but it's quite probable they will continue improving. So I don't think I buy that all of our current problems will exist in the future (it seems likely that, say, environmental degradation will be much less of a problem in the next few centuries), but I agree new ones will arise.

> Thus, I would not want to live forever in a place that is not good to live in.

By extension I assume that you believe the current world is "not good to live in." I would say the current world is flawed, but overall I enjoy it. Do you not get more pleasure out of it than pain?

> The argument could be made that we could and will have other options besides the Earth. I don't see this as impossible but I also don't see it happening anytime soon. The effects of achieving one of these ideas will probably greatly impact the other depending on which happens first. The speed and necessity of the second achievement will increase rapidly, I imagine.

I agree. I'm positive that, if we don't get wiped out in the next hundred years, humanity will colonize other worlds. Certainly within our own solar system, Mars and several moons are basically within our level of current technology. If we were immortal, the times involved in getting to other solar systems aren't really so bad.

Stephen