Immortality
- Were you looking for immorality?
Immortality is eternal life. An immortal being is supposedly immune to death. Many religions and cranks have promised eternal life, but none have been proven to deliver on the claim.
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[edit] Biological immortality
Despite claims to the contrary, only a certain type of jellyfish[1] may have any sort of claim to immortality (assuming they aren't eaten by predators).
A number of plants also seem to have no age limit with some of the oldest examples found, such as the "Pando" clonal colony of quaking aspen in Utah, reaching tens of thousands of years old.[2]
[edit] Genetic Immortality
The view that you can achieve a form of immortality through your genes being passed on to your children and through them, others. Downsides are you yourself will likely be forgotten after four or five generations and your descendents will quickly be as similar to you as you are to anybody else.
[edit] Supernatural immortality
Magic will grant you immortal life in Heaven! Or as a vampire. The first emperor of the Qin dynasty died taking mercury pills in search of immortality.
[edit] Virtual immortality
Ha, we don't need that supernatural rubbish! We have cryonics and whole-brain emulation! Or we will have them, eventually. Or at least they don't provably contradict physics. YOU CAN'T PROVE THEY DO.
[edit] Cultural immortality
Make people remember your name (if not you yourself) forever through, good or bad, things such as The military, political works, Terrorist acts, artistic triumphs, etc. This can quickly fall into "The person they are remembering is barely a shadow of what they actually were". Woody Allen had this to say, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090130-immortal-jellyfish-swarm.html
- ↑ Discover magazine: "Based on evidence such as the resemblance of some aspen clone leaves to fossilized ones, Burton Barnes of the University of Michigan has suggested that aspen clones in the western United States may reach the age of a million years or more. In principle, clones may even be essentially immortal, dying only from disease or the deterioration of the environment rather than from some internal clock."
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