Who Would Want To Live Forever?

There's a million quotes about the short span of life we have and the inevitability of death.  I began to wonder if anybody would actually want to live forever.  I was reminded of the story of Eos and Tithonus.  Eos and Tithonus were in love, but Tithonus was a mortal.  Eos begged Zeus to give Tithonus eternal life, and Zeus granted it.  Zeus is kind of a douche, though, and made it so that though he lived forever, age and senility still overtook him.

The Highlander had a pretty sweet deal.  He could live forever, was forever young, and could even withstand tremendous amounts of torture.  The dude walked across the bottom of a lake.  He apparently doesn't even need to breathe, so what would be the purpose of having lungs?  If a highlander decided to just go ahead and give himself a blood eagle, would he function normally?

So once you've got the physical aspects of immortality down, there's the psychological aspect of living forever.  The first and most obvious dilemma is the family and friends dying off.  If you're like me, the family deaths would improve quality of life and the idea of living as a hermit is appealing, so we've side stepped all of that.  What about the technological advances.  How much and how often would you have to relearn everything.  It would almost be a full time job catching up with technology not to mention various laws.  You would be able to watch the fall of our current civilizations and the rise of new ones.  You will be able to watch various social movements.  Over time the continents would drift and change due to various natural disasters.  All the landmarks you know will be destroyed.  Eventually you'd have a whole new earth with new maps if it isn't destroyed first.  How good a memory do you have?  After a few thousand years would you even remember who you started out as?  Would your new identities be all that you are?  Would your parents just be a glimpse of a memory that you can't seem to bring into focus?  If you managed to live long enough would everybody else evolve, leaving you behind?  The movie "The Man From Earth" did a good job of taking the immortal's view of life, covering all of this and more.

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