The Acronym

By Irina Onoprienko, Staff Writer

It's a common question, really: given the choice, would you choose to be immortal? You can tell a lot about a person from their response. You can tell even more from the questions they ask.

First of all, what do you mean by immortality? If immortality means that you won't die until killed, there's no problem -- you just get to choose when you die. If immortality means you continue aging without being able to die, the answer would obviously be no, because who wants to be old and feeble forever? The real question comes when immortality means you will neither die nor age. In my opinion, it's still a pretty simple question.

Death is supposed to be some great adventure, but to be honest -- no one actually knows that death will be interesting. You might go to heaven, you might go to hell, you might get reincarnated or become a ghost, or -- and this seems scientifically most likely – you might simply cease to exist. True, death may be exciting -- but you don't know that.

However, you do know that if you stick around, you're sure to find something interesting. First of all, there's the fact that you'll be around to see and experience everything. You'll be around when people invent antigravity, when aliens land on the earth, when World War III happens. Your life will turn into a science fiction novel – which will be pretty amazing, even if you don’t read sci-fi.

Some people say that life would get pretty tiring after a couple hundred years. You'd have to live through the pain of losing everyone you know to death, of watching the planet change around you.

But even when you've grown tired of living the ordinary way, just think... you're immortal now. You can do all those things that you've always wanted to, without having to fear for your life or your sanity. If you go insane, you'll get over it eventually, and if you die... well, you won't.

You can walk through machine gun fire, you can fly a kite in a lightning storm, you can jump out of a plane without a parachute or a space shuttle without a space suit. Sure, it might hurt a bit... (or a lot...) but the pain will only be temporary. If you live for long enough, you'll forget that it ever hurt, but the experiences you have will be unforgettable.

And when you've done everything you've ever wanted to do, seen everything you've wanted to see, written your autobiography and sold it as fiction, well... You can just sit back and wait for the sun to explode. Because how many people get to see that?

How often do you hear someone say that life is short and fragile and precious, and you should take advantage of it? Yet a surprising number of people decide that they wouldn't want to be immortal. Why ever not? Immortality would free you from the constraints of time itself, which people are always trying in vain to shake off.