Quick poll to get a feel for "when" you decided that immortality was right and/or possible. Feel free to reply with your moment of inspiration or the journey it took.

I have refrained from answering this in the other forum because I feel a little defensive about it and wanted to reflect upon my own history without over indulgance.

I find I have three periods when I thought a lot about it. The first was as a pre-teen watching the Vietnam Conflict threaten to become WWIII, the second time as a College student when I decided that I *chose* to be born and must act with concordant responsibility for that decision, and third as I have struggled and lost battles to save the lives of family and friends.

If there is a fourth period it is TODAY. As in, "Live Life Like there is no Tomorrow" and make every moment count. That doesn't presume hedonistic self indulgancy unless all you are looking for is an excuse to behave that way in the first place. Fighting back against mortality is a good way to make today count.

A little history however, I was raised in the family of an Old School Physician. My father took his oath religiously. Life is sacred and a physician should first do no harm. But when all else failed their responsibility is to relieve suffering.

All this I understood but as I was seeing the patients retuning from Vietnam, the survivors we worked with at VA Hospitals from WWI & WWII, as well as the plethora of patients that came through the door with drug addictions and other social diseases I began to reevaluate the role of the physician. The concerns I raised created a conflict between me the natural healer and what I percieved as the corruption of the actual means to accomplishing the goal.

Too many problems are outside the penumbra of concerns a physician is trained to cope with yet they are still better trained to address these than those society has chosen to do so. i.e. The Drug War.

Too many interests for profit have interfered with the potential and undermined the ability of science to fullfill its chosen mission. I still find this more than a little dissappointing and disturbing. Vaccines vs Antibiotics etc. Pharmaceutical Profits vs *Orphaning* useful therapies.

I began thinking about all this a long time ago when my dad taught me to do his clinical exams (Gram tests for Gonococcal smears, I was twelve) and I noticed that some patients were addicted to drugs and were repeatedly visiting the office looking for a *fix* rather than a cure.

The abortion debate was in full swing and the rate of unwanted pregnancy was also a phenomenon that aroused my attention even though I hadn't yet reached puberty. I decided then that people had to live longer in order to have the time to wise up (learn) and also to be motivated to change the widespread level of self destructive behavior I was a first hand witness to.

And as I tried to interest my father in new medical technologies his main concern was a classical understanding of medical and biological doctrine combined with a healthy sense of how to protect patent rights. I realized then that ironically for all the good intentions there was no way to get from here (limited life span in a world that is growing more unhealthy and dangerous everyday) to there ( a theoretical time of longevity and popular rational behavior). So I am making an end run with all of you.

If we can change the global perspective and behavioral paradigms on these issues then whether we fail for ourselves, or not, as long as humanity survives there can be hope of eventual success.[hmm]

-> Click to read archived answers in 'old' forum

When my parents told me that I would die some day, I cried. I was three at the time.

At first, I thought immortality was a given. Now it is a goal.

Bob

Since I can remember I have thought about the importance of death and what would happen... early on, I went to church with my family and I all seemed fine and good. God would take care of me if i should die....he could also punish me if I did something wrong.. always looking over my shoulder watching what I did..

So at about 8 I really began to question what the church was and what religion was all about, Was there really a God?... I didn't see him.. and faith was not enough to make me believe.. I think a person is born with a mind that is skeptical. And that mind I have.

As for the date and time that I became interested in physical, secular immortality, there is none. It has been a gradual evolution. After reading many books about religion, life, science and the future... a thought began to form in my mind.

I began to ask myself "What is the most important goal in life" As i believe that nothing happens after death. Physical immortality became the most important goal.

I had been thinking a lot about Albert Camus's novel, The Plague, in 1975 at age 18 while in grade 12. For me, this was no ordinary novel. Existentialist Camus introduced the idea, to me, that life is absurd because we die and that the only escape from this absurdity was irrational religious belief, suicide, or some other philosophical construct of one's own.

Over the next year, I continued to consider what possible philosophical construct would allow escape from the absurdity of the meaningless of existence due to the fact that we die. Then, while at University of Waterloo, in first year Physics, I came across a paper entitled "The Common Sense of Physical Immortality". [1]. That was it! I understood physical immortality as a solution to the problem that existentialism raised.

Rick,
Thank you for sharing your story.. and thanks for hosting "The Common Sense of Physical Immortality" .. I found this document to be quite compelling and to the point... sure would be interesting to find out who actually wrote it.. I also wonder how many more of us around the world feel compelled to hide their true identities and how this is damaging the potential truth that physical immortality is the only real answer to the problem of death.

When I got into insects I would have them battle and see who was the "king of the insect world" course at the age of 8-13 what would you expect.

I then slowly got off of the insects and when into general biology to get a feel of what i really think would be "cool." Later down the road around 16 I was talking to some friends and religion comes up. They talk about what they want to do in their "heaven" and i just sort of glazed over thinking that they would just stop talking about it. Yet i woke up when they asked me what i wanted to do.....then I realized I never really gave a "creator" a thought. And I thought to myself "what bullshit!"

So I passed the opportunity to answer and lost them after that year of HS or crapville if you ask me.

Then I started to get angry that people want to force on people that death has to be accepted. And my main conviction, goal, quest, whatever you can call it would be: "Screw my social life, I'm not going to be maggot food."

And the thing that keeps me from wasting focus now is the FACT, that if your immortal you can live past the fools.

When I first came to the notion of immortality as fact, I had my soul sold to the devil by trickery to which I stayed pure, loving and abiding to god. I was thirteen at the time.
At age eighteen my best friend had noting but the pure conviction that he was an athesist and that anything else is grand delusion. I weeped inside for weeks because apart from my catholic programming which is embedded, I knew that here lied the answer, there is no life after death no god no devil.
But I still believe in immortals, immortality for me it is far easier to believe in vampires than it is to believe in god. For vampires were once men.
I have seen what manner of dead spirits roam the earth in vioce alone , I have woken up in dreams I thought I'd never return from.
It's such a damn thing being so close to divinity and nothing real on the otherside.

Once I expierenced someone who claimed that I was immortal... I was born that way and my coming was foretold through prophecy. I have struggled with the thought of the possibility there was truth in his words. I have since contempleted wheither it was true and how it might be like to live for eternity.

I have come close to death many times and I have experienced what I think was my body dying. I could see thorugh my eyes yet was trapped inside my body laying down on a bed underneath a pillow. I felt as though my spirit was floating in a void that could only be compared to an astral plane or space itself. My eyes did not blink and my body was completly relaxed, I felt slighty cold but it was not unpleasant. I was motionless and felt at peace with everything natural and supernatural in the universe. When I grew tired of laying there, I snapped out of it and sat up easy.

Two friends were in the room there with my and told me I had been dead for twenty minutes. They even showed me a stopwatch they had used to measure the time I spent dead. One of them claimed that he was also immortal as I was and later he explained he no longer wanted to live that way and told me to take off his head so that I could gain all of his knowledge. I refused trying to convince him that his life had meaning and that I could not take the life of a friend.

I have spent much time pondering the possibility of the truth and remembering other times I may have experienced death and rejuvination of my body as I call it. I am looking for truth and answers to set my mind and soul at ease.

Christopher Lambert > Adrian Paul, yes?

I've seen enough in Viet Nam and lost many people who are dear to me so having been brought up Catholic the questions of their destinations were a source of interest to me. My conclusion is that Christianity with it's rewards and punishments ,placed the barrier of a fear base ,do good or suffer. I've read Ravi Ravindra,the Dalai Lama, Gurdjieff, Raymond C Baker,Ram Dass,A.H. Almaas, Thich Nhat Hanh,Gary Zukav, Stuart Wilde,Kahlil Gibran, and Sri Da Avabhasa and still have some doubts. Perhaps that's the way it should be.

I'm not sure immortality is possible. I'm not even sure its "right" in this form.
My idea is to live long enough to "Transform" into something much better.
More than a man, more than a machine, more than a fusion of the two! (From Logans Run ;-).

Seriously, I read a book when I was 19 about life extension. I was just
killing time in-between college classes, majoring in bio. I had thought of it before but not
really as possible. After reading that book I began to think it might be possible.
But, we will have to fight for it. Technology like that won't be given freely....

-------------------------------
"When citizens fear their government, you have tyranny; when the government fears its citizens, you have freedom."
- Thomas Jefferson

It all started with an essay i had to write for college - I stumbled upon Transhumanists and Extropianism during my research into nanotechnology. This is an immensly exciting subject for me; it has given me many new avenues of thought and opened my mind to many new things. I look forward to my nanogirl news updates and my imminst emails. Immortality may not be available now, or even in my life time but i rekon it would be achievable within the next 100 years, well, atleast an increase in lifespan of another 30/40 years. How amazing would that be?.................

When I was a little boy, I asked my mom what the neighbor kids were talking about when they brought up their traditions of religion. My mom said "god is nature". Soon I pressed for more, and so she read me greek myths from an encyclopedia.
I knew that dying was a horrible thing right away, and had no illusions of an afterlife.
My dad was a Doctor of Philosophy, and mom is now an artist for an educational software company.

This is a great thread! Maybe we can distill from the replies a sense of how we can excite others about immortality prospects.
-- wannabe

I remember the exact instance I got excited by the prospect of immortality. It was when I read Robert Anton Wilson's article in Future magazine in 1978. I was 13 at the time, and it said that for people under 30 there is a good chance we could all live indefinitely as the pace of longetivy science would exceed the pace of aging before we had a chance to die of old age. I still think that after 25 years, RAW was spot on with his predictions. And he didn't know of the coming nanotech age.

Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.

This post has been edited by planetp: 30-May 2004, 02:34 PM

Since I am feeling all senses.
I guess the moment I started to dream , might be in adolescence.
I have lot of goals and aims , and the preference among them is being changed very often. Finally my preference is unaltered now, that is "Immortality".
Though I am working on personal intersts and aims , I always think about immortality. I feel like there is no way one can fulfill their entire dreams and goals in 60 or 70 yrs. And there is no way one can live life as he/she want to live in 60 or 70 yrs. So the only solution for every problem and everyone's problem is immortality.

When I was young, it seemed to me as it seems to almost all that life was abundant and infinite; full of challenges and discovery, constantly learning and experiencing the world. The world seemed so full of life and endless possibilities.
Such is the nature of many young people.

I had many young friends during my youth. One of them I merely lived next to when I was 7 years old. Her name was Merecia. She and I quickly became very good friends, and did almost everything together.
We used to joke to one another about which was better: Being taller or being older? She was a year older than I, and I almost 4 inches taller than her.
We playfully argued the importance of both for many months, and remained friends for almost 2 years.
My family then moved, and I was not to see or hear from her for almost 4 years.

I remember it clearly. I was on my way home from school, and my mother told me that she had received a phone call from who I referred to as "Uncle Dwane", Merecia's father. My mother told me she had been killed in a car accident.
I was devastated.
Then the cold irony of it hit me one-thousand times harder, when I remembered a question I had asked my mother once.
"Mom, is there any way that I will ever be older than Merecia?" and she replied: "No dear, not unless she...no."
I was hit so hard, that even at 12 I became delirious. Lost in the agony of despair and sadness, that my best friend would no longer be there.
I blamed everyone for it, but most especially, I blamed "God", for I was religious at the time.
Now, it is 13 years since then, and I am both the older and taller of the two of us.

But that wouldn't be the last time I saw death.
4 years later, my great grandmother, the patriot both religiously and intellectually of our family, suffered the blow of cancer.
A perfect woman in her lifetime, accomplisher of many things. She was born on November 8th, 1900, and died In 1994.
Death from cancer...an ailment that she should have never had.
A woman of many talents; music, art, poetry, Teaching, Religion, Real Estate, and many more.
She taught me music, taught me to paint, to draw, to garden, to cook, many things that I all took for granted.

Before she died, she revealed to the entire family that this wasn't the first time she had been diagnosed with cancer. That back in '84, her doctor had found it when it was still minute and easily treatable. However, upon a return to the doctors office for a second X-ray, the doctor misread the X-rays and had told her that the cancer had mysteriously disappeared.
Overjoyed, my great-grandmother attributed the "miracle" to God and her faith.
But God would have nothing to do with it, for 8 years later, the cancer had spread so badly that there was no hope or chance for any possible recovery.
My great-grandmother became both a victim of genetic chance, and medical incompetence.
I'm sure there are many who can relate, having had their loved ones die for similar reasons.

When she died, my mother asked me if I wanted to attend her funeral. I was so furious and sad, that I deliberately said "No! I will not see her, weakened, old, destroyed. I will remember her for the strong elderly woman she was, and all that she taught me when she was alive."

Some years later, I realized that I would too, eventually suffer a similar fate. So filled was I with a rage against the system, that I vowed to combat needless death at any cost, even if that means I am to prepare for my own cryo-stasis.

In the seventh grade when we were introduced to our concept of the structure of the atom.
Pushed forward by Frank Tipplers "The Phsysics of Imortality" about four year ago.
This year I am 60 and springing from Robert Green Ingersolls' history.
It certainly requires a lot of courage to come out of the grips of orthodox cultism.

Born Again
The pulpit (puppet) master was wielding his wand filled with guilt accusations insisting that I am lost to the eternal dungeon of the devil unless I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior. My logical rational self escaped that hypnotic trance induced by stirring my emotions with guilt just as the tear that welled up in my left eye arrived at the corner of my mouth. I was intrigued that I had allowed myself to be hypnotized and relived that I escaped the hypnotic trance induced by accusations of unworthiness. The afore mentioned incident happened on some Sunday morning in a church pew when I was about 35 years old. My rational self saved me from the abyss of ignorance and deceit. Now that I am free of religious baggage and have moved onto higher plateaus comfort has warmed over me. I have passed through the eye of the needle and have compassion for those that choose to remain in the quagmire of ignorance and deceit.
Joy Joy Joy