Who Wants to Live Forever?

To never age. 

To never die. 

Sounds like paradise, doesn't it? But would it really be? 

In my romantic contemporary fantasy, Her Immortal Love, both the hero and heroine are confronted with the question as to whether immortality would be a blessing or a curse. 

One of the earliest stories ever written, The Epic of Gilgamesh, deals with the hero seeking a way to become immortal following the death of a beloved friend. 

In his book, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization , author Stephen Cave lists four patterns of humanity’s quest to live forever: 

• Extending life through medicine or magic (which is the method used in Her Immortal Love)
• Spiritual or medical resurrection following death
• An afterlife or reincarnation
• Living on through fame, descendants or one's creative works

If you don’t count supernatural creatures such as vampires and/or werewolves, there haven’t been that many movies or television shows that featured immortals. One of the most widely known is the Highlander television series starring Adrian Paul, which was based on the 1986 Highlander movie starring Christopher Lambert. 

A less widely known series (and that's because it lasted one season) was The Immortal, which starred Christopher George. It aired in 1970. George played Ben Richards, a test car driver, who has properties in his blood that make him immune to disease and also gives him an extended lifespan. 

Highlander, The Immortal, and Her Immortal Love all deal with fictional accounts of immortality.  Scientists, however, are searching for ways to make human beings truly immortal. An organization called the 2045 Initiative is working on a way to create holographic avatars that would house artificial brains. Our artificial brains. It’s called the 2045 Initiative because they hope to achieve this by the year 2045.

An article in The New York Times says that the secret to immortality may be found in jellyfishes. Turritopsis dohrnii is a species of jellyfish that can revert back to a polyp, which is its earliest stage of development, and resume living all over again. That would be like you or I somehow becoming a fetus again and starting our lives all over.  And this could happen again and again and again.  I suppose it would be more like reincarnation than immortality since we would not be the exact same person once we began to grow up again, but our unique genetic makeup would continue to live on. Sounds like the premise for an interesting story.

If science has anything to do about it, it’s possible that living forever may someday become a reality. Perhaps only for the super-rich, but who knows? Being immortal could be as simple as popping a pill every day before breakfast.

If you could live forever, would you? And if you did, what would you do with your immortality? Would you see it as a blessing or a curse?