The temptation to NOT exist

[Gray House]

Quote Originally Posted by Russell Nash

Hope. Example: Who knows if one of theses days an alien civilization appears on Earth and grants us the gift of immortality.

I've just skimmed through this thread which I hadn't seen before and the above quoted bit caught my eye. Immortality seems to me to be one of the most nightmarish ideas I can imagine. But it seems that most people imagine it as being something desirable, and no wonder; it removes the fear of death. I think at an earlier period of my life it may have seemed desirable to me as well, but I think only because I hadn't thought about it all that much. I account for the seeming desirability of immortality by the inability of the human mind to conceive of long stretches of time in any way other than as an abstraction. For example: the difference between 4 and 40 years seems like a long time but 400,000 years and 401,000 years seem like similar lengths of time because we can only conceive of these lengths of time in a very abstract way. They are just numbers. I think that if these lengths of time were conceivable to us in a more real seeming way immortality would not seem at all desirable.