Immortality

Immortality is eternal life. An immortal being is supposedly immune to death. Many religions and cranks have promised eternal life, but none have been proven to deliver on the claim.

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Biological immortality

Despite claims to the contrary, only a certain type of jellyfish[1] may have any sort of claim to immortality (assuming they aren't eaten by predators).

A number of plants also seem to have no age limit with some of the oldest examples found, such as the "Pando" clonal colony of quaking aspen in Utah, reaching tens of thousands of years old.[2]

Genetic Immortality

The view that you can achieve a form of immortality through your genes being passed on to your children and through them, others. Downsides are you yourself will likely be forgotten after four or five generations and your descendents will quickly be as similar to you as you are to anybody else.

Supernatural immortality

Magic will grant you immortal life in Heaven! Or as a vampire. The first emperor of China's Qin dynasty died taking mercury pills in search of immortality.

Virtual immortality

Ha, we don't need that supernatural rubbish! We have cryonics and whole-brain emulation! Or we will have them, eventually. Or at least they don't provably contradict physics. YOU CAN'T PROVE THEY DO.

Cultural immortality

Make people remember your name (if not you yourself) foreverfor longer than otherwise through good or bad deeds such as exemplary military service, political works, terrorist acts, artistic triumphs, etc. This can quickly fall into "The person they are remembering is barely a shadow of what they actually were". Woody Allen had this to say: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."

Desirability of immortality

Some traditions (such as Christianity) regard immortality favorably as a worthwhile goal. Greek mythology, on the other hand, which featured a separate privileged class of immortals (gods and demi-gods), warned against the hubris of average humans aspiring to better their status in stories such as that of Prometheus,[3] and portrayed the disadvantages of eternal punishment, as in the tale of Tantalus.[4]

People who claimed to be immortal
gollark: (they aren't, I think)
gollark: Trouble is that it's slow, so presumably if they did there'd be periodic lag as they updated all their dragons.
gollark: I wonder how hatcheries update their stuff. Is it just periodic or something else?
gollark: Or granduncle or whatever.
gollark: I think I have one which is a great uncle of that

See also

References
  1. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090130-immortal-jellyfish-swarm.html
  2. Discover magazine: "Based on evidence such as the resemblance of some aspen clone leaves to fossilized ones, Burton Barnes of the University of Michigan has suggested that aspen clones in the western United States may reach the age of a million years or more. In principle, clones may even be essentially immortal, dying only from disease or the deterioration of the environment rather than from some internal clock."
  3. See the Wikipedia article on Prometheus.
  4. See the Wikipedia article on Tantalus.
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