Immortality
The terms "immortality" and "eternal youth" are often used as synonyms for "indefinite lifespan", but they carry connotations from their other contexts which science has deemed to be impossible. That is, immortal means "incapable of dying". Eternal implies guaranteed existence for eternity, and in this context is also implausible because of entropy. Even if cures were found for all the degenerative diseases, and effective treatments were developed for all the processes of aging, so that bodies could be maintained as easily as cars can be repaired, people would still be killed in accidents, slain in wars, choosing to die, etc. The term indefinite lifespan represents this more achievable state of affairs, because it merely implies freedom from death by age or infirmity. The use of the term is also sometimes favored for reasons of linguistic aesthetics, in the same way that the term birth control is preferred to "birth prevention" or "birth elimination" which both imply, as does 'immortality', that the choice is one-time only and has permanent consequences, whereas the point of 'indefinite lifespans', like the point of 'birth control', is to gain the opportunity to lead one's life in a more conscious and deliberate manner.
Read more about this topic: Indefinite Lifespan
Famous quotes containing the word immortality:
“Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody’s assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“... the random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)