There are some people who find the prospect of death so abhorrent they arrange for their corpses to be frozen, in the hope that one day they can be resurrected. Others, such as the director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil, think they might achieve immortality by having their consciousness uploaded to a computer. Some have invested vast sums in the research needed to develop such technologies. These people may or may not be deluded about the scientific prospects of immortality. But are they perhaps deluded in other ways? Are they deluded in what they wish for?
If there were an elixir of life, would you choose to take it? Let’s assume immortality is an attractive prospect. If you wanted to live perpetually as a healthy twenty-year old, for example, then you could; if you wanted your loved ones to be immortal as well, then they would be; or if you preferred to have a never-ending supply of new loved ones, then you could have. But there’s one catch. The elixir isn’t reversible, and suicide isn’t an option. If you choose to take the elixir, there will be no going back. Now would you choose to take it?
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