Quest for Immortality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfTqXL0d9Ls

“ Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we’d find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were indefinitely put off, the human psyche would end up, well, like the gambler in the “Twilight Zone” episode.

— Ray Kurzweil, In Death

<---The picture to the right is nelson's Quest for immortality, and suggests man's quest to live forever.


A website from the Immortality Institute had an article giving people five simple steps that should, if performed correctly, allow a person to live forever.
1) Eat a healthy diet
2)Lead an active life
3)Taking Supplements
4)Rejuvenation therapies
5)Cryonics (or freezing yourself while in good health so that you may someday be 'thawed' and brought back to life in a later time.)

“To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake”

-Arthur Schopenhauer
In short I think that people still long for immortality for one of three reasons, one is that they have a profound fear of death, and what is to come when life ends. Or they feel they have not accomplished enough or reached their full potential in life and think that if they are given more time, they will somehow accomplish what they set out to do. A third reason people could want to find immortality is simply because they can. For the scientific curiousity of wondering if it is i fact possible to live forever. In Gilgamesh's case, he seeks immortality becasue his greatest friend, Enkidu is dead and he wants to find a way to bring him back to life.
Some people believe that this is a very accomplishable goal, one that will probably never happen in my lifetime but in the next 1,000 years. Personally I think that the idea itself is completely absurd and it will never happen.