Are you "prepared" to die?

That may actually be a highly incorrect conclusion. Egyptian mummies that have been embalmed and dried-out corpses buried in desert sand have taught scientists a lot. If our species is still extant hundreds or thousands of years from now, scientists may be able to learn a lot from studying the remains of people from our time.

At my age, and with all of my physical issues, I’m not worth another look after they bury me. Just let me R.I.P. (rot in place).

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Dude, I would rather die than live to have dementia and cant remember to wipe my own ass. That’s no way to live.

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Yeah. But aren’t you AFRAID!!!

What if it’s an ABYSS???

And I’ve been thinking about this … in the existential sense of things, when we die, do we become our PAST? :thinking: yes. I am THAT smart! I asked THAT question. A very DEEP question. The deepest of them all.

I was dead for billions of years, I have no recollection of anything let alone anything terrible, so why would I worry about it?

The physically dying part might give some pause, but lets hope it’s relative painless.

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Because your ego is (like everyone else’s) very “attuned” to the idea that “you” exist.

Imagine your self an aging 80 year old man with a failing heart.

Never mind the pain. What about your inability to hold onto reality as the process of death completely annihilates a lifetime of ego and self-existing pretence?

It’s not the non-existence that should scare you. It’s the process of going from existence to non-existence. Don’t you think that uncontrollable, unstoppable, unrelenting slip into nothingness will be a confusing experience (at the very least)?

Do you really understand the nothingness you once were? Can you explain how unusual it will be to cease existing? I think it’s a frightening endeavour.

Your point escapes me sorry? I fail to see what those facts have to do with my experiencing nothing when I was dead for billions of years?

I just stated plainly it doesn’t?

I plainly said that that alone gave me pause, are you even reading my posts?

I think you mean might be, not will be, it could be very quick, and again the relevance escapes me?

I understand I did not experience billions of years of nothingness, and quite obviously the phrase “you once were” is at odds with the word nothingness, and the fact I experienced none of it of course.

I never claimed it was, it is in fact commonplace, as all living things are born and die.

Do you, why? Death is the inevitable price of admission for this ride, there are no refunds. As I said I don’t fear something the evidence demonstrates I cannot experience, and cannot avoid, so the dying part I am obviously keen to postpone as long as is possible, and hope to avoid as much unnecessary pain as possible, but the being dead part is not only inevitable it will be a doddle if the evidence is anything to go by.

If ego does anything here, then it encourages people to delude themselves their consciousness is too important to simply vanish without trace, and that it meant no more to the universe than the existence of a flea.

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I have always liked the idea of cryonics, and having my body preserved in liquid nitrogen.

This isn’t neccesarily because I want to be revived in 2,000 years when science advances to that level (although it would be interesting) . . . but, rather, I believe that a “library” of preserved corpses from different eras will help future scientists track the origins of different diseases, as we know that diseases change over time.

As an example that supports this idea, scientists recently dug up an Inuit Native American who died in the 1918 flu epidemic, and was interred in the arctic permafrost.

These disease hunters extracted a sample of frozen lung tissue, and they were able to recreate the entire 1918 influenza virus in the lab.

This helped them refine the flu vaccines, and also to better understand how the 1918 pandemic killed so many people.

So, I believe that the government should subsidize cryonics as a public service.

See below:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/health/dr-johan-hultin-dead.html&ved=2ahUKEwizsfu9oPH-AhUYVTABHcfbCJ8QFnoECBkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2JWnx2E0MbSYx8cd0yosbH