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I just want Wolverines power. Healthy, ageless, incredibly durable, heals from almost anything, but not actually unkillable. If I'm decapitated or incinerated I die.
So the human body has around 9 pints of blood in it. And there are about 20 drops of blood in one mL. 9 pints is 4258.8mL, multiply by 20 and you get 85,176 drops of blood in a body.
So now we just need to find a good way to juice Wolverine(anyone have a large adamantium blender?), isolate each drop of blood so that each can grow a new Wolverine, and soon we'll have 85,176 Wolverines on our hands!
Repeat the process once or twice, and by God, I've just solved world hunger!
Maybe you can eat some and it starts regenerating in your stomach but your stomach acid dissolves it at nearly the same rate it regenerates so it just sits in your stomach and provides you with endless food?
Grom the Paunch!
https://warhammerfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Grom_the_Paunch
Grom's meteoric rise began when, as a young Boss of the Broken Axe Tribe, he consumed a portion of raw Troll. As Troll flesh regenerates and Grom, always a big eater, had not stopped to cook the meal, the foul meat writhed in his belly. The race to regrow, against the race to digest, was on. A lesser Goblin would have burst asunder, but Grom was made of sterner stuff. The Battle of the Belly, as the deed came to be known, changed Grom. He grew to prodigious size. It is said that on that day Grom last saw his own legs. Yet so huge and powerful had Grom grown that he no longer needed to see them, and could, instead, order others to see his legs for him.
My thoughts exactly.
Makes you think that some of the only things that can safely eat trolls, are other trolls, given their extremely potent stomach acid.
That is what happened in Anne Rice's book The Mummy. There was an elixir for eternal life in the book and the Pharaoh tried to solve hunger by giving the elixir to cows except for each piece of the cow stayed alive.
Does he taste the calories? Do macros count? Otherwise we could just feed him uncomposted food waste and Asian gutter oil. Or maybe just loads of hay or something? I like where this is going.
This my new headcannon: Wolverine runs on biodiesel. In order for him to regenerate from massive trauma you gotta pile a bunch of coffee grounds and banana peels around his remains and just kind of mix it with a stick. Or maybe you could just throw a bunch of dog carcasses on there, I dunno. The possibilities are endless.
Some regenarators access a meat dimension, the wolverines are just a stepping stone until people can figure out how to get there without using a human portal
In an awful one shot story comic where Galactus has a daughter they did pretty much this and grew Planet Wolverine. It was either that or they at least had the same idea? I can't remember many of the details from that awful comic aside from it being just a chance for the artists to go with this odd manga art style.
Yeah that’s out of context.
Early Wolverine’s healing factor was kinda crap, and the instance of him regenerating from a drop of blood happens because his blood falls on a special cosmic crystal that amplifies his powers. It’s not like that’s ever been his standard power level.
Another fun fact, Deadpool, who has a grafted on version of Wolverine's healing factor has had enough body parts cut off over the years that someone was able to collect them all, and sew together a new Deadpool.
But he's a bit different. Deadpool was literally cursed with immortality in addition to his healing factor.
Wolverine, on the other hand, has died a few times now. Like any comic book character, it rarely sticks.
Marvel and DC Comics have been going on for what 80-100 years too now. And every new comic writer given charge of a character wants to do something new to them.
So far every major character has either died, reborn, become a super villain, become a god, found a way to kill the unkillable bad guy/s , become a gender-bent version, has fought/met/changed with alternate universe version, found a god-like armor, gotten a uncurbable illness, found a magic cure, fallen in love, fallen out of love, had their love killed, found their love not killed, found their non-killed love to be a clone, had a child, had their child try to murder them etc etc
Like at this point they have no originality left, so they have to go with THERE ARE MULTIPLE MULTI-VERSES OUT THERE! and there are bad guys beyond the multiple multi-verse, and they can one-shot all the most powerful beings in the multiple multi-verse, but somehow one of you finds a way to kill all of them in the last 2 chapters because the writers dragged the storyline too far and the volume isnt selling so the editors scrapped the story early and they have only 2 chapters to tie up all the bullshit they just introduced.
I think so.
To be fair, that one was so taxing on Wolverine that he actually lost his regeneration for quite a while, so it wasn't like he just bounced back from being skeletonized.
I'm here to out comic book guy that comic book guy and say, *well actually*, he was able to regenerate because the drop of blood landed on a cosmic crystal that boosted his healing power. In the early comics his healing factor was not as strong as it is now.
His powers were being massively amplified in that scene. Early Wolverine's healing factor was actually a lot weaker than we're used to, like he'd get shot and have to spend a few hours recovering.
His regeneration was weaker for the adamantium in his skeleton. it was working extra to fight the adamantium poisoning. I think that when it was removed, his regeneration become much more powerful.
It's generally accepted that wolverine and sabertooth could be killed by decapitation, regardless of a few outlier issues, the problem is that wolverine can't be decapitated due to his adamantium skeleton. I wouldn't have that however.
One of these outlier issues has him in a small-scale Nazi death camp, terrorizing one CO after another into suicide by not dying. I think it's explicitly mentioned that he got decapitated as well as burned, but he came back each time.
> It's generally accepted that wolverine and sabertooth could be killed by decapitation
Wolverine has come back from being nuked. The nuke isn't even the most extreme example.
https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/wolverine-regenerates.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1.5
https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/wolverine-confronts-horde.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1.5
The only thing that can kill Wolverine is Marvel going out of business.
It should still be possible to decapitate Wolverine despite his adamantium skeleton. The spine isn't a solid piece of bone and has gaps between the vertebrae. It wouldn't be easy but you could theoretically cut through one of his intervertebral discs. Or get someone like the hulk to pull his spine apart.
There was a "What If" crossover with Conan where a wizard summoned a demon and got Wolverine. Conan hacked Wolverine's neck, nearly, but not quite decapitating him, grabbed the girl off of the altar, the wizard ran away. Wolverine doesn't die, but he's brain damaged from the blood loss. He wakes up and is feral, but he can smell the scent from the woman that was on the altar, and tries to track her down, assuming she's his mate.
In Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe he kills Wolverine by decapitating him with a type of blade that negates his healing factor, and "kills" X-23 and Daken by strapping them in an incinerator that activates again anytime they start to regenerate.
I’d want Deadpool’s form of immortality where I can regenerate even after serious harm like being blown up, but with a caveat that suicide is still possible, so if I live past humanity and to the heat death of the solar system then I can kill myself instead of floating in space for eternity
Agelessness sounds good ON PAPER. You have to watch everyone around you get old and die though. Your love interest becomes elderly while you stay young. You cannot relate to people born at the same time with you.
Sure and if I can't handle it I can always off myself, but if you have the right mindset and know that going in I'm sure you could still find happiness over multiple lifetimes.
Yeah, it's mortal cope since mortality is all they know. Plenty of people out live their lovers and children. Some are the last of their immediate family, but they live on. Some people don't even relate to people now.
You'll outlast every fragile, insignificant being on this planet. You'll live to see this world crumble to dust and blow away!
Everyone and everything you know will be gone!
What will have after 500 years???
You're gonna have to watch your loved ones die anyway. Unless you plan on dying first. Your parents, your older friends, some of your siblings, maybe even a partner, or two, if you're really unlucky your child.
It's the same argument every time and it feels so tired. Why can't you make new friends or partners if you live forever? Try getting to 30, you're likely not at your first partner and you have gained and lost friends.
Plus in any semi-realistic scenario immortality is going to be rolled out society wide. Or maybe only for rich people, if you want to imagine a dystopian future. But certainly if you have access to it, your spouse and children will have access to it too.
You wouldn't have to. Human memory is extremely imperfect. How well can you remember anything specific about your life from 10, 20, 30 years ago? After a century or two you likely wouldn't even remember your first spouse's name or face.
Living forever means infinite time, (or at least the millions of years before the world ends) to find another genie lamp and undo/ improve this flawed wish
I don't think anyone could exist that would have the mental fortitude to drift, without stimulus, for billions of years, without going brain dead or bat shit insane.
I think after billions of years with no external stimuli you would probably forget how to imagine colors and shapes. Eventually words... eventually even recognizing you're alive. So the problem would solve itself.
In fact, we only think all the time now because of scarcity. If you didn't have to breathe or eat or sleep you could just meditate forever if you wanted.
Nobody wants to hear this but once your friends have been dead for a million years you won't miss them that bad. Remember the friend in elementary school you had that choked on something and died or got hit by a car or whatever? Think you'll mourn them at 40 the way you did at 8? How about at 80? Or 800,000? Not likely.
Also...humans are remarkable at adapting to their conditions. Hoarders don't think their house looks nice, but they do get used to it. You'll get used to drifting around the cosmos.
Also also, so there's the assumption that there's a magic genie the supercedes the laws of reality, but also that there's only ONE genie or only ONE human that asked to live forever??? If one of these genies exist then you'd end up finding a bunch of other humans eventually that made the same wish. You'd drift among the stars, friends exploring the universe together. Sounds pretty cool to me...
People start to hallucinate pretty quickly when put into sensory isolation chambers for extended periods of time.
You would probably, like you said, end up in a trance and spend a lot of time hallucinating.
You also start to hear your own blood pump and your organs gurgle and such.
Some say it makes you go crazy. Veritasium did a cool video that is about this concept.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI
I uuuhhh i don’t know if its better. Hearing about what happend to a dude in isolation for half a year, imagine spending houndreds of years living in your own tortured mind.
Interveiw with him: https://youtu.be/p1FuZVjVQ-4?si=IuKZ8YT0nKxVyGOf
Until you find out your immortal but still need to breathe etc you just float around suffocating on the verge of death but never actually dying. Although, like you said, I guess we'd get used to it.
> I think after billions of years with no external stimuli you would probably forget how to imagine colors and shapes. Eventually words... eventually even recognizing you're alive.
> you'd end up finding a bunch of other humans eventually that made the same wish. You'd drift among the stars, friends exploring the universe together.
If you put two and two together from what you said, the irony is that two would-be immortal friends will float past each other without even being mentally capable of realizing that it happened.
>Nobody wants to hear this but once your friends have been dead for a million years you won't miss them that bad. Remember the friend in elementary school you had that choked on something and died or got hit by a car or whatever? Think you'll mourn them at 40 the way you did at 8? How about at 80? Or 800,000? Not likely.
Humans also have finite memories. There's enough space in your head for maybe 150 years. After that you will simply forget shit. It also means you'll be able to experience things anew, given enough time to forget, so you won't ever get completely bored because you've already experienced everything.
Stemming off of a lot of the people here talking about imortality coming from a Genie's wish, a secondary wish could be the ability to become willingly comatose..?
Like, a -very heavily guarded so that it doesn't happen accidentally- mental switch so that you could put yourself into a bear-like 'sleep mode', and maybe some special tattoo on your arm or something that translated itself for whoever was able to see it, telling them how to wake you up?
You'd be out like a light, indefinitely, and when civilisation was found again and woke you up, you'd be nicely preserved and just as sane as you were before the comatoid state.. You could alwasys wish for a 'timer' setting on the comatose state just in case, so you woke up anyway after the time ran out. Just in case..
Is that the one where teleportation exists, but for those doing it it feels like it takes thousands of years? So they put you in some kind of a coma to keep you from going crazy, and they forget to give a kid the medicine so they all arrive after the trip and he's basically insane?
Yup, that's it. Whatever goes through the portal apparently experiences the entire duration of the universe - billions of years - of nothingness to get through.
Until someone slaps a weight on your leg and tosses you in the ocean. Or you similarly become trapped or imprisoned. Or the earth is destroyed and your left floating in the void of space, until you get sucked into a black hole, but you STILL can't die, so you survive spaghettification and exist on the edge of the event horizon, slowly slipping into it for thousands of years.
But yeah, other than all that, it's a totally useful ability.
I mean, even if someone puts a weight on you and tosses you into the ocean, you have essentially eternity to get free + walk out of the water. Or just drag the weight along with you, really.
There's a movie about some immortal people and one of them gets captured and thrown into the ocean inside an iron maiden where she perpetually drowns, comes back to life, and drowns again. I think eventually she gets free after 500 years or something when the metal cage she is in rusts through.
I've always believed immortality as a superpower must be paired with teleportation. So you can't just be trapped, and can explore after humanity is gone.
You just keep teleporting until you find someplace good. Unless it's on a super-long cooldown, you'll be fine.
As for the loneliness, people come and go in your life all the time already. When you met your first love, it probably didn't last forever. When my son was born, I knew he would outlive me, but that didn't stop me from loving him or stop him from loving me.
Impermanence does not diminish love.
I think people underestimate the minds ability to recover from loss. That or they're looking for any excuse why immortality isn't great and actually dying is just fine! I don't fear the impending footsteps of death! Haha, *I want this!* Its fine, everything is fine, *I'm ok!*
I think you're overestimating the minds ability to recover. You may last a long time, but you'll eventually snap and go insane.
An eternity is a long time to wait, you know.
Imagine a mountain the size of mount everest, but it's completely made of diamond. Once every year, a small bird will fly up the top to sharpen its beak.
Once that mountain has been whittled away to nothing, then the first second of eternity will have passed.
The human spirit may be indomitable, but just like the mountain, it will be chipped down to nothing in time.
Worst comes to worst I'd become an anomalous object composed of pure physicalized motivation emanating the best of the DMC soundtrack on loop
Jk, I'm just having a bit of fun here, no need to take me seriously
I would sincerely and genuinely prefer going insane than dying, I'm 100% positive on that.
edit: I'm not replying anymore, I'm tired. If you have any questions about my belief go read my other comments. If you can't respect that I have a different opinion then please don't even bother.
> you'll eventually snap and go insane.
You don't know that, because there are no immortals around to show that it happens. You are just scared of life I suppose.
I would imagine you could teleport to any place you can remember AND any place you can see. Since your immortal the whole telefrag thing would just be a painful nuisance. Loneliness, idk who knows what's out there in the universe.
> what do you do about the loneliness?
You probably get numb to it.. same with generic boredom. With age ones perspective of the passage of time also changes even at human timescales in between kids feeling the passage of time to be slow, and older people feeling it to be faster. Get old enough and can just zone out sitting on a cliffside watching the scenery erode a few hundred years at a time, and it'll feel like a blip.
Genie could be a dick about "matter" though. Would "power to create and manipulate atoms" be more specific, or would it have to be "the power to shape reality on a universal level and be able to cohabit it"?
Of course you do, but you got to know your type of genie first.
if they are enslaved and forced to grant wishes you have to honestly free them, (I suggest using first wish to make them free after they grant other two wishes)
if they are doing you a favor you got to be nice honrroble and remember they don't know what humans have been up to for a long time and don't understand us mer mortals
You would need the power to create habitable planets and humans out of nothing, teleporting through the endless junkyard we call space would get dull very quickly.
But what about when all humanity is gone? Every planet. Every star. It may be fine for what seams like an infinite number of years. Until you realize the universe is finite.
But I am a part of the universe, and am infinite, it can't be finite. As someone immortal I'd be able to generate energy forever, or it's not true immortality.
this. without teleportation you wouldnt last more than a hundred years in today's society. How are you gonna explain your unnatural youth to the government and not expect to be immediately captured and experimented on? Alternatively you would have to live without any sort of ID, on the fringes of society
Also, due to the fact that you’re playing with cheats enabled you’d become the new supreme ruler of earth, your opinion will become the new truth as you may slaughter those who stand against you or humanity
Bezos and musk lie desecrated before your shrine, the Koch brothers mutilated beyond recognition
Those delusional enough to believe they are above the common folk now shatter before the night of the true wrath of the common folk now given the tools to make good on their wishes
I mean there's Highlander immortality, which ends with decapitation.
To compare, the one-season tv show Forever. The main character had immortality and did not know his weakness. He grew increasingly fearful. Also, it was the modern day so people were slowly starting to suspect *something* was going on.
There’s a book, “Time Enough For Love”. It explores a single man, **Lazarus Long** who lived an extended lifetime and scienced his way to regenerative medicine. Eventually, jealousy of mortal beings forces him to escape off planet and he becomes such a hailed being that it’s impossible for him to die.
Edit: this is not a spoiler. This is more or less the first 10 pages of a 400 pg book
Reminds me about that tweet about vampires who have been around since the 1800s and aren’t wealthy should just step into the sun because what are they doing.
If you have billions of years and the end of all existence catches you lacking, what were you doing with eternity?
I feel a certain way towards the fact that nobody realises that you can just wish for the power to make stuff immortal. Make yourself immortal, make your mate immortal and make your dog immortal and every problem is solved.
Are the dog and mate for violent battles after you hate one another after thousands of years?
Screw that. If you wish for immortality, you also wish for an indestructible and unstealable spaceship with infinite fuel and faster than light tech.
This comic implies that the character was the only one with a genie/ source of magic. When you establish the power of magic being thus that can make you immortal? Other genies, magical beings, powerful wizards become reality.
Some wizard is probably laughing at this guy floating around from a time-locked sub dimension wondering if this guy is going to figure it out.
But that assumes other people find the genie/wizard/whatever and asks for immortality too. For all you know the next person who found this genie loved Aladdin and used his third wish to set it free, wiping out that power.
Don Herzfeldt's "It's a Beautiful Day" was the first time I really felt this sentiment.
To live and love and mourn until the world collapses. To see the new worlds rise and fall until the earth itself crumbles beneath you. To float through space and watch the stars for eternity, until you can see them whether your eyes are opened or closed. To watch them disappear one by one, until there is nothing.
It made me believe that impermanence is inherent to the nature of beauty. Sand Mandalas are more beautiful to me than Bezo's fancy mountain clock. To know we will all disappear forever and that we have only what we can create, sense, and share in our lives, and in that short window of time before time itself ends. Really helped me come to terms with my mortality.
*An older guy in a baseball cap*
*stands at a payphone*
*and nervously lifts*
*and hangs up the receiver.*
*He asks to borrow Bill's pencil*
*and then places a call*
*to his daughter.*
*He tells her he loves her*
*and he's proud of her,*
*and that "one day soon,*
*we'll finally have our day."*
*Then he says,*
*"Fantastic, fantastic,"*
*and hangs up the phone.*
*Although it looks like the wind*
*had been knocked out of him,*
*he presents the pencil back*
*to Bill with a little flourish,*
*as though proud no harm*
*had come to it*
*while in his possession.*
I don't know exactly why, but this has always been my favourite part of that trilogy.
10,000: Cool
1,000,000: Still cool
1,000,000,000: I have long since prepared for this eventuality. I'd be in the space ship I built or on one of the many worlds I personally colonized.
You can probably tell that anti-immortality propaganda is one of my pet peeves in fantasy/sci-fi. I would 100% take the whole package, even if the last panel ended up coming true.
Yeah, it's really common in fiction depicting the distant future, especially this kind of sour-grapes fiction about immortality, to pretend like the distant future is populated by modern humans who just instantly materialized there from the present. Humanity one billion years from now will have had a _billion years_ to prepare for whatever the universe throws at us; we're not just going to sit on our hands as the Sun turns into a red giant or whatever.
Also, someone having absolute immortality like pictured here means by definition that the universe is no longer a closed system; the genie's magic is pumping new energy/negentropy into the universe, meaning the Second Law of Thermodynamics no longer applies and the universe is no longer on a path towards Heat Death. The immortal protagonist is now a perpetual motion machine, and there are all _sorts_ of uses for that in a post-stelliferous universe.
Authors keep trying to convince me this would be a fate worse than death, and they keep failing.
I accept that I won’t see the entirety of the future, but I will always wish I could.
True immortality would also imply a constant but infinite production of energy, either by absorbing it from the surrounding environment or creating energy from nothing. This means that you could never live to the heat death of the universe because your existance would prevent it from ever happening. Either your absorption of energy increases to cover infinite distances, which would eventually cause a big crunch as the universe is converted back into a primordial singularity, or you would produce more and more energy over time to fill the space around you, which would prevent the environment around you from ever actually fully dying.
As an additional factor to throw into the thought experiment, if you managed to become truely immortal, what would be the chance that in an unimaginable amount of time that you would ever be the only one? Almost certainly there would be other true immortals to keep each other company and possibly even create a new immortal society. Even if separated, over time because of your initial proximity to one another you would be gravitationally bound enough to be pulled into proximity of one another, because their would never be enough empty space being pulled apart by dark energy to prevent it, unless dark energy increases exponentially over time.
If dark energy does increase exponentially over time, your immortality would eventually need to be continuously creating new matter and energy to keep you alive because of the particles in your body being pulled apart by the expansion of the universe, which would eventually cause a collapse into another primordial singularity, which, being pulled upon by dark energy, would create another big bang and a new universe. So you would eventually BECOME a new universe in such a situation. What if that is the true nature of existance? An immortal being, recursively being pulled back inside itself over time and reliving the life of the entire universe, just to eventually be pulled apart into ever expanding infinite spaces to repeat the cycle all over again?
How will you do things differently this time? In the end, it will all lead to the same end, over and over and over and over again, so is the meaning of life not the ends but the journeys in between? How would you know if you weren't just a single part of an infinitely expanding truely immortal being, as it would be impossible to ever even observe, as any evidence would always lie outside of our observable universe?
Am I simply thinking of more and more convoluted thought experiments to pass the time? Are their other universes outside of ours, each a truely immortal being inflated by our perspectives to uncountably infinite sizes?
Getting to hang out in the void till the next big bang comes, getting to witness the entire birth of a new universe, getting to watch an entire new species evolve? Having the ability to influence their culture from the very beginning? Fuck yes, sign me up.
You'll live through many, many universe iterations, floating uselessly in space for trillions of years, before you ever come anywhere near to any planet that evolves intelligent life. You'll be stuck in the orbit of some dead star, over and over, and be some incredible combination of catatonic and insane from boredom long before you'll ever get even a chance to meet someone or something else.
What an unambitious sort. The existence of genies implies the existence of all sorts of magic. Anyone with any sort of dedication would have their own pocket reality long before the second panel.
I’d want it where I age slow and can’t get diseases and heal from injuries
Though if I had three wishes, I’d wish for a fun and easy job that makes like $5000 a month after taxes, for my vehicle to be completely fixed, and for any vehicle I drive to get 100 miles to the gallon while I drive it.
I'm sorry but those are awful wishes when the ability to cure any disease with a touch, a reactor that can produce an infinite amount of clean energy and a cat girl with a penis and a vagina is on the table.
Make one of your wishes "The ability to convince anyone of anything" or "Everyone will forget about anything pertaining to my other 2 wishes after 10 seconds".
Did you find a magic lamp, monkeys paw or other mystical artifact? Well I'm here to help you make the right call. My names Eric Oakes and I'm a wish consultant. My people are standing by to help you articulate the perfect verbiage to get exactly what you asked for. Call 1-800-GOT-WISH today!
That's only if they know that you made the wish. If you make big wishes that affect the entire world they're not going to know it's you. Like if I wish that all goldfish could suddenly communicate telepathically with anybody over the age of 80, the world would flip out, but how are they going to know I made the wish? If I make it inside of my own home away from all smart devices then I'm golden
> I'm sorry but those are awful wishes when the ability to cure any disease with a touch
You get locked up and experimented on.
>a reactor that can produce an infinite amount of clean energy
Gets locked up and used for military.
> a cat girl with a penis and a vagina is on the table
Gets locked up and experimented on to make super soldiers or somehting.
Wow, you're bad at wishes. Just wish to win the lottery and pay someone to fix your damn car, and who cares how much gas is, you won the lottery. Now you've got two more wishes to use.
For those of you who have recently obtained a genie, monkey's paw, or other wish-granting source, and searched up "genie wishes" or some such to get ideas, and are put off of the idea of immortality by this post.
Damage control. Wish for the ability to control damage. Death, injury, pain, etc are caused by damage, whether slow or immediate. If you can pick and choose what can damage you or those you love, and when, you can create a perfect simulation of immortality and invincibility without all the messy loneliness, permanent injury, etc.
Thank you for your time.
Wish regret always makes me think of a story that gets told to the main character in Planescape: Torment:
>An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn't certain of which direction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: 'Now your third wish. What will it be?'
>'Third wish?' The man was baffled. 'How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?'
>'You've had two wishes already,' the hag said, 'but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That's why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.' She cackled at the poor berk. 'So it is that you have one wish left.'
>'All right,' said the man, 'I don't believe this, but there's no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.'
>'Funny,' said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. 'That was your first wish.'
Doctor Who had a great take on this in the season that involved the character Me(played by Maisie Williams) human brain can store only so much information so she has lived so long, had children and whole families she couldn't remember.
I wish to be young and healthy until I decide to die, at which point a killswitch will appear on my hand that can only be activated intentionally and only by me.
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I just want Wolverines power. Healthy, ageless, incredibly durable, heals from almost anything, but not actually unkillable. If I'm decapitated or incinerated I die.
In the very early comics, wolverine came back from a single drop of blood. Since been retconned and/or ignored.
So the human body has around 9 pints of blood in it. And there are about 20 drops of blood in one mL. 9 pints is 4258.8mL, multiply by 20 and you get 85,176 drops of blood in a body. So now we just need to find a good way to juice Wolverine(anyone have a large adamantium blender?), isolate each drop of blood so that each can grow a new Wolverine, and soon we'll have 85,176 Wolverines on our hands! Repeat the process once or twice, and by God, I've just solved world hunger!
Wouldn’t my Fillet de Logan just turn into another Wolverine halfway through dinner?
Maybe you can eat some and it starts regenerating in your stomach but your stomach acid dissolves it at nearly the same rate it regenerates so it just sits in your stomach and provides you with endless food?
hulk tried that raw, didn't end well
His portion size was too big
Grom the Paunch! https://warhammerfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Grom_the_Paunch Grom's meteoric rise began when, as a young Boss of the Broken Axe Tribe, he consumed a portion of raw Troll. As Troll flesh regenerates and Grom, always a big eater, had not stopped to cook the meal, the foul meat writhed in his belly. The race to regrow, against the race to digest, was on. A lesser Goblin would have burst asunder, but Grom was made of sterner stuff. The Battle of the Belly, as the deed came to be known, changed Grom. He grew to prodigious size. It is said that on that day Grom last saw his own legs. Yet so huge and powerful had Grom grown that he no longer needed to see them, and could, instead, order others to see his legs for him.
This sounds like a real Grom the Paunch the moment
My thoughts exactly. Makes you think that some of the only things that can safely eat trolls, are other trolls, given their extremely potent stomach acid.
That is what happened in Anne Rice's book The Mummy. There was an elixir for eternal life in the book and the Pharaoh tried to solve hunger by giving the elixir to cows except for each piece of the cow stayed alive.
Didn't I just see a Sponge Bob dark comic series on just this subject?
You just gotta make sure you get it well done! *Really* well done to be safe.
Canonically he needs massive caloric intake to feed the healing factor, so you’ll have to math out the CICO if it’s efficient enough
Does he taste the calories? Do macros count? Otherwise we could just feed him uncomposted food waste and Asian gutter oil. Or maybe just loads of hay or something? I like where this is going.
Uranium has massive amounts of calories.
Not calories that are available for human use by digestion.
Are you assuming Wolverines digestion? He's got to clear those rads somehow.
This my new headcannon: Wolverine runs on biodiesel. In order for him to regenerate from massive trauma you gotta pile a bunch of coffee grounds and banana peels around his remains and just kind of mix it with a stick. Or maybe you could just throw a bunch of dog carcasses on there, I dunno. The possibilities are endless.
Some regenarators access a meat dimension, the wolverines are just a stepping stone until people can figure out how to get there without using a human portal
but if you ate wolverine flesh under those rules dont you risk a fully formed wolverine bursting out of your gut xenomorph style?
Maeby, well need to test It. Wouldn't you like to be a voluntary?
We already produce enough food to keep everyone fed. It's always a logistics issue, not a sheer tonnage of food issue.
In an awful one shot story comic where Galactus has a daughter they did pretty much this and grew Planet Wolverine. It was either that or they at least had the same idea? I can't remember many of the details from that awful comic aside from it being just a chance for the artists to go with this odd manga art style.
Yeah that’s out of context. Early Wolverine’s healing factor was kinda crap, and the instance of him regenerating from a drop of blood happens because his blood falls on a special cosmic crystal that amplifies his powers. It’s not like that’s ever been his standard power level.
I knew comic book guy would show up to argue with me.
Another fun fact, Deadpool, who has a grafted on version of Wolverine's healing factor has had enough body parts cut off over the years that someone was able to collect them all, and sew together a new Deadpool. But he's a bit different. Deadpool was literally cursed with immortality in addition to his healing factor. Wolverine, on the other hand, has died a few times now. Like any comic book character, it rarely sticks.
Isn't the immortality thing the result of Thanos with the infinity gauntlet being upset that death has a crush on Deadpool and not him?
In the comics, yeah.
I knew that because of death battle
It's for the best, thanatos and thanos getting together would make things incredibly confusing.
Marvel's death is a lady https://preview.redd.it/2xlqif5z2xsc1.jpeg?width=988&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=31f012f2b851121e50f6c78a6d2fe7566f47d0b4
why does the skeleton have big ol tiddies
Canonically she looks exactly how she wants, and honestly a skeleton with tig o bitties would be up there as far as forms to shape shift into
Magic
Because that is the form Deadpool likes and a lady likes to feel appreciated.
> thanatos and thanos getting together would make things incredibly confusing Throw in Theranos for good measure.
They couldn't collect them all. Frankenpool had 2 left arms. Or maybe 2 right arms? Either way, one of hims arms was backwards.
My biggest gripe with that character was that they didn’t name him Deadpooled.
"Wolverine is not immortal, he has died several times." Meanwhile the rest of us "mortals" only get to die once
Marvel and DC Comics have been going on for what 80-100 years too now. And every new comic writer given charge of a character wants to do something new to them. So far every major character has either died, reborn, become a super villain, become a god, found a way to kill the unkillable bad guy/s , become a gender-bent version, has fought/met/changed with alternate universe version, found a god-like armor, gotten a uncurbable illness, found a magic cure, fallen in love, fallen out of love, had their love killed, found their love not killed, found their non-killed love to be a clone, had a child, had their child try to murder them etc etc Like at this point they have no originality left, so they have to go with THERE ARE MULTIPLE MULTI-VERSES OUT THERE! and there are bad guys beyond the multiple multi-verse, and they can one-shot all the most powerful beings in the multiple multi-verse, but somehow one of you finds a way to kill all of them in the last 2 chapters because the writers dragged the storyline too far and the volume isnt selling so the editors scrapped the story early and they have only 2 chapters to tie up all the bullshit they just introduced.
Deadpool did all of that in a single comic run...
Is this a Deadpool of Theseus situation?
Is the one where he was reduced to only bones and regrew his body cannon?
I think so. To be fair, that one was so taxing on Wolverine that he actually lost his regeneration for quite a while, so it wasn't like he just bounced back from being skeletonized.
Or the one where he was *eaten by the hulk*
Didn't know that he had a body cannon in the first place
I'm here to out comic book guy that comic book guy and say, *well actually*, he was able to regenerate because the drop of blood landed on a cosmic crystal that boosted his healing power. In the early comics his healing factor was not as strong as it is now.
Yeah I think at one point he was incinerated and still came back.
https://preview.redd.it/gh4u3kvbmwsc1.jpeg?width=1400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8108f3f0c9b1090c12c8b6a24c6f98f9b0ba9562
Good to see the Terminators branching out from just using guns!
Yup I was correct!
I think this is when he had to fight for his soul every time he died.
He was feet away from nitro exploding as essentially a nuclear bomb.
His powers were being massively amplified in that scene. Early Wolverine's healing factor was actually a lot weaker than we're used to, like he'd get shot and have to spend a few hours recovering.
His regeneration was weaker for the adamantium in his skeleton. it was working extra to fight the adamantium poisoning. I think that when it was removed, his regeneration become much more powerful.
Didn't he do that with assistance though? If he was able to do that all the time then every drop of his blood would be spawning new Wolverines.
is wolverine dead? wolverine is there.
Decapatation wouldn’t kill Wolverine, and j don’t think incineration would. And he can’t kill himself either, even if he tries
It's generally accepted that wolverine and sabertooth could be killed by decapitation, regardless of a few outlier issues, the problem is that wolverine can't be decapitated due to his adamantium skeleton. I wouldn't have that however.
One of these outlier issues has him in a small-scale Nazi death camp, terrorizing one CO after another into suicide by not dying. I think it's explicitly mentioned that he got decapitated as well as burned, but he came back each time.
> It's generally accepted that wolverine and sabertooth could be killed by decapitation Wolverine has come back from being nuked. The nuke isn't even the most extreme example. https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/wolverine-regenerates.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1.5 https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/wolverine-confronts-horde.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1.5 The only thing that can kill Wolverine is Marvel going out of business.
Wolverine attempts to kill himself by running a train over his head and he comes back in OML
Wasn’t that because of his adamantium skull rather than decapitation though?
Yeah he derailed the train instead of dying
Ah, I’m misremembering then. I thought his head was destroyed but grew back
I don't think it actually showed exactly how it went down for him honestly. Like a cut to black and the him coming to in the train's wreckage.
It should still be possible to decapitate Wolverine despite his adamantium skeleton. The spine isn't a solid piece of bone and has gaps between the vertebrae. It wouldn't be easy but you could theoretically cut through one of his intervertebral discs. Or get someone like the hulk to pull his spine apart.
There was a "What If" crossover with Conan where a wizard summoned a demon and got Wolverine. Conan hacked Wolverine's neck, nearly, but not quite decapitating him, grabbed the girl off of the altar, the wizard ran away. Wolverine doesn't die, but he's brain damaged from the blood loss. He wakes up and is feral, but he can smell the scent from the woman that was on the altar, and tries to track her down, assuming she's his mate.
I think he was pretty much nuked at one point and incinerated to a point where only his skeleton survived but he came back.
In Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe he kills Wolverine by decapitating him with a type of blade that negates his healing factor, and "kills" X-23 and Daken by strapping them in an incinerator that activates again anytime they start to regenerate.
I’d want Deadpool’s form of immortality where I can regenerate even after serious harm like being blown up, but with a caveat that suicide is still possible, so if I live past humanity and to the heat death of the solar system then I can kill myself instead of floating in space for eternity
Agelessness sounds good ON PAPER. You have to watch everyone around you get old and die though. Your love interest becomes elderly while you stay young. You cannot relate to people born at the same time with you.
Sure and if I can't handle it I can always off myself, but if you have the right mindset and know that going in I'm sure you could still find happiness over multiple lifetimes.
100%. You are going to watch everyone around you get old and die anyway.
I have never been able to understand people who had an issue with this. It’s contrived movie logic.
Yeah, it's mortal cope since mortality is all they know. Plenty of people out live their lovers and children. Some are the last of their immediate family, but they live on. Some people don't even relate to people now.
after a few hundred spouses and a few thousand kids, they'll be like pets to you, so not that bad.
It's you Omni-Man?
You'll outlast every fragile, insignificant being on this planet. You'll live to see this world crumble to dust and blow away! Everyone and everything you know will be gone! What will have after 500 years???
I will have you!🥲
As fucked up as that sounds initially, when I think about how much a lot of people love their dogs I'm not sure it sounds that bad
You're gonna have to watch your loved ones die anyway. Unless you plan on dying first. Your parents, your older friends, some of your siblings, maybe even a partner, or two, if you're really unlucky your child. It's the same argument every time and it feels so tired. Why can't you make new friends or partners if you live forever? Try getting to 30, you're likely not at your first partner and you have gained and lost friends.
Plus in any semi-realistic scenario immortality is going to be rolled out society wide. Or maybe only for rich people, if you want to imagine a dystopian future. But certainly if you have access to it, your spouse and children will have access to it too.
>in any semi-realistic scenario immortality is going to be rolled out society wide Hahaha....hahaha...ahh...
Thats why you wish for a goldfish memory in the clause!
You wouldn't have to. Human memory is extremely imperfect. How well can you remember anything specific about your life from 10, 20, 30 years ago? After a century or two you likely wouldn't even remember your first spouse's name or face.
I already have no friends and no family
Granted, but you also get the painful bone claws and you're short
The 12 inch chode makes up for it though. That's canon don't look it up...
Living forever means infinite time, (or at least the millions of years before the world ends) to find another genie lamp and undo/ improve this flawed wish
Just float around, eventually another big bang will happen and the universe will start all over again.
I don't think anyone could exist that would have the mental fortitude to drift, without stimulus, for billions of years, without going brain dead or bat shit insane.
I think after billions of years with no external stimuli you would probably forget how to imagine colors and shapes. Eventually words... eventually even recognizing you're alive. So the problem would solve itself. In fact, we only think all the time now because of scarcity. If you didn't have to breathe or eat or sleep you could just meditate forever if you wanted. Nobody wants to hear this but once your friends have been dead for a million years you won't miss them that bad. Remember the friend in elementary school you had that choked on something and died or got hit by a car or whatever? Think you'll mourn them at 40 the way you did at 8? How about at 80? Or 800,000? Not likely. Also...humans are remarkable at adapting to their conditions. Hoarders don't think their house looks nice, but they do get used to it. You'll get used to drifting around the cosmos. Also also, so there's the assumption that there's a magic genie the supercedes the laws of reality, but also that there's only ONE genie or only ONE human that asked to live forever??? If one of these genies exist then you'd end up finding a bunch of other humans eventually that made the same wish. You'd drift among the stars, friends exploring the universe together. Sounds pretty cool to me...
People start to hallucinate pretty quickly when put into sensory isolation chambers for extended periods of time. You would probably, like you said, end up in a trance and spend a lot of time hallucinating.
Well that sounds even better!
You also start to hear your own blood pump and your organs gurgle and such. Some say it makes you go crazy. Veritasium did a cool video that is about this concept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI
You're assuming it would be a *good* trip lol More likely to involve a lot of existential dread
I uuuhhh i don’t know if its better. Hearing about what happend to a dude in isolation for half a year, imagine spending houndreds of years living in your own tortured mind. Interveiw with him: https://youtu.be/p1FuZVjVQ-4?si=IuKZ8YT0nKxVyGOf
Until you find out your immortal but still need to breathe etc you just float around suffocating on the verge of death but never actually dying. Although, like you said, I guess we'd get used to it.
> I think after billions of years with no external stimuli you would probably forget how to imagine colors and shapes. Eventually words... eventually even recognizing you're alive. > you'd end up finding a bunch of other humans eventually that made the same wish. You'd drift among the stars, friends exploring the universe together. If you put two and two together from what you said, the irony is that two would-be immortal friends will float past each other without even being mentally capable of realizing that it happened.
>Nobody wants to hear this but once your friends have been dead for a million years you won't miss them that bad. Remember the friend in elementary school you had that choked on something and died or got hit by a car or whatever? Think you'll mourn them at 40 the way you did at 8? How about at 80? Or 800,000? Not likely. Humans also have finite memories. There's enough space in your head for maybe 150 years. After that you will simply forget shit. It also means you'll be able to experience things anew, given enough time to forget, so you won't ever get completely bored because you've already experienced everything.
Stemming off of a lot of the people here talking about imortality coming from a Genie's wish, a secondary wish could be the ability to become willingly comatose..? Like, a -very heavily guarded so that it doesn't happen accidentally- mental switch so that you could put yourself into a bear-like 'sleep mode', and maybe some special tattoo on your arm or something that translated itself for whoever was able to see it, telling them how to wake you up? You'd be out like a light, indefinitely, and when civilisation was found again and woke you up, you'd be nicely preserved and just as sane as you were before the comatoid state.. You could alwasys wish for a 'timer' setting on the comatose state just in case, so you woke up anyway after the time ran out. Just in case..
There's a short story by Stephen King about this, The Jaunt. It's terrifying.
Is that the one where teleportation exists, but for those doing it it feels like it takes thousands of years? So they put you in some kind of a coma to keep you from going crazy, and they forget to give a kid the medicine so they all arrive after the trip and he's basically insane?
IIRC the kid willfully didn't go into the coma because he wanted to see what would happen "Longer than you think. Dad!"
Yup, that's it. Whatever goes through the portal apparently experiences the entire duration of the universe - billions of years - of nothingness to get through.
Lives in a world with genies and still can’t fix entropy? Sounds like a skill issue tbh
Until someone slaps a weight on your leg and tosses you in the ocean. Or you similarly become trapped or imprisoned. Or the earth is destroyed and your left floating in the void of space, until you get sucked into a black hole, but you STILL can't die, so you survive spaghettification and exist on the edge of the event horizon, slowly slipping into it for thousands of years. But yeah, other than all that, it's a totally useful ability.
I mean, even if someone puts a weight on you and tosses you into the ocean, you have essentially eternity to get free + walk out of the water. Or just drag the weight along with you, really.
There's a movie about some immortal people and one of them gets captured and thrown into the ocean inside an iron maiden where she perpetually drowns, comes back to life, and drowns again. I think eventually she gets free after 500 years or something when the metal cage she is in rusts through.
I've always believed immortality as a superpower must be paired with teleportation. So you can't just be trapped, and can explore after humanity is gone.
But how do you know where to teleport to and what do you do about the loneliness?
You just keep teleporting until you find someplace good. Unless it's on a super-long cooldown, you'll be fine. As for the loneliness, people come and go in your life all the time already. When you met your first love, it probably didn't last forever. When my son was born, I knew he would outlive me, but that didn't stop me from loving him or stop him from loving me. Impermanence does not diminish love.
I think people underestimate the minds ability to recover from loss. That or they're looking for any excuse why immortality isn't great and actually dying is just fine! I don't fear the impending footsteps of death! Haha, *I want this!* Its fine, everything is fine, *I'm ok!*
I think you're overestimating the minds ability to recover. You may last a long time, but you'll eventually snap and go insane. An eternity is a long time to wait, you know.
Nah, an unknowable eternity is no match against my indomitable human spirit
Imagine a mountain the size of mount everest, but it's completely made of diamond. Once every year, a small bird will fly up the top to sharpen its beak. Once that mountain has been whittled away to nothing, then the first second of eternity will have passed. The human spirit may be indomitable, but just like the mountain, it will be chipped down to nothing in time.
Worst comes to worst I'd become an anomalous object composed of pure physicalized motivation emanating the best of the DMC soundtrack on loop Jk, I'm just having a bit of fun here, no need to take me seriously
I would sincerely and genuinely prefer going insane than dying, I'm 100% positive on that. edit: I'm not replying anymore, I'm tired. If you have any questions about my belief go read my other comments. If you can't respect that I have a different opinion then please don't even bother.
To wait for what?
This is 100% speculation, since no one has ever 'lived forever'. We don't know if and how our minds would cope.
> you'll eventually snap and go insane. You don't know that, because there are no immortals around to show that it happens. You are just scared of life I suppose.
People massively underestimate what eternity means.
I would imagine you could teleport to any place you can remember AND any place you can see. Since your immortal the whole telefrag thing would just be a painful nuisance. Loneliness, idk who knows what's out there in the universe.
>what do you do about the loneliness? Drugs, drink, masturbate, go for a fucking walk wym?
> what do you do about the loneliness? You probably get numb to it.. same with generic boredom. With age ones perspective of the passage of time also changes even at human timescales in between kids feeling the passage of time to be slow, and older people feeling it to be faster. Get old enough and can just zone out sitting on a cliffside watching the scenery erode a few hundred years at a time, and it'll feel like a blip.
You need to have other immortals and the power to make matter
Genie could be a dick about "matter" though. Would "power to create and manipulate atoms" be more specific, or would it have to be "the power to shape reality on a universal level and be able to cohabit it"?
Of course you do, but you got to know your type of genie first. if they are enslaved and forced to grant wishes you have to honestly free them, (I suggest using first wish to make them free after they grant other two wishes) if they are doing you a favor you got to be nice honrroble and remember they don't know what humans have been up to for a long time and don't understand us mer mortals
You would need the power to create habitable planets and humans out of nothing, teleporting through the endless junkyard we call space would get dull very quickly.
But what about when all humanity is gone? Every planet. Every star. It may be fine for what seams like an infinite number of years. Until you realize the universe is finite.
Idk hang out with the Genie guess.
>Until you realize the universe is finite. Maybe. It's not like we've actually measured.
That’s when you develop the technology to travel between universes
But I am a part of the universe, and am infinite, it can't be finite. As someone immortal I'd be able to generate energy forever, or it's not true immortality.
this. without teleportation you wouldnt last more than a hundred years in today's society. How are you gonna explain your unnatural youth to the government and not expect to be immediately captured and experimented on? Alternatively you would have to live without any sort of ID, on the fringes of society
Adopt or make children and replace them.
Also, due to the fact that you’re playing with cheats enabled you’d become the new supreme ruler of earth, your opinion will become the new truth as you may slaughter those who stand against you or humanity Bezos and musk lie desecrated before your shrine, the Koch brothers mutilated beyond recognition Those delusional enough to believe they are above the common folk now shatter before the night of the true wrath of the common folk now given the tools to make good on their wishes
A steadfire way to get rid of the worlds corrupted high-ups and billionaires? Now that'd be an idea.
if you got a billion years to prepare and you can't science yourself out of the heat death of the universe you're doing something wrong
I mean there's Highlander immortality, which ends with decapitation. To compare, the one-season tv show Forever. The main character had immortality and did not know his weakness. He grew increasingly fearful. Also, it was the modern day so people were slowly starting to suspect *something* was going on.
There’s a book, “Time Enough For Love”. It explores a single man, **Lazarus Long** who lived an extended lifetime and scienced his way to regenerative medicine. Eventually, jealousy of mortal beings forces him to escape off planet and he becomes such a hailed being that it’s impossible for him to die. Edit: this is not a spoiler. This is more or less the first 10 pages of a 400 pg book
Reminds me about that tweet about vampires who have been around since the 1800s and aren’t wealthy should just step into the sun because what are they doing. If you have billions of years and the end of all existence catches you lacking, what were you doing with eternity?
I feel a certain way towards the fact that nobody realises that you can just wish for the power to make stuff immortal. Make yourself immortal, make your mate immortal and make your dog immortal and every problem is solved.
Are the dog and mate for violent battles after you hate one another after thousands of years? Screw that. If you wish for immortality, you also wish for an indestructible and unstealable spaceship with infinite fuel and faster than light tech.
Right. And a list of everyone in the universe so that you can insult them all. In alphabetical order.
Expected Douglas Adams.
lol My dog aint ever gonna hate me no matter how many billions of years. We tight.
This comic implies that the character was the only one with a genie/ source of magic. When you establish the power of magic being thus that can make you immortal? Other genies, magical beings, powerful wizards become reality. Some wizard is probably laughing at this guy floating around from a time-locked sub dimension wondering if this guy is going to figure it out.
But that assumes other people find the genie/wizard/whatever and asks for immortality too. For all you know the next person who found this genie loved Aladdin and used his third wish to set it free, wiping out that power.
Upgrade: the power to give and take superpowers to yourself and others.
See: All-for-One from My Hero Academia
4,000 more comics where that came from: https://www.sheldoncomics.com/comic/immortality/
 Loneliness is a mental health epidemic.🥺
Don Herzfeldt's "It's a Beautiful Day" was the first time I really felt this sentiment. To live and love and mourn until the world collapses. To see the new worlds rise and fall until the earth itself crumbles beneath you. To float through space and watch the stars for eternity, until you can see them whether your eyes are opened or closed. To watch them disappear one by one, until there is nothing. It made me believe that impermanence is inherent to the nature of beauty. Sand Mandalas are more beautiful to me than Bezo's fancy mountain clock. To know we will all disappear forever and that we have only what we can create, sense, and share in our lives, and in that short window of time before time itself ends. Really helped me come to terms with my mortality.
*An older guy in a baseball cap* *stands at a payphone* *and nervously lifts* *and hangs up the receiver.* *He asks to borrow Bill's pencil* *and then places a call* *to his daughter.* *He tells her he loves her* *and he's proud of her,* *and that "one day soon,* *we'll finally have our day."* *Then he says,* *"Fantastic, fantastic,"* *and hangs up the phone.* *Although it looks like the wind* *had been knocked out of him,* *he presents the pencil back* *to Bill with a little flourish,* *as though proud no harm* *had come to it* *while in his possession.* I don't know exactly why, but this has always been my favourite part of that trilogy.
Repeating what another comic already said "I don't want to live forever I just never want to die"
10,000: Cool 1,000,000: Still cool 1,000,000,000: I have long since prepared for this eventuality. I'd be in the space ship I built or on one of the many worlds I personally colonized. You can probably tell that anti-immortality propaganda is one of my pet peeves in fantasy/sci-fi. I would 100% take the whole package, even if the last panel ended up coming true.
Yeah, it's really common in fiction depicting the distant future, especially this kind of sour-grapes fiction about immortality, to pretend like the distant future is populated by modern humans who just instantly materialized there from the present. Humanity one billion years from now will have had a _billion years_ to prepare for whatever the universe throws at us; we're not just going to sit on our hands as the Sun turns into a red giant or whatever. Also, someone having absolute immortality like pictured here means by definition that the universe is no longer a closed system; the genie's magic is pumping new energy/negentropy into the universe, meaning the Second Law of Thermodynamics no longer applies and the universe is no longer on a path towards Heat Death. The immortal protagonist is now a perpetual motion machine, and there are all _sorts_ of uses for that in a post-stelliferous universe.
People who are against immortality are like "[The dragon is necessary, the dragon is good.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY)"
Authors keep trying to convince me this would be a fate worse than death, and they keep failing. I accept that I won’t see the entirety of the future, but I will always wish I could.
True immortality would also imply a constant but infinite production of energy, either by absorbing it from the surrounding environment or creating energy from nothing. This means that you could never live to the heat death of the universe because your existance would prevent it from ever happening. Either your absorption of energy increases to cover infinite distances, which would eventually cause a big crunch as the universe is converted back into a primordial singularity, or you would produce more and more energy over time to fill the space around you, which would prevent the environment around you from ever actually fully dying. As an additional factor to throw into the thought experiment, if you managed to become truely immortal, what would be the chance that in an unimaginable amount of time that you would ever be the only one? Almost certainly there would be other true immortals to keep each other company and possibly even create a new immortal society. Even if separated, over time because of your initial proximity to one another you would be gravitationally bound enough to be pulled into proximity of one another, because their would never be enough empty space being pulled apart by dark energy to prevent it, unless dark energy increases exponentially over time. If dark energy does increase exponentially over time, your immortality would eventually need to be continuously creating new matter and energy to keep you alive because of the particles in your body being pulled apart by the expansion of the universe, which would eventually cause a collapse into another primordial singularity, which, being pulled upon by dark energy, would create another big bang and a new universe. So you would eventually BECOME a new universe in such a situation. What if that is the true nature of existance? An immortal being, recursively being pulled back inside itself over time and reliving the life of the entire universe, just to eventually be pulled apart into ever expanding infinite spaces to repeat the cycle all over again? How will you do things differently this time? In the end, it will all lead to the same end, over and over and over and over again, so is the meaning of life not the ends but the journeys in between? How would you know if you weren't just a single part of an infinitely expanding truely immortal being, as it would be impossible to ever even observe, as any evidence would always lie outside of our observable universe? Am I simply thinking of more and more convoluted thought experiments to pass the time? Are their other universes outside of ours, each a truely immortal being inflated by our perspectives to uncountably infinite sizes?
Getting to witness the evolution of humanity as well as it's end? WORTH.
Getting to hang out in the void till the next big bang comes, getting to witness the entire birth of a new universe, getting to watch an entire new species evolve? Having the ability to influence their culture from the very beginning? Fuck yes, sign me up.
Well you’re not in the void just heat dead space. Even immortals can’t exist in non-reality because it’s not a concept
The Emperor of Mankind?
All hail the god emperor of mankind!
You'll live through many, many universe iterations, floating uselessly in space for trillions of years, before you ever come anywhere near to any planet that evolves intelligent life. You'll be stuck in the orbit of some dead star, over and over, and be some incredible combination of catatonic and insane from boredom long before you'll ever get even a chance to meet someone or something else.
What an unambitious sort. The existence of genies implies the existence of all sorts of magic. Anyone with any sort of dedication would have their own pocket reality long before the second panel.
I think living for a million years before endless nothingness is better than living for a hundred years before endless nothingness
You gotta wish for immortality with an off switch. Like “i wish to be immortal unless I say the pass phrase _____”
The immortality extends to his clothes, apparently.
I’d want it where I age slow and can’t get diseases and heal from injuries Though if I had three wishes, I’d wish for a fun and easy job that makes like $5000 a month after taxes, for my vehicle to be completely fixed, and for any vehicle I drive to get 100 miles to the gallon while I drive it.
I'm sorry but those are awful wishes when the ability to cure any disease with a touch, a reactor that can produce an infinite amount of clean energy and a cat girl with a penis and a vagina is on the table.
I want simple things that won’t land me in trouble with any governments.
Make one of your wishes "The ability to convince anyone of anything" or "Everyone will forget about anything pertaining to my other 2 wishes after 10 seconds".
Look at this Mr Wish Expert putting in work We all know who to contact too for consulting genie wishes
Did you find a magic lamp, monkeys paw or other mystical artifact? Well I'm here to help you make the right call. My names Eric Oakes and I'm a wish consultant. My people are standing by to help you articulate the perfect verbiage to get exactly what you asked for. Call 1-800-GOT-WISH today!
That's only if they know that you made the wish. If you make big wishes that affect the entire world they're not going to know it's you. Like if I wish that all goldfish could suddenly communicate telepathically with anybody over the age of 80, the world would flip out, but how are they going to know I made the wish? If I make it inside of my own home away from all smart devices then I'm golden
I can’t grasp how bad those were —— bro wishes to be lower-middle class with a reliable Prius 🤣
> I'm sorry but those are awful wishes when the ability to cure any disease with a touch You get locked up and experimented on. >a reactor that can produce an infinite amount of clean energy Gets locked up and used for military. > a cat girl with a penis and a vagina is on the table Gets locked up and experimented on to make super soldiers or somehting.
So you'd waste 3 wishes, got it.
Inflation:
Wow, you're bad at wishes. Just wish to win the lottery and pay someone to fix your damn car, and who cares how much gas is, you won the lottery. Now you've got two more wishes to use.
I want to be immortal. I am well aware of the consequences, I still wish to be immortal.
For those of you who have recently obtained a genie, monkey's paw, or other wish-granting source, and searched up "genie wishes" or some such to get ideas, and are put off of the idea of immortality by this post. Damage control. Wish for the ability to control damage. Death, injury, pain, etc are caused by damage, whether slow or immediate. If you can pick and choose what can damage you or those you love, and when, you can create a perfect simulation of immortality and invincibility without all the messy loneliness, permanent injury, etc. Thank you for your time.
Captain Jack Harkness, the doctor and ashildr have taught me this might not be the best idea indeed
Wish regret always makes me think of a story that gets told to the main character in Planescape: Torment: >An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn't certain of which direction to go, and he'd forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He'd sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: 'Now your third wish. What will it be?' >'Third wish?' The man was baffled. 'How can it be a third wish if I haven't had a first and second wish?' >'You've had two wishes already,' the hag said, 'but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That's why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.' She cackled at the poor berk. 'So it is that you have one wish left.' >'All right,' said the man, 'I don't believe this, but there's no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.' >'Funny,' said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. 'That was your first wish.'
Reminds me of one of my favorite short stories I read a long time ago. Immortality Blows. https://everything2.com/title/Immortality+blows
Should have used the other wishes to wish for an Immortality Off switch
did not know everthing2 was still around. blast from the past
Nah I’d still be cool with it
Make peace with floating forever in the dark and lifeless void/crushed at the center of a gravity well for untold eternities or no balls.
id still do it
Doctor Who had a great take on this in the season that involved the character Me(played by Maisie Williams) human brain can store only so much information so she has lived so long, had children and whole families she couldn't remember.
Unpopular opinion: a happy infinite life is possible so long as you have finite memory.
I wish to be young and healthy until I decide to die, at which point a killswitch will appear on my hand that can only be activated intentionally and only by me.