Immortality

"Who wants to live forever? As it turns out, most beings wouldn't say no… "

– Total War: Warhammer

"Immortality, Eternal Life, STAND POWER!"

– Dio Brando

A fact of life is its finite nature, eventually, we all die. A lot of words have been used to contemplate this and its implications but never the less it is a fact that humans are typically predisposed to avoid as long as possible. Natural Selection tends to weed out those beings who throw their lives away without a second thought. Even those that deeply believe that an eternal paradise awaits them beyond this mortal coil typically don't rush to it off the roof of the nearest tall building. Vast amounts of money are spent on measures to extend our limited time here in this world.

As such, it's easy to see why Immortality is a common element of fantasy and science fiction. The same goes for Longevity, in which the lifespan is extended by a significant margin.

Before jumping into fantasy shit, we must note that biological immortality actually exists in the animal kingdom. It is most prevalent in Cnidarians, as hydras and some jellyfishes either don't show any signs of aging or revert back into immature form.

Types of Immortality

• Biological Immortality: Simply put you stop aging and can go on indefinitely. You can still die mind you if get crushed, incinerated, blown up, etc., but there's no ticking clock.
  • Life Stealing: A life stealer can attain biological immortality by (one way or another) stealing life from others.
  • Alchemical Immortality: You found some special item in order to cheat death. Most famous of them all is the Philosopher's Stone, a legendary holy grail of a relic that can turn iron into gold, cure illnesses and grant eternal life.
• Sequential Immortality: Your body can die, but when that happens you simply move to another one. The benign version of this involves bodies that are blank slates waiting for a consciousness. The asshole version in contrast involves taking over someone else's body and either suppressing the original mind or replacing it.
  • Hive Mind: Parallel version of the above - you have several bodies, but they all share a single mind through telepathy or something. If you can add new bodies to this network, you're immortal until you run out of spares.
• Uploading: A science fiction concept, a computer interfaces with your brain to preserve your consciousness as software running on it's substrates. It's all well and cool this way...provided that your system is well-maintained and doesn't develop any...irregularities.
• Undeath: You can't die because you're already dead. Probably the most explored sort of immortality considering the many varieties of undead exist in every fictional work in existence as well as the sorts of immortality each provides.
• True Immortality: See Perpetuals, you simply can't die. This can be a bad thing if you get buried alive, blown into little bits as you'll be suffering every bit of that. Especially agonizing without any manner of regeneration.

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