I'm not sure immortality from aging and disease is something that should be sought after until we've gotten off this rock. We're a warlike species and being confined to a single planet when the only path to death is murder seems ill-advised given our psychological tendencies.
No, we're by far the best thing that's happened to this planet.
Yes, we've caused immeasurable suffering to ourselves and other creatures. But that's the default state of life in the cosmos. Everything suffers. For no reason.
But here we are a life form with ability to
realize the pain and suffering we cause. Moreover, people actively work to improve the lot of their fellow travelers in greater and greater capacity over time. We have gone from chopping down every nearby forest and burning every rival village in times of famine to creating international relief networks and managing ecosystems. We cannot help but continue getting smarter and improving ourselves morally, ethically and technologically. Soon will come a time where we won't need to strip the Earth or harm other creatures to sustain ourselves.
Moreover, the only way that life on Earth will survive in the long run is if we reach the stars and take life with us. We are Earth's reproductive system. As with many animals, reproduction is an energetically taxing exercise. We are harming the Earth because right now we
have to in order to grow and fulfill our cosmic life reproductive function.
If I could say that mankind has a purpose to exist then I'd have to say it's to keep the torch of life alive in an empty, hostile cosmos.
To be honest, I'm also not sure we'd be loading up onto colony ships en masse if we would survive the journey. The quality of life would be abysmal compared to even a crowded Earth. My point here is that where we're at technologically would make immortality more of a disadvantage than something that makes us 'better'.
The quality of life would be great - you're thinking an order of magnitude too small for the size of a colony ship. Any society that is capable of building a colony ship could easily scale it up and definitely would want to for many reasons. They will have populations equivalent to large terrestrial cities and contain as much physical volume, industry, agriculture and entertainment as large cities if not more.
People can easily spend their entire lives inside the limits of Manhattan and never suffer for it.
It depends on how you define "quality of life" and "boredom."
I wouldn't want to be immortal unless I could also be healthy and have enough to do or think about to keep from going insane from boredom.
This puts me in mind of the Star Trek episode "Plato's Stepchildren" - about a group of immortals with psychokinesis, who bully and torment the only member of their community who doesn't have that power.
Why would you get bored? Or rather,
how? An infinite life span means infinite possibilities. You'll be able to do anything you want with decent long-term planning. Eventually you'd be able to do anything you want even
without planning as technology improves to the point where we will reach a Star Trek-like state of resource availability. Money
will become obsolete - all we need is better across-the-board technology and we will erase scarcity.
We're already on the exponential curve of technological growth, the point of economic liberation I'm talking about probably isn't more than a century off in my estimation.
There's nowhere you can go on a ship and one minor mistake or malfunction is an immediate end to everything. The most minor of tasks requires extreme overhead, making everything in your daily life a task of labour. Whereas on a habitable world this labour results in it becoming easier as time passes by, on a ship it'd simply become more and more difficult. There would be no innovation, no new sources of high quality entertainment. You're essentially trapped in a tin can where every action is an immense effort for several lifetimes.
Nah, dawg. I'm not signing on for that.
This is all wrong.
The ships will be massive. There really wouldn't be a single point of failure - the chance of one of them blowing up is about the same as NYC getting hit with an asteroid tomorrow. It's conceivable but highly unlikely.
As to boredom and lack of entertainment, again I point to NYC and ask if you
really couldn't make a go of staying there forever? Because that's what a colony ship would be like. Only bigger, more advanced and with all the modern features.
Plus you guys act like it will be cut off from Earth. It never would be! It'd be in constant contact and though the time lag will get extreme, no colony ship would ever be truly isolated in every sense of the word.
The only thing more ecologically destructive than a rich Westerner is an immortal rich Westerner, who would of course be immortal long before anyone else. Also, old ideas wouldn't die with the old farts but would just kind of stick around in near-perpetuity, as would dictators and so on. Further, this immortality wouldn't be real immortality: people would still die, it's just that death would literally always come in a shocking abrupt way like an accident rather than as an expected "well, we knew something would get him, he was 93 after all" type of event. And there would be no natural retirement age, limiting turnover while condemning people to work indefinitely until they had somehow accumulated enough to live on for an indefinite length of time. And so on, and so forth. Death is not a bug, it's a feature.
Personally, I want to die someday. I don't want to live forever as long as I have good physical health, I want to die after I've put in my time.
I am of the opinion that given enough time, people can and do change. Given infinite life spans, people will have time to adjust to, accept and eventually become comfortable with all sorts of other people and ideologies. Take gay marriage acceptance - sure dying old people helped society progress but I personally know a lot of older folk that came to terms with it and even accepted it as a good thing just from being exposed to gay culture (if there is such a thing) over time. My own grandmother made such a transformation in the 4 years I lived with her.
