No. Life has (can have) meaning regardless of the length of time it lasts. Life is represented by what we do while living, not by how long we live. That isn't to say that life cannot become meaningless after a period of time.
I really have no, clear idea of how long i would like to live. I know that it would be based on many factors, not least of which are health and mobility. One thing is certain, I would want the ability to say "Enough! Lemme outta here!"
Well, I would say “no”. The biological function of this human machine is only the mechanics of life. What gives like meaning is how you live it. The experiences, the love, the wonder of viewing the world and how you affect others in a positive way. Leaving the world or just a small part of it better than when you found it. A line from one of my favorite poems which I have posted on this site: “The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and YOU may contribute a verse.” Walt Whitman.
Why would living forever change anything as far as meaning? It means our environment would be constantly changing and new challenges would abound. This is predicated on living a relatively pain free, comfortable life
In the first place, life is not meaningless. Life is a grand tour, full of wonder, awe, beauty, and mystery. How long a body stays alive has no bearing on the issue.
My personal opinion is that the sense of personhood as a separate individual is an illusion, sustained by memory. Perhaps all these overlapping lives should be thought of as a single entity. Even if your body lived a thousand years, I think that you would be a different person. You’d have no use for those old memories from a thousand years ago—they’d be hard to manage. The question of personal identity is tricky. I address that issue in “The Staggering Implications of the Mystery of Existence”, available on the Kindle Store.
Would that be sometime. To live in a mansion in the sky with extreme happiness for eternity.
It might be more possible to be reincarnated as a wise 1000 year Old Oak tree. As long as a Christian dose not come along and cut me into Bibles.
Immortality makes life more meaningful if your meaning for life is the pursuit of knowledge and happiness. Imagine having infinite opportunities to experience life and learn from them. Imagine infinite opportunities to meet new people and create meaningful and happy infinite relationships with them. No more death in the family means less grief in life. The benefits are more than i can explain in this comment.
No. Not any more than it's suddenly meaningless because we don't believe in god. Meaning does not come from god or from mortality. It is found by each individual in each moment.
It's true that belief in god can be a shaky basis for meaning (until the abstraction starts leaking, which it invariably does, sooner or later). It's true that the pressure of mortality can focus you and presumably the absence of that pressure could unfocus you. But what would it matter? With unlimited time, you would just be focused by unhappiness caused by bad life choices; that works, too.
Besides, any sort of immortality that's absolute is a fantasy that's never going to happen. The closest we'll likely come to "living forever" is biological immortality, where disease and aging are taken out of the picture. But you can still die by misadventure, so you still can expect to eventually have an accident and die. So in that scenario you would still have always some nonzero possibility of dying in the next moment, just like now.
I suppose it's just possible that a long way in the future it will be possible to move one's memory and consciousness into a newly-grown body or robot of some kind, without compromising quality of life. That's a problem for another day, sort of the opposite of borrowing trouble. In terms of what's remotely likely to be true in the next few generations, I don't see the challenge of finding meaning changing substantially, other than hopefully getting rid of silly religious notions about how that's accomplished.
I don't think so. But if we had infinity time our lives would be lived completely different. So what is meaningful to you would change as well
I think the meaning of life has very little to do with its length. It's all about what you fill it with and the people you surround yourself with. And what you contribute to the lives of others that give life meaning. If you can live forever you could technically create more meaning than you would during the average lifespan. However, with the possibility of living forever there might be less of an appreciation of life and less inclination to make the most of it because it wouldn't be so fleeting anymore.
Having said all that, I have to admit that eternal life doesn't exactly seem like a great deal to me and when I was still a Christian I was really terrified by the idea of existing forever in the afterlife. What if heaven wasn't all that it was cracked up to be? There would be no way out!
I think human nature prevents us from achieving perpetual happiness. We get used to the good things way too quickly and so we are always in pursuit of something new. That might get tiring after a few centuries in my opinion.