“Who wants to live forever, anyway?”

This perhaps sounds like a subtle “burden of proof” error, but the question can be even more misleading than that.

Let’s turn it around: “When would you like to die?”

Immediately we’re mired in assumptions. Even though the discussion is about the hypothetical possibility of “immortality,” there are still going to be a lot of people who will say something about wanting to die when they’re too feeble to live properly, when they’re in too much pain, etc. These are the people who have forgotten that we’re talking about a hypothetical situation.

Which may mean the hypothetical situation is just too poorly defined to have a fruitful discussion. Are we talking about some idiotically poor form of immortality like the Struldbrugs in “Gulliver’s Travels,” where you live forever but become progressively more feeble? Are we talking about a form of immortality where we retain a certain static amount of youth and continue living until a truck runs us over? Or do we mean a kind of nearly unimaginable physical immortality where almost nothing can damage or destroy us?

But despite this vagueness, the question of “When do you want to die?” retains some validity in itself. As far as we have ever seen, the only people who ever really want to die are those who are physically and/or mentally ill.

Healthy, happy people don’t want to die. Now, if you could be permanently healthy and always have at least the potential for being happy, when would you want to die?

You don’t know?

That’s probably the only reasonable answer. If I could remain physically and mentally healthy for an indefinite period, I don’t know how long I’d like to live either.

But I would damned well like to have the option of finding out through experience.