Science is always trying to cheat death, but just for the sake of debate, have you ever wanted to be immortal?
Give it some serious thought for a moment. You are immortal, but no one else is, so you are an observer of time, a recorder of history, the wisest person ever, and probably pretty lonely. I have to imagine existential depression would be even more of an issue, and eventually nothing would be all that interesting. Been there, done that, walked across a war-torn battlefield unscathed again, blah, blah, blah.
Ok, so not that great. What if others could be immortal, too? We’d have to be pretty careful how many offspring we have if no one will ever die, but there would be no such thing as loss, death, or even most anxiety, because what would there be to fear? We could do whatever, forever.
Ever been bored, not just in boring situations like the DMV, but just because you’re ready for something new and you don’t know what? People who work on Broadway say that even performing for thousands of people can get boring because they do it 8 times a week for years, and while that makes sense, being in a spotlight on stage is what most people would consider a big deal. The more you do something, the less of a big deal it is. If we were immortal, we would do everything, then we’d do everything again, and eventually we’d have done it all so many times that nothing is a big deal anymore, and there is nothing new, with all recent creations mirroring something from the past so closely as to be instantly too familiar to hold our attention.
Yeah, I’m not all that ready to sign up for immortality, thanks. The good news is that I don’t have the option, so I don’t even have to face the moral dilemma of how my chosen morality might effect those I love. Medical science can take out some of our parts when they don’t work anymore, we can even swap for new parts on occasion, but we can’t just keep swapping out broken parts so that a person stays alive forever. Immortality isn’t a thing, and as far as I’m concerned, praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
But machines can be replaced one piece at a time, and they don’t deal with boredom, moral dilemmas or existential depression. I have no problems whatsoever with that. My computer can go ahead and last forever if it wants to. It can’t, but wouldn’t that be nice?
If you have a maintenance contract for your NAS/SAN, then your system can live forever even if it’s eventually made out of all new parts. Does that mean your system, if protected, is, in fact, immortal?
We must study this further. The more maintenance contracts we have going the larger the sample size. Join the quest for digital immortality in a research project designed to secure your projects for the foreseeable future—win win.