I've been fascinated by the topic of Immortality ever since I was a little kid watching Dragonball Z, where two of the main characters wanted to gather the dragonballs in order to make a wish for achieving immortality.

Back then, immortality was simply a vague concept to me. Whoever was immortal would live forever. But I hadn't really given much thought to the practical implications of immortality.

Since then, I've come across many versions and nuances of immortality, ranging from Nicolas Flamel and the Philosopher's Stone, as well as Voldemort's horcruxes from the Harry Potter books all the way to to the totally non-fictional scientific advances outlined in the book, Lifespan.

Now, the thought of immortality is less about preserving our bodies as we are forever, and more about preserving our ideas and our sense of identities - the fictional Altered Carbon comes close to this line of thinking.

Our bodies need to evolve. We have come to where we are over billions of years of evolution. The slower our birth-to-death cycles, the slower we propagate gene mutations. And slower the rate of propagation of gene mutations, slower the evolution.

Which means, immortality, if we were to achieve it, will involve a lot of constant re-engineering of our bodies to account for new realities in the world.

However, our sense of identity and our ideas can live on in a lot of different ways.