The jury is still out about immortality. Books like Tuck Everlasting or The Picture of Dorian Grey say that however you swing it, eternal youth can often be a raw deal. Or at the very least, you always have to give something to get something. As George R.R. Martin would put it, "only death pays for life" when you're playing with blood magic.
Consciousness transfer—the idea that a person can extend his or her life by siphoning memories and knowledge into another vessel—is less ominous in pop culture. The best example here is Lieutenant Dax from the Star Trek franchise. In Deep Space 9, this character is fleshed out in Jadzia Dax, a 28-year-old woman who has a Trill simbiont, a slug-like being that requires a humanoid host, inside of her. The worm is surgically embedded into hosts' bodies so that its consciousness can live on, joining with the consciousness of the host. But in the Star Trek universe, hosts volunteer for this position. In DS9, Jadzia describes how she trained to become a host and was mentored by the Trill's former host, an old man named Curzon Dax. Once the Trill was inside of her, she had one mind, but all of her memories and feelings lived together with the memories and feelings of the 300-year-old simbiont.
Barring the discovery of a consciousness-transferring simbiont, though, can real-world humans ever achieve this kind of everlasting life? Self/less is yet another movie about consciousness transfer and immortality that tries to imagine this future, but it falls well short of the excellent books and TV shows cited above.
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