[brianpgordon]

A bit off topic, but the (not very good) novel The World at the End of Time inspired the same thoughts in me.

One of the narrators is an immortal being who can manipulate energy. He has a grand old time in his youth swimming around in the cores of main sequence stars, playing and thinking and scheming for billions of years. He manages to kill off all of his kin, ensuring his survival forever. But eventually the really desirable, hot stars start to burn out. He has to move to longer-living dwarf stars, and turn down his mental processes because they can't be completely supported with the reduced amount of energy available. The universe continues to age and the stars dim and he's forced to let go of large parts of his memory because he can't afford the energy expenditure to keep it coherent. He begins to fear for his continued survival, always hungry and searching for sources of energy. Much later, the stars have burned out to cinders and are nearly at thermal equilibrium with the - by now - extremely dim background radiation. He's terrified of black holes but their Hawking radiation is the best remaining source of energy in the universe so he gets close to a big black hole, a shadow of his former self, holding onto only a few core memories with the energy of the particles emanating from the event horizon. He hibernates for eons at a time, slowly gathering energy until he can afford a few moments of consciousness. The black holes of course eventually evaporate and he becomes effectively insensate, living off the meager energy of protons occasionally decaying.

Yeah, I don't want to live forever either.