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Would You Choose Immortality?
After reading Jon Gabriel’s recent piece regarding funerals, it occurred to me that ever since I learned about mortality (at about age four), I’ve wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. I’ve kept in shape and have always enjoyed lots of butter (I knew it was good for me before Time announced it!). But I still know that, in the end, death is a place where we are all equal.
Science and technology will eventually find a way for people to live a very long time, if not “forever.” The first to benefit will be the very wealthy, but the technology will presumably become accessible to the masses with time. Or will it? Should it? If you were given the choice to live 1,000 years in good health or die a natural death at 90, which would you choose? And what if the only choices were natural death or Highlander-style immortality?
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You know what they say about cemeteries: people are just dying to get in there.
As to your question, I’d choose to live 1,000 years. I am, after all, a historian. :-)
The Queen song from Higlander says it all, “Who wants to live forever” I admit that there is part of me that wants to be around to see what happens next.
I’m with Doc on this. A life without vigor, a burdensome life, is no life. Decrepitude creeps in around 75-80. That’s when I take up cigars and brown liquor for breakfast.
How about a thousand years of vigor, with the body and mind of say, you at 39?
Make it mind at 39 (my age now) and body at 22 and you’ve got a deal.
What a heavenly or hellish question. Do you even get an option?
It depends on how one defines immortality. If you want your flesh to be immortal, then you must spiritualize it. It will not happen through technology. Only one man has been known to take his body with him (although there are rumors of others).
On the other hand, we are all immortal spiritually. Maybe the personal ego of a particular incarnation is lost, but what we are goes on. There is neither illness nor age in Spirit, just new roles to fulfill.
I believe that after dying we’ll all eventually be resurrected in immortal bodies, so I’m looking forward to that.
As to a scientific means of greatly prolonging my life (not actual immorality)…yeah, I’d probably take it, provided the physical quality of that life was still decent.
Larry Niven wrote a series of short stories, not about immortality, but about life extension through organ transplants. The main source of organs for transplant was the bodies of criminals “broken up” for spare parts. It wasn’t long until jaywalking was a capital crime.
If you think the debate over government healthcare has been rancorous, just wait until the cost of an extra 1,000 years of life is $1 million. We’ll be bankrupt the next day.
That reminds me of another story, but where the transplants came from clones that were created either at birth or in vitro and were kept alive as replacement parts that would not be rejected by the body. I may be conflating two stories, but I believe the main character in the story was heir to all the world’s monarchies and some people engineered for him to become King of Earth. The first time he tried to assert his authority in contravention of what the schemers wanted, he was replaced by his clone and became his clone’s spare parts.
There are so many. One of the first I ever remember reading was where a mid-Twentieth Century demagogic politician somehow came forward in time to a period when everyone was physically immortal. He started denouncing immortality and gathered a following among the young…until the powers that be granted him the immortality treatment. When this became known, he was physically torn to shreds by his erstwhile followers. It’s probably been forty years, and I apologize for not remembering title or author.
The problem with immortals for a writer, though, is that they only make good characters early in their immortal lifetimes. Characters are supposed to grow and develop, change. As we get older, we tend to become more and more “ourselves,” and tend to change less and learn less in life, or the lessons have to be harder and more extreme to make a change in us. A character who is fifty might change. A character who is eighty is unlikely to change much. If a character hasn’t grown up and become himself by the time he’s a thousand, he’s not a very believable human being. Now, take that to a million years. Even with eternal youth, how much is a million-year-old person likely to change and develop in a story. So, the most usual role for an eternal character winds up being to provide exposition or be the player behind the scenes pulling the strings. Often too predictable.
Looking at the types immortality on the TV Tropes site is fun.
Who could forget Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged?
The body will decay and die. That’s fine with me. Wouldn’t really want a body that lasts forever. Does spirit die with it? I don’t thnk so. Obviously that deeply affects how I answer the question.
Even a century – a mere eyeblink – is pushing the limits of how long I’d want a body. I suspect we’re given about the right amount of time to learn what we are able in this world.
The way I see things, it’s all a learning experience. On good days, I see the “world” as a school. On bad days (which, thankfully, I never really have anymore) it’s still a learning experience but I see it as a jail. No way I want to stay in jail forever. But same goes for school. Way back when I went to one, I couldn’t wait for summer vacation.
So if the world is a school, dying is summer vacation. Don’t cry for me when I graduate!
I’m with Knotwise. Not interested in an extended lifespan on this earth if it just means more time in the old folks’ home. Anyway, I am not afraid to die because I know that after this life, I’m getting a much better one, complete with imperishable body and renewed Creation. Now that’s the kind of immortality I look forward to!
Genuine immortality is a concept so foreign to human experience that it’s hard to speculate how we might feel about it, so let’s go with a thousand year max. I think I’d be very satisfied to live 80-90-100 years if I could have the same level of health and fitness as a 25-year old up until the end. But that’s just a guess. Maybe once I got near the end, I’d decide to spring for another rejuvenation treatment and get another 40 years.
One consideration is how this would effect society in general. If there were youth extension technologies and they were so fabulously expensive that only a dozen people in the world could afford them, it wouldn’t change things a lot. But if it were common, it would change things in a multitude of ways. Would anybody get married and promise to stay married “’til death do us part” when that could be several centuries? Or would a marriage contract be for 30 years with optional renewal? How many children would you choose to have during your 1000 year life? Would we suffer overpopulation? To be continued…
Would we culturally evolve or would we stagnate? A lot of positive social change happens because old people die off. If 95% of the people alive 120 years ago were still with us, would we have ended racial segregation, for instance?
I’m not saying it’s all downside. If life-extension treatments progressed slowly, the way medicine generally does, we could probably adapt to it as things went along. Maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about overpopulation because by then we’d have a substantial portion of humanity moving off-planet to live. I’ll get back to you later regarding science fiction stories on the topic.
I would like to live as long as I want, but no longer. I like the way it worked for Tolkien’s Numenoreans: they had very long lifespans (several centuries), and they remained healthy and vital until the end. When they died, it was because they decided it was time, and did so voluntarily.
The down side of individual immortality would be watching everyone I love grow old and die around me. And if we’re talking about immortality for the whole species, I’m afraid I have to say no. A world without death inevitably means a world without children. Not interested.
Highlander style immortality it is. There can be only one.
After the first century it would be little else but agony.
I’ve been talking about the idea of immortality or vastly expanded (thousands of years) lifespans with people for twenty years as a philosophical concept. How would they react to such a possibility?
No two people answer the same. Some are repulsed and see it as keeping them from a heavenly reward. Others are baffled. Some prefer to grown old and be grandmothers and die. I would spend every penny I owned building a space ship to go explore the galaxy, no matter how long it took to launch.
The biggest impact would be on financial institutions. All our finances are designed around the 30 year mortgage, for example. That is nothing when you can live for so long. It would be a tremendous upheaval in how we think about saving money and investing.
I think there would be push back, and possibly violence from fanatical religions, such as Islam (not hard to imagine) and some sects of Christianity.
For religious or other reasons, there certainly would be people who would not be satisfied to reject immortality or youth/life extension for themselves. They would seek to prohibit it for everyone.
Sign me up for the Thousand Year Plan with a side order of Youthful Vigor! I wanna see what happens next!!
That being said…
I think that such a hugely extended life-span really has the potential to ossify a culture in a much more profound way than even the most backward tribal traditions. I can’t even begin to imagine the deepness of the ennui that would develop, existing on that kind of time horizon. A long life in and of itself is no cure for the human condition… I’d really rather not have to work for 3/4 of a millennium before retirement.
I must admit though, the idea of true immortality is horrifying to me. Anne Rice wrote The Mummy or Ramses the Damned that explored the notion of a truly unending life, no matter the trauma visited on them. Even though he was alive (healthy and vigorous,) he had no hope of an end to his situation. That idea, even to the callow youth that I was when I read it, really put me off the idea.
Highlander-style immortality is a much preferred option even if I’d have to die violently.
I find your question interesting, but I am not sure that I could choose correctly. There are many things that have happened in my life over which I had little say, many of which I saw at the time as setbacks or bad things, that turned out to be so much better than I could possibly have imagined.
Death can be a friend: I know it was for my grandmother — I was there caring for her and she really hoped to go. But it can also be horrible and demeaning.
In many things in life, it seems best to me to allow God to work in His mysterious ways and to be grateful for the opportunities to love and be loved. If such technology/medicine becomes feasible without a moral component (e.g., creating embryos to harvest replacement body parts and then killing them), it seems like a good thing.
In all things, I let this be my guide: “I set before you this day life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, that you and your children may live.”
As a Christian, I’m anxious to be in Heaven. But I also believe that I wouldn’t be here unless there was more God wanted me to either do or experience. Even simple presence can help people. I must honor the gifts of earthly life and the body, without abusing them to deliberately shorten my lifespan, but also keep my thoughts on Heaven.
Earthly life is full of both beauty and hardship. It’s natural to focus on the hardships of old age, but it provides unique opportunities as well. My grandma lived to be 95. She lived to know eight great grandchildren. She lived long enough to have her motherly care returned by her children. In need, the charitable spirit in neighbors and friends becomes more evident. She lived long enough for scanners and computers to digitize old photos and help her to reflect on memories which could then be passed on to future generations. She lived long enough for her sons to develop careers and afford to send her on trips to Ireland, as she had always dreamed.
Old age isn’t all bad. But I’d be happy not even to experience middle age, because our experiences here are just prelude to a greater life. Some people live a hundred years and are never ready for that transition, while others are accepted into Heaven without even reaching adulthood. Time is precious. Time is irrelevant. Another mystery of life.
Not me.
I don’t look forward to death, but it’s the natural order for mortals.
Having watched both my parents die in the their mid-eighties, I’ve learned a more or less universal truth: there are young seventy-year-olds; there are no young eighty-year-olds.
As long as I’m compos mentis and can live without unnecessary pain, I’m happy with this mortal state.
I embrace what the 77-year-old Joseph Epstein said in his wonderful contemplative essay on death in Commentary: “Death Takes No Holiday:
I enjoy reading Science Fiction books and found that many have addressed the issues around immortality. The first one I know of is St Leon (1799) by William Godwin. The more recent past many writer use it as a plot device. In one I read (cannot remember author or books but think it was Pohl or Asimov) it started with selective mating of individuals with family member’s with long lives and followed the product of such unions far into the future (I think the idea for the plot started from some eugenic ideas). This group basically breed for long lift.
For me, as God wills . . . I have been faced with death and know I can only control very little. I take care of myself as best I can but will not lose sleep over it. My body is just a shell for my immortal soul.
Five Reasons Immortality Would Be Worse Than Death:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18708_5-reasons-immortality-would-be-worse-than-death.html
(I’ll give you one hint: Heat Death Of The Universe.)