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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?
Published in General
Might you be thinking of “Time Enough for Love” by Robert A. Heinlein? There was a secret society (The Howard Families) that gave people with long-lived ancestors money if they would marry similar people. They paid a bonus every time such a couple had a baby, then made the offer to those babies when they grew up. An interesting book, but not great by Heinlein standards.
In the “Old Man’s War” series by John Scalzi a future Earth has people aging like we do now, but when they are very old they are offered an opportunity by the military. Sign up and we’ll give you a new, youthful body with various military upgrades. The catch is that you’ll probably get killed eventually in an interstellar battle and you can never come back to Earth.
Interesting. Let’s say you could live perpetually (absent disease or accident) and at a youthful state. Would you have as close a tie with your children after a couple decades? Presumably the number of children people would have would rise (though I would imagine the rate would slow as a person ages, but who knows?) and it’s impossible to maintain a close relationship with so many people. Your children from when you are twenty will not need or merit as much as your more recent children when you’re 240. And to trace down whom you’re related to would be difficult, to be sure.
You hold the defenses together long enough for the Americans to save your bacon?
Very interesting; I wonder if unending fecundity would strongly influence a woman’s decision to have children. I suspect that many would find it temping to delay childbirth indefinitely without the biological clock ticking in the background. Would the desire to have children disappear, or would the instinct remain?
I love you, Frank!
I was actually thinking of, “Never, never, never give up!” But, I’ll take the laugh.
Yes.
Has anybody read “Altered Carbon” by Richard K. Morgan? In this future, people have a socket in their skull that has a “stack”, which is essentially a cartridge that is a backup of their minds; the knowledge, memory, thoughts, and personality. While your body will age and die, if you’ve got the money (or a benefactor) you can buy a new (and very different) body and have the cartridge transferred over to it. If you’ve got the money you can rent a totally non-human body and be a dinosaur for a day. The book is a fairly glum but well worth reading. Morgan’s use of prose is right up my alley and their are a lot of creative ideas in there.
I would not recommend the sequel, “Broken Angels.” Although it has Morgan’s beautiful prose, the story is just so filled with despair that I couldn’t enjoy it. And his book “Market Forces” (not a sequel) is ridiculous, unless you’ve always wished that somebody could channel Michael Moore while writing SF.
There are drawbacks to this Utopia?!?
6foot2, you changed the post since I first read it. You took out the part where you asked for favorite science fiction stories about immortality. I’ve saved the best for last, so you’re getting it whether you still want it or not.
The “Company” aka “Dr. Zeus” novels and short stories by Kage Baker are the awesomest. A secret society of rich people in the future figures out an immortality process but it won’t work on them. They’re able to travel several thousands of years into the past and apply this treatment to small children who match the right physical criteria. These cyborg kids are raised to be the servants of their future masters and their job is to stash away valuable historical artifacts and such for safe-keeping. Things hit the fan when the immortal cyborgs eventually catch up in time to their masters. Baker develops several wonderful characters that I felt a real connection to. I give this collection my highest recommendation.
Join the crowd :)
If everyone lived to what we perceive as “immortality” of 1000 years, we’d probably face a great shortage of resources, unless human habits changed. I think our lives are proportional…if we live to be 1000, then 1oo year olds would be toddlers, and 150 year olds would be teens. 600 is the new 300.
I believe we are immortal, but maybe not physically, and that having children is the way we create immortality, without physically sticking around.
and then there’s this thought:
“When we’ve been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we’d first begun.”
If you are immortal, how would you finish the phrase “we’ve no less days …….., than when we’d first begun?”
Would that make immortality worth whatever it costs, to yourself? your family, your community?
Depends on what she looks like.
Oh wait, you said immorTality.
Immortality? No.
Live a *lot* longer than our currently allotted “Threescore and Ten”? Yes.
The thing is, eternity is a really, really, really long time.
There’s a short story by R.A. Lafferty, titled “Been a Long, Long, Time”. In it, the main character is attempting to prove the ” Monkeys typing Shakespeare” theory. The clock to measure the passage of time is very simple: A cube of granite, measuring a parsec [approx 19 trillion miles] on each side. One every 1000 years, a sparrow flies up and sharpens its beak on the stone. He has until the stone is completely worn away for the monkeys to produce the works of Shakespeare.
I’m a Taggartian when it comes to admitting defeat:
That is indeed an interesting question. I have to imagine that if there was no time limit on fertility, on average immortal woman would tend to postpone procreating compared to an average mortal woman.
The conventional wisdom in evolutionary biology is that we decline with old age because there is no selective pressure against negative traits that only affect us after we are done reproducing. And there’s little selective pressure to extend our reproductive years, because our kids can reproduce for us. It occurs to me that it might even be true that aging and senescence might promote reproduction.
(cont)
“Indestructible” immortality (e.g. people who shrug off bullet wounds) is probably not a serious biological possibility. But simply not aging I think is probably not that far out. However, not aging would almost certainly involve an investment of resources that would be, in Darwinian terms, unfit.
One of the big misconceptions of Darwinian biology is that it leads to a “superman” that is stronger and tougher (maybe immortal) than what came before. But really being super would take a lot of energy, and that would be energy that would probably have to come from what would otherwise be invested in offspring. So, in Darwinian terms, mortal man is more fit than superman, and that may be why mortal man really exists and superman doesn’t.
By Grabthar’s Hammer, what a comment!
I think what you say makes complete sense. All humans are related, but to different degrees. E.g. if you were cryonically frozen like Buck Rogers, I don’t think there would be a problem with marrying your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild. At that level of removal (you contributed only 1/256 of their genome), they are not really your relative. You were talking about the social, personal connections, but I think the same principle applies. If everyone is your relative, then no one is your relative.
Yes. I think if resources were unlimited, we probably would be immortal.
The more I think about this, the more I think it’s better that resources are limited. If resources were unlimited, everything in the universe would just go on forever. The whole universe would be like the federal government. No matter how ill-conceived a creature was, it would just go on forever without dying, like corn subsidies.
So, it all makes sense. God and evolution are completely compatible!
And always have been.
But the Darwinian model does not take intelligent action into account. Life and intelligence are the counter to entropy, and Darwin as well.
Natural selection isn’t everything. It’s one force among others in the universe. I think Darwinian theory means that organisms that are better at countering entropy will tend to flourish more than organisms that are less good at countering entropy. The net effect is living things that exist today are remarkably good at countering entropy. Living a really long time doesn’t counter entropy nearly as much as having offspring, so natural selection favors fertility over longevity.
Remember, it’s about the fitness to the environment. Both strategies have been pursued relatively successfully. As have others, such as with eusocial insects.
You’re assuming that reproduction is more important than continued individual existence.
For purposes of spreading a gene pool, reproduction is better than living longer, everything else being equal. I think that’s pretty well established scientifically and mathematically. It may still be that for purposes of living well (which can’t be scientifically defined), living longer is better than reproduction.
However, I suspect that energy/work/effort allocated to living longer probably results in diminishing returns. As much work as it is to raise children into mature, functioning adults, it probably takes less work to do that than to take an aged human, and reverse the effects of aging to produce a mature (that is, not aged), functioning adult. I suppose that could change someday. It’s an interesting question. If it was economically more sensible to, for example, keep existing physicians young and able indefinitely, rather than to spend money training medical students, what would be the societal results of that?