The Dilemma of Immortality
A pill that makes you live forever might be the worst idea ever
If there’s anything every human agrees on, it’s this; everybody dies.
It’s one of the inevitable features of our existence that we’ve come to accept. We’ve fought diseases, navigated oceans, dammed rivers, and explored space. In some ways, the history of human existence on Earth is the history of how we have conquered, dominated, or subdued nature. But death is one part of nature that we seem to have resigned ourselves to. We have and continue to experiment with how to create life using the basic building blocks, we have produced medicine and technology to extend our lives by years, allowing us to live till ages that our ancestors could only dream of. But there are almost no experiments on how to beat death and live forever. Instead, we have hopelessly accepted death as our inevitable fate, and have given up trying to escape it.
But what if we could?
Imagine that there was a medical procedure that could confer immortality; you do this medical procedure, and you’d live for as long as you want to. Imagine that aside from accidents, terminal illnesses, and the sort, this medical procedure was the key to living forever. Imagine that one day; you were offered the opportunity to have this medical procedure, a chance to live forever, would you take it?
Imagine that this medical procedure had always been around; for thousands of years. A person who underwent this procedure 300 years ago would have lived through the many wars in England and Europe, the Industrial Revolution, the American Civil War, the Spanish flu epidemic, colonization and decolonization, World War 1, World War 2, the Cold war and every other event that has come afterwards. This is an awfully long time to have lived; this person wouldn’t need to read history, they would be a walking repertoire of world history. Compare life on earth and 300 years ago, and life on earth presently. For this person, it would be like being in a giant but excruciatingly slow time machine for the last 300 years.
There are real ramifications for our experimental person who has lived 300 years on Earth. We can apply the same principles that we use to measure our lives on the things that matter to us on Earth. For example, would this person have enjoyed their life on earth? For normal humans who live 70-odd years on Earth, knowing that your life on Earth is short and ephemeral provides you with a sense of purpose, a driving force to live a meaningful life — however, you define that. For a person who knows they can live forever, where will they derive their sense of purpose? What reason does this person have to get up from bed every day and get ready for work or even stress over anything since they know they have all the time in the world to live?
There are also emotional and psychological scars. Living on earth for 70 years is no mean fit; all the experiences we go through leave a lasting effect on us. People who live through wars, famines, terrorist attacks, pandemics, all these things leave scars that cumulate. A person who lives through these comes out a different person on the other side. Now imagine that you’ve had through live through all the bad events that have happened in the world over the last 300 years; the holocaust, multiple wars, pandemics, deaths, the near misses, all of it.
When you go down our little thought experiment, and consider the ramifications of an immortal life on earth, it becomes obvious why we have resigned ourselves to death, or at least quietly accepted it. Life on earth can be a scary adventure. Immortal life is even scarier. It’s even scarier because no one has experienced it, which means we don’t have the least idea of what it’s like. There are no previous experiences against which to judge our insecurities, and our fears, or build a model of what immortal life on earth would be like. Immortal life in heaven or paradise? — sure; because those places are supposedly pure and perfect. But immortal life on earth, with all its flaws, is a different ball game.
At this point, you are probably wondering what the point of this essay is. It boils down to a single question, the question that was the seed idea which eventually blossomed into a 700+ word essay. That question is this; what would it feel like to be immortal?
