10 reasons why people shouldn't be immortal

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Eternity is still too much.

1. Evolution will turn you into a relic of the past

Whatever some individuals say, who deny the theory of evolution, it still works and people continue to develop. Your children will be like you, but they will not become perfect copies: they will also receive a number of evolutionary changes, they will become, albeit not much, but better than you.

Look at the reconstructed images of the people of the past. Even in the relatively recent 19th century, they were much shorter than we are. And if the acceleration continues, you will have to complex looking at your tall descendants. Who knows what people will be like in a couple of thousand years? Perhaps the immortal ancestor will seem to them like a ridiculous talking monkey.

But evolution will not only affect appearance. Will your immune system be able to normally resist viruses and bacteria, which have also evolved over the millennia? Will you be able to have future offspring with people? Will you be able to normally digest food that does not even exist yet? Far from being a fact. Eventually, future generations will be so far removed from you along the evolutionary ladder that you will turn into a Neanderthal.

2. Time will not be perceived at all

Have you ever noticed how the perception of time changes with age? It seems to the child that the days go on for a long time, and the birthday still does not come. Adults, on the other hand, look at time differently - for them it flies like crazy. It seems that 2014 ended quite recently … What do you mean five years ago ?!

The older a person becomes, the faster time passes in his subjective view.

At 10 years old, a year is a tenth of your life, and at 100 years old it is already a hundredth, and therefore it seems shorter. Scientists argue whether there is a limit to this phenomenon, and sometimes come to very funny conclusions.

For example, mathematician Len Freeman created the so-called concept of effective age and even found a formula with which you can calculate how quickly time passes for you. The article was published in the humorous magazine The Journal of Irreproducible Results, but there is some truth in every joke.

It is quite possible that for a person who is already 10 thousand years old, time will fly by so quickly that he will not even notice how one-day generations change.

3. You can continue to age mentally

If you've read Jonathan Swift, you should remember characters like the Strulburgs. These immortal creatures that Gulliver meets during his travels never die, but they never stop aging. As a result, they look like living mummies with senile minds.

Eternal life is eternal old age, eternal decrepitude and weakness, a miserable existence that the Strulburgs drag out.

Jonathan Swift

Organic designs tend to wear out. And even if the technologies of the future can keep the body from aging, it is not a fact that they will make your brain function forever as if it were still young.

Your memory may start to change. Now you often cannot remember where the car keys were delivered, but what will it be like to recall the events that happened 1,000 years ago? In addition, even the strongest people are not immune from Alzheimer's disease and other age-related disruptions.

And if such diseases do not learn to completely heal, we will get many unfortunate representatives of humanity, doomed to forever suffer from senile madness.

4. Social inequality will grow

Why do I use the pronoun "you" all the time? You will certainly not be immortal, because this pleasure is not for everyone. First of all, rich guys like Jeff Bezos, who have an extra billion to edit the genome and transplant the brain into a new body, will get long lives.

Don't you happen to have a billion? I thought so.

With the invention of immortality, class inequality will grow stronger and stronger. Wealthy people will accumulate wealth at home, and the poor will become poorer, and this will become another reason for social discord - right up to wars. A classless society is a controversial and very utopian concept, which will be almost more difficult to implement than the technology of immortality itself.

5. You won't have to count on retirement

I hope you love your job because you will have to do it forever. Even if you manage to retrain and change your profession at least a million times during your endless life, there will still be no chance of taking a break from work.

Paying a pension to an immortal citizen is too heavy a burden for the state, and therefore it will probably be canceled.

The absence of mortality will also lead to stagnation in almost all sectors, as well as to a drop in labor productivity. If your boss and you are immortal and have been in your position for centuries, what are your chances of getting promoted?

6. Overpopulation of the planet will become a reality

The earth can support the life of a limited number of people. Already, a huge number of them suffer from lack of food and water, and if the natural decline in population is stopped, the deficit will only grow. The planet's resources will sooner or later be depleted, and this can provoke not only hunger and suffering, but also massive wars.

7. Society will stop progressing

Imagine that in the Middle Ages, alchemists would fulfill their dream and find the Philosopher's Stone. The people who inhabited the Earth then would have become immortal and would have survived to this day. And as a result, we would still burn witches, engage in racial segregation, and practice restricting women's rights.

How do you like the prospect of living in an unchanging society for millennia? A bit reminiscent of the novels of George Martin with his Middle Ages, which has lasted for 8,000 years.

The older people get, the harder it is for them to adapt to a changing society - including morally and ethically. It is not easy for a person to give up his beliefs with which he has lived all his life.

Therefore, for society to change, the continuity of generations is necessary. People with overly conservative views must sooner or later die of old age, otherwise they will slow down the development of mankind.

8. Criminal penalties will become useless

If people become immortal, we will surely face the problem of crime control. Imagine yourself: if, over the centuries of life, a person grows tired of a monotonous existence and wants to have fun with not entirely legal means - for example, mass murder and cruel rape - what measures can restrain him? 30, 40 and even 100 years in prison are unlikely to be an adequate deterrent for someone who intends to live tens of thousands of years.

And society will certainly recognize life sentences as immoral: being locked in a cell for eternity can be considered imprisonment in a personal hell.

You can, of course, use the death penalty, but even today it is a very controversial thing from an ethical point of view. Life is valuable, and endless life is even more valuable. Moral attitudes will be revised accordingly by society, and people of the future are unlikely to dare to kill an immortal, if there is even the slightest probability that the sentence is wrong.

9. The meaning of life will be lost

Humans are pretty lazy creatures, and if they have the option of doing nothing, they don’t do anything. Sometimes only the knowledge that the time of human life is limited encourages them to fulfill their dreams, be it traveling around the world, creating masterpieces of art or raising children.

And if you know that you have eternity ahead of you, why rush somewhere? Or, on the contrary, over the millennia, you can try anything, and then realize that there is nothing else to do.

And sooner or later it will just get bored.

This is not particularly conducive to the emergence of life-affirming thoughts. Even flights to other planets and radical changes in living conditions and areas of activity become boring, and as a result, the most amazing activities will become a monotonous routine.

As immortal demigods, humans risk either engaging in extreme forms of hedonism for centuries, or vegetating in perpetual procrastination. Both will get bored someday.

10. You will survive everything that is dear to you

You have become immortal. Then they started a family and children. Will they be immortal too? If so, congratulations: you have contributed to the planet's impending overpopulation. If not, sooner or later you will have to see your children die, and then the children of their children, and so on. However, perhaps due to some mental deviations that manifested itself as a result of immortality (remember the individual perception of time?), You will not be particularly affected by the death of descendants.

However, you can outlive not only your family and great-grandchildren, but the whole world you are used to.

Someday the country in which you were born will disappear. The continent that you traveled far and wide during your travels will go under water. The face of the planet will change beyond recognition, and you will live.

And even if you die, it’s definitely not in your bed from old age. Most likely, your death will be unnatural - someone can kill you, you will die during some next war or from an accident. And it is unlikely that someone will hold your hand before leaving for another world.