Immortality and the Blessing of the End

 

                        source: (https://medium.com/the-ploy/is-immortality-possible-476f07701a17)

Most books I’ve read make one believe that immortality is some sort of endgame for humanity and that everyone will eventually become immortal. As a kid, the idea fascinated me. The idea of existing forever, trying all sorts of things, never losing anybody. The idea seemed truly blissful… until I grew older. If you ask me now if I want immortality, I probably wouldn’t hesitate in refusing the offer. The reason for it is pretty simple too. The short of it is that there is no merit to living that long. The long of it? I’ll try to explain it to you in this rant of mine.

One reason I feel immortality is an overrated concept is that death gives life meaning. May sound weird but stay with me. Say I ask you to go skydiving without a parachute or deep sea diving with no equipment. You’d refuse right, because those activities will kill you without a doubt. Your refusal stems from a sense of value you attach to your life which is why you wont risk it doing something stupid. But if you were immortal, you would lose this fear of dying and will become increasingly rash. The result? The value you attach to life becomes smaller and smaller. A sad fact is that the value we attach to others is pretty proportional to the value we attach to ourselves. So if our own lives lose value, what’s to say we will value the lives of others. This will spell the end of society as we know it as humans will be reduced to objects in the eyes of others. Don’t know about you but I would rather die than live in such a society.

From a practical perspective, immortality will create a pretty big mess. Death rate will hit zero (obviously) but birth rate will stay above zero. Result? Population goes up at a rate faster than it is now. From each country’s perspective, supply and demand becomes skewed and economies will take a hit. From a global perspective, we will hit the Earth’s carrying capacity a lot faster than we are right now, global warming will worsen, more mouths to feed so food shortages will be rampant. Conclusion? Dystopia. Rules on food, reproduction, crime will become stricter, governments will become more involved in society to the point where they will have to control everything. Within a few years, Orwell’s novels will have become reality and utopia of endless life we would have created has become a horrifying nightmare.

Now you could ask me, “why make everyone immortal, make the select few immortal”. This creates it own sets of problems. The first of which being equality. There will be an uproar about who gets to be immortal and who doesn’t. Humanity will be judged by humanity and the whole affair will turn very ugly very quickly. And the second problem being that making select few immortal is just unfair on them. Imagine living forever but never being able to get close to anyone because you know for a fact that you will lose them. Imagine living through wars, sickness and strife and observing the death that stems from it. All that death and sickness will at some point get to you, making you a very bitter person reduced to merely observing life rather than living it. Is it worth letting a person go through all that just because they can contribute something to society? I’ll let you think about it.

 In conclusion, what I wanted convey through this discussion was that the end brings value to things. No one wants to watch a movie that goes on forever, no one wants to eat a meal that never ends because they know that they only appreciate it because they know that it must end. Similarly, no one would appreciate endless life, because the best gift life can give us… is death.