In a similar vein, if there are immortal people, how would we know?
I’d say you could 30-35 years of so with plausible deniability, after that explanations would get harder. You either fake death and take on a new identity or come out as a long lived mutant. Even if you came out a long lived mutant I’m not sure why you think the government would feel it had to to “get involved”.
During the height of the AIDS crisis it was discovered there were a few gay people with HIV who were apparently utterly immune to AIDS, did the government force itself on them?
There’s this guywho has superhuman (literally) tolerance for cold temperatures. Is the goverment forcing him to do anything?
It would be nice if some folks would quite fighting the hypothetical. Do you folks really think at some point if somebody lived a long assed damn time they aren’t gonna have problems? Problems with society and “the man” that nobody has because, ya know, its NEVER happened before?
It ain’t illegal for me to have secret fortune teller powers either and win the lottery every time I want to. But if I did you can bet some folks would get involved. And for pete’s sake we are talking about somebody who DOESN"T appear to age. If THAT ain’t gonna raise some special problems I don’t know what the heck would.
Way to miss the point guys.
Yes, that’s exactly what I think. I know it’s traditional in the US–and a staple of science fiction shows–to distrust the government, but they’re not going to force someone to submit to vivisection or whatever. For the first generation to notice, it’d be a curiosity. By the time it was obvious that person was never going to age, they’d have been around for ages already, that first generation would have died off, and we’d have moved on to something else. The government can’t even figure out how to run a postal service; they’re not going to be locking people up in secret labs.
If the question is “how long could you go”, how is it fighting the hypothetical to say “never”? Given that there are other extreme outliers who have managed to escape the fate you’re proposing, how is it unreasonable to suppose that an even more extreme outlier might also be OK?
Go watch the movie the man from earth. The subject is 14,000 years old and doesn’t age beyond his 30s. His plan is he gets a job as a professor and once people start realizing he isn’t aging (10 years or so) he moves onto a new position and starts up again.
OK, so maybe ever efficient private industry would kidnap and vivisect him.
Actually, I think that when electing a Pope they sometimes want a guy who won’t have a super long reign, ie gonna die soon. I’m not sure electing a Pope who would rule for the rest of eternity would appeal to the Cardinals.
Anyways, I figure our immortal would probably want to fake his death periodically, making sure the new identity was good to go beforehand. How long before someone would make a serious attempt to collect and study his DNA? I have a hard time making even a silly guess at that.
The hypothetical was quite specifically that the “government” was going to get involved, not how people in general would be curious and nosy. These are two very different scenarios. The government being involved and “taking you away” per the OP assumes that your slow aging makes you (somehow) a threat to the state so grave your freedom can be taken away. I find this assumption questionable to ludicrous in a democratic society.
Not dangerous. An asset. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine the CIA or NSA wanting exclusive access to the world’s only immortal.
There’s a place in Cuba you might wanna think about for a moment then. And thats just for a bunch of possibly bothersome glorified goat herders with questionable backgrounds, not somebody (and the ONLY body known on the planet in the OP) who might hold the key to immortality (or at least a damn long and healthy life baring blatant OSHA violations).
Assuming it’s “immortal” as in doesn’t get older and not indestructable, what possible national security benefit could being really old have?
The problem is that it takes WAY more than 30 years for someone to appear to be immortal. Someone could look 35 well into their 60s and 70s, and I think most people would assume that that person was still going to die at some point and just leave behind an exquisite corpse. Once they get into their 80s or 90s, it’s going to be clear that they are not only exceptionally young-looking, but also likely to be very long-lived. It’s still a remarkable stretch to assume they are actually immortal. Personally, I’d be likely to credit an extremely good and extremely discrete plastic surgeon along with exceptional genes, assuming it happened to someone else. They would know it wasn’t surgery, but they also wouldn’t know they were immortal, would they? (Assuming they haven’t survived being shot in the head or something.)
Now I can’t see anyone in their 70s or 80s suddenly deciding that they’re just so healthy and good looking that they have to go into hiding. But if they don’t, it’s probably going to be too late soon. They’ll already have had family and friends (doctors, too, no doubt) commenting frequently on their good fortune for decades, and by this point will probably have been the focus of numerous light human interest and society articles in the local paper and on local tv. If they haven’t already, they’ll soon be getting calls from People Magazine and Good Morning, America. Again, not because anyone is suspicious, but because it’s an interesting story. Researchers will probably start asking you to participate in gerontological studies about the same time, and you’d have to be pretty cold-hearted to turn all of them down, even the ones who just want to know about your exercise regimen.
Once you’re in your nineties, it’s going to pretty clear something bizarre is happening, but it still won’t be clear what. Living forever is factually impossible, so I certainly wouldn’t jump to that conclusion if it were me, but I would definitely start to worry about how much longer I was going to live. I’d surely have retired long ago, and maybe started a second career, but I probably didn’t make plans for what to do for the next 30 years! Any kids and grandkids are going to be worrying that they’ll be too old to take care of me if and when I finally get feeble! Faking my own death would still be about the farthest thing from my mind.
Every year from then on, it would basically become harder to disappear, as more people would be interested. The world record for longevity is 122 years. No man has made it to 116. I had to look those numbers up, and if any of the supercentenarians pictured on Wikipedia had been especially young-looking, I’d have thought, “Wow, they look really good!” not, “OMG vampire!!!” Even at 130, it would be far more plausible that someone is a genetic freak who will live to 200 than that they are actually immortal.
Not aging or dying from natural causes. That’s huge. Imagine sleeper agents that could stay undercover for a century and still be in their physical prime. To say nothing of people in power who’d long for immortality just for personal gain. People are pretty corruptible in regards to real-world power, so I can easily imagine someone with shadowy underlings already on the payroll abusing their power in an attempt to gain the secrets to immortality.
Of course it’s all make believe, but I think the most fantastical notion in this thread is that the world would leave the immortal well enough alone.
Some of you people need to quit watching so many sci-fi movies.
Hell, Presidents can’t even get a BJ from an office intern with out it becoming a media circus frenzy.
Do you guys really think keeping an immortal in secret is something any government agency can do?
Do you also believe area 51 has space aliens?
No kidding. I mean what the fuck is huger than that? God showing up? Aliens from space landing? What else?
At least this has some chance of being sorta possible with violating known laws of nature or stretching them beyond all belief or having no evidence that it is possible.
Yeah, the biggest and most important thing to ever cross the path of man and everybody is just going to act normal and logical like its just another day.
Gitmo ain’t no secret and they (according to some people) are royally violating some folks civil rights for something far less than the secrets to immortality.
Area 51 ain’t no secret but good luck on getting a tour there. Hell, lawyers had to fight like shit to just get the government to admit it existed on paper.
Our immortal man doesn’t need to be kept somewhere secret to be fucked over.
Some people live significantly longer than the rest of us now, but no one kidnaps them. What good would that do? What would you get out of it that you couldn’t get by asking nicely for a few tissue samples and a questionare filled out? Holding someone in prison is extremely expensive and doesn’t allow you to examine the person’s ordinary diet, activities, and habits that might be the key to understanding their longevity. OTOH, you could pressure, pay, badger, threaten, guilt-trip, embarrass, trick, or seduce someone into volunteering whatever you needed far more easily and cheaply without necessarily having to hide what you were doing.
“Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”
Our government may well grab you just so another can’t. They may well be friendly about the protection they’re forcing on you, telling you tales about how China whats to grind your bones.
Any organization has basically forever to decode you. Possessing you is the sticky wicket.
I really like this write up, but I disagree with your basic conclusions. I’d like to use a real example to highlight the age difference we’re discussing.
Here’s a shirtless 35-year-old Paul Newman filming Exodus. Here’s a 61-year-old Newmanfilming The Color of Money.
Now, I chose Newman as a best-case scenario from your POV, because he did age fantastically well. But still, if Exodus Newman was shooting The Color of Money, wouldn’t the buzz exceed the celeb rags and tabloids by then?
Sure, but even so, immortality is so fantastically unlikely that no rational person would consider it seriously. He would appear to all (including himself) to be merely exceptionally lucky. And that luckiness is very unlikely to be something that could be “extracted” and developed by a single entity a la the Manhattan Project. Science just doesn’t work that way. Even if it somehow turned out to be something remarkably simple, like a singe gene mutation (the simplest possible explanation) it would take decades of work before anyone could realistically benefit from it. And that would be people conceived after a treatment was developed. It would take decades more before anything could be done for someone who was already an adult. Multiply those timetables by anything from 2 to infinity if you plan on limiting the research to only a small cadre of scientists sworn to secrecy.
ETA: And don’t forget, even when Newman looks Exodus perfect at 75, you still don’t know that he’s going to live exceptionally long, as opposed to merely being in excellent health and appearance until he dies of a stroke at 78.