If no one could die, if we were all immortal, then nobody could ever sacrifice their life for someone else.
And what is love if not that willingness to die saving someone’s life?
Mothers have willingly died so their children could live, sometimes before they are even born.
Soldiers have knowingly fought and died in hopeless battles just hoping to delay the enemy long enough for their families and friends to escape.
Engineers have chosen death from radiation to to save their countrymen from nuclear meltdowns.
Nurses and doctors have flown to epidemic centers and warzones and died from infection or explosions trying to save their fellow man.
The examples are countless.These are the ultimate expressions of love we know. It’s no coincidence we hail these acts of selfless love as the noblest. The ones we tear up hearing about. Those people are our heroes.
Perhaps it is morbid of me to say, but honestly: What would Love be reduced to in a world where Death does not exist? Where such heroes do not exist?
Would we want to live in a world with …just cordial relations or some such instead of love?
I think that is why we are mortals, because a long time ago we chose love over immortality.
We are one species of animals out of uncountable millions of species of animals that have appeared on the Earth over the last several hundred million years. There is nothing unique or special about our biology that separates us from other animals.
As others have said, humans are just another species of animal. There’s no reason why we should be different than other species. The only reason why we would be immortal would be if immortality was the normal state for animals. And if immortality was normal, humans never would have appeared. The world would be overrun by all of the earlier species that existed before us.
OP, are you using your story as some sort of saccharine metaphor, or do you literally believe that there was some sort of celestial conference of immortal pre-humans who voted on whether or not to shed their immortality?
Mortality vs. immortality has various definitions.
By one common definition (apparently the OP’s definition), it means one eventually dies vs. never dies.
But another definition (and I think, more common in mythology) means that one can never die a natural death, but can be killed (e.g., in battle or by any other enemy). Immortals of this sort can live indefinitely long, but may eventually be killed. The elves of LOTR, for example, were this kind of immortal.
By this definition, the OP’s entire thesis falls apart.
The vast majority of people will never sacrifice their life.
So for an occasional act of heroism, we all have to experience a slow decline into disease and pain before our lives terminate before some relatively short finite duration. Doesn’t seem like a good deal.
Also, you could flip the whole thing around. One of the most evil things a person could do is take a life (and note, this has happened more often than people directly sacrificing their life).
So a hypothetical immortal population might start a thread “I have figured out why we are immortal” with the argument that they will never know murder.
The comparative shortness of life may make us appreciate it and the lives of others more than if we were immortal, but that would only mean that love is a consequence of mortality, not a cuase of it.
This makes me think of Anne Rice’s vampire books where the immortal vampires eventually kill themselves or go insane because they can’t keep up or understand modern times as they age, or they just get bored with living so long.
