This would be a real problem. We forget a lot of stuff already. I basically have a “highlight reel” of my life already, with tons of stuff either lost to the biological bit-bucket or still there, but missing file headers. Tag on another hundred years, what will happen? Will we forget more? Will older unused info get ‘overwritten’? Is there ultimately a finite capacity for learning that we have yet to hit? Will we find it harder and harder to learn new things? As we live and learn, will our past become more fuzzy and full of holes?
We really don’t know what would happen if we suddenly had to cope with two or more lifetimes of info. We never needed it, so why would we evolve the capacity to do so? It sounds to me like a lot of energy to devote to something unnecessary, and evolution doesn’t seem to do that. It’s a concern, should we ever develop the capability of significantly extending our lives.
It’s sometimes argued that lobsters don’t age. Or at least don’t age anything much like typical creatures. They’re certainly fully subject to predation, starvation, accident, and disease. Just not to aging.
I don’t see myself making it for very long under these circumstances. Maybe I would, but if I knew in advance I wouldn’t die for at least a couple hundred years I would have at least as much anxiety as I would excitement, if not more.
I’m not a writer, but I occasionally imagine outlines for various stories, one of which focuses on an immortal person. One scene I imagined occurred at some party several hundred thousand years in the future. The immortal person notices that everyone else in the room seems a little bit different. The person finally realize that humanity is still evolving and the typical human appearance has finally become noticeably distinct from what it was when they were born. I’m sure this doesn’t pass the laugh test for evolutionary theory, though.
It’s a good idea for a story, and I think you’re right, but not for the reason that many people presume.
In just two or three centuries I expect that humans will already look and behave quite differently.
But it won’t be because of who got laid and who got dead.
It will be because of advanced medicine (curing things that we don’t even think of as diseases right now, let alone the normal health problems and limitations we all suffer), cybernetics and, of course, genetic engineering.
Heck, we could argue that it’s somewhat pointless stipulating whether the non-ageing person is unique or everyone has that gift. Because the initial person only needs to survive a few centuries before “living indefinitely with a youthful body” would be the norm.
I kicked around a story idea at one time wherein a man became immortal, lived a few hundred million years, then was thrust through time back to a point several hundred million years before he was originally born, ending up living in a big ol’ circle of at least a billion years. My assertion was that after so much time, such a person would remember next to none of the details of his ‘old life,’ to include friends and even his own original personality. For my purposes, he was a stranger, a completely different person to the people he’d once known.
You might enjoy the man from Earth
It’s a ridiculously overrated movie considering it’s just a group of friends chatting, but it touches on some of the issues of what a person with extreme longevity would recall
I’ve been depressed, and medicated for it. It never left me bored.
Been raped (more than once), whipped and shot at by fascist police in a racist police state, lost siblings to wasting diseases and sudden death, been clinically depressed and am ADHD.
you seem defensive about this for some reason. if you can find eternal fulfillment from looking at sand under a microscope, that’s great.
I don’t find life, as it is right now, that fulfilling. if someone came to me and said would you like to go into cryonic stasis for 300 years, and then afterwards live as a healthy 25 year old for as long as you like I’d probably say yes because neuroscience and science in general will be far more advanced by then. who knows what we will have unlocked by then. I’m sure we will have intelligently designed brains to live in by then, if not something even more advanced.