I have 3 little girls, ages 6, 4 and 1 year old. Since the birth of my oldest, I have been stuck with fear over my own mortality. I go to bed at night thinking about what is an inevitable, undeniable part (or end) of life. I cant stop, I’m deathly (no pun intended) afraid of dying. The thought of non-existance is horrifying… The thought that one day my beautiful girls will be fatherless is killing (again, no pun intended) me…
I find this to be the biggest problem that mankind, as a whole, has to face. Why hasnt our species dedicated more time and money towards working on the whole death issue? Why havent we, collectively, started serious research into immortality? Surely, no-one wants to die…ignoring the suicidal masses for a moment… Isnt everyone afraid? (I do not want a theological/religious discussion, please…)
This topic has probably come up here before but I want to talk about it, I want to see what everyone else’s thoughts are about this. I want to know how others deal with this, how they are able to push this from thier minds.
I get the sense that for a lot of people on this board their life sucks and the last thing they would want to do is prolong it.
Seriously though, there are a few cottage industries like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, biotech, and genetics that are looking into this problem. You’ll probably hear about them soon.
What makes you think we haven’t? There is lots of research into beating the Grim Reaper, or at least holding him off for a while. The average lifespan is much longer now than a hundred years ago, and it keeps getting longer.
In the meantime, how about pulling your weight by stopping to be a master killer?
Actually, there is plenty of research going into this right now from several different angles. While I seriously doubt that we, as a species, will ever become ‘imortal’, I fully expect my generation to live longer and better (which is the key IMO…who wants to live longer but not enjoy the extra time?) than the previous generations have…and that my own children will live longer and better than my own generation. If I can cross the century mark and still be relatively fit and spry with my wits (such as they are) still about me I’ll be a happy man…and I think this is a reasonable expectation looking at how things are currently coming along.
And what are we going to do with the towering hordes of immortals once we have this death thing licked? Would we ban new life, since there’d be no room for it? Or, more probably, would we make the expense of becoming immortal so high that only the richest .004 percent of human beings could afford it?
Death is natural. It’s the circle of life–the old make way for the young. A society comprised of immortals would be a society that never changed politically, culturally, genetically–it would be stuck in a permanent rut. If the immortals were an elite group, they would acquire so much accumulated wealth that they would be like gods on Earth. Non-immortals couldn’t even begin to compete with immortals, who would have centuries of experience and connections to keep them in their lofty positions. (There’s been many an SF novel written about such societies.)
And really, is there anyone on Earth whose life is so kick-ass that they want to live it forever? I could see wanting a slight extension, say fifty years, but forever? Could you stand spending centuries looking at the same people, the same places? What if your family elected not to be immortalized?
Living organisms age due to the fact that the telomeres at the end of DNA chains get shorter and shorter with each replication. Once those tips run out, cells die off.
Research into the big killers of cancer and heart disease is endless. But, truth be told, longevity with a worn-out and aged body may not be of interest to a lot of folks.
I’m more interested in creating an artificial device for the purpose of containing one’s mind or soul. Read Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to find out what those obelisks were all about.
I think real immortality is beyond our means…its silly to even speculate about it. Certainly its not going to happen in the near future, and I doubt it ever will. Even if they come up with an effective means to halt aging completely (something I find highly unlikely), people will still die. They will be killed in accidents, murdered, etc. There will still be diseases and other things that kill folks off. I seriously doubt that the world will suddenly fill to capacity with people.
In addition, having longer lives will probably have the effect of driving down population growth even more. Look at Europe these days with its negative population growth. Even the US is barely breaking even last time I checked (our growth comes mostly from folks from other countries coming in). As standards of living increase in 3rd world nations they too will see declines in population…and nations like China with their wierd emphasis on boy children over girls are poised to implode this century big time. Even India will probably see something of a population implosion this century IMO.
However, I think most people would love to live longer lives…if said extensions had a high quality of life. And I think this is certainly within our capability as a species. I also highly doubt it will be something ‘for the rich only’…from a purely economic perspective. There are a hell of a lot more middle class folks out there in the world than there are elite rich.
Random thoughts on this:
• Being afraid of something isn’t a good enough reason to try to eradicate it. If you’re afraid of spiders, do you work towards the eradication of every spider in the world?
• Perhaps coming to terms with one’s own mortality is a vital part of growing as a human being.
• Immortality would either mean a population explosion, or no more babies.
I think the way things work right now is pretty damn good. Try facing down your fears of death, find out what is at the root of them, and perhaps you will learn some important things about yourself.
Please, speak for yourself! I’m an atheist, and as such, don’t believe in heaven or an afterlife…but still…
Right now I’m thinking of the quote from Gandalf. “Green fields…and shining shores” or something like that. When the time comes, and I’ve finished what I want to do, it will be time to “shuffle off this mortal coil” and find out what the next adventure is.
Besides, there would have to be an enormously radical change in our entire society/culture if people started living forever. Less to no children would have to be born, to make room for the old ones. Immortal races in fiction generally don’t have children at all - it’s one or the other.
Actually lifespan has not changed. What has changed is life expectancy (except for those who don’t plan to live past the next encounter with a comet, but I digress).
To be sure anytime or anywhere there’s been even a hint that immortality/ perpetual youth might be possible, people have pursued it with a vengence. Ponce DeLeon for instance. Or the inital hype when hormones were discovered, which lead to experiments with monkey gland injections, among other things.
Right now we know that we don’t know enough yet about why people age for any sort of crash program like the polio vaccine drive to be practical. We’re still working out the basics. But in principle there’s no reason why if you can live a year you couldn’t live 1000 years.
As posted by several others, a society of extremely long-lived people would require either a near-zero birthrate or more hopefully we’ll be in space by then and have a lot more room to grow.
For what it’s worth I too used to be in extreme fear of dying. Now when I look my mortality in the face, I don’t feal fear so much as sorrow. I guess this is an improvement.
Death, too, and more importantly, what may or may not follow is also my biggest fear. You may ask, why do I not immediately drop what I am doing and spend every minute to finding a cure for brain death?
Because it might not be successful. If we as a culture did everything we could to stop aging and death and it still didn’t work, we would have wasted our lives when we could have been having fun, making works of art, and making love.
Most humans, if nothing were to go wrong, would live to the age of about 110-120. That number has not really changed significantly.
What has changed is that we’re finding ways to eliminate the things that “go wrong” and prevent someone from reaching that mark. So, for example, the potential lifespan may be 110-120 and some people may have died earlier than that due to smallpox. What we’ve done is removed smallpox from the list of things that prevent you from reaching that high potential, but we haven’t actually changed the potential maximum age at all.
Death should not be “cured”, not as long as we keep creating new life. We put it off long enough as it is. Personally, I think the expanding population is a bigger problem to mankind and the planet than death is.
I don’t want to die, but neither am I afraid of it. I’ll accept it when it is inevitable, and fight it when I can.
