10 reasons why people should not be immortal
A Life / / December 19, 2019
1. Evolution turn you into a relic of the past
Whatever was said, some individuals who reject the theory of evolution, it still works and people continueDarwin Lives! Modern Humans Are Still Evolving develop. Your children will be like you, but it will not be perfect replicas: they will receive a number of evolutionary changes, will not let a lot, but it's better than you.
Look at the reconstructed human form of the past. Even in the relatively recent XIX century, they were far belowMen's average height 'up 11cm since 1870s' growth than we are. And if the acceleration continues, you will have to complexes, looking at their highest descendants. Who knows what people will be in a couple of thousands of years? Perhaps the immortal ancestor seems to them something ridiculous talking monkey.
But evolution It will not only affect the appearance. Can your immune system normally counteract viruses and bacteria, which also evolved over the millennia? Will you be able to start with the people of the future offspring? Will the properly digest food, which do not even exist? Not a fact. In the end, the future generations so distant from you on the evolutionary ladder that you will become a Neanderthal.
2. Time will be perceived not so
Have you ever noticed how age changes the perception of time? The child seems to be that the days are long, and the day of birth still can not come. Adults also look at the time in a different way - for them it is flying like mad. It seems that 2014 second ended just recently... What does five years ago ?!
The older a person gets, the faster his subjective view of flowing timeChronomics, human time estimation, and aging.
In 10 years, a year - the tenth part of your life, and in 100 years - is the hundredth part, and because it appears shorter. Scientists debate whether there is a limit to this phenomenon, and sometimes come to a very amusing conclusions.
For example, mathematician Len Freeman created the so-called conceptWhy time appears to speed up with age (idea) effective age and even found a formula which can calculate how fast flowing time for you. The article was published in the humor magazine The Journal of Irreproducible Results, but every joke has some truth.
It is possible that for a person who is already 10 thousand years, the time will fly so fast that he will not even notice how the alternate generation of short-lived.
3. You can continue to age mentally
If you've read Jonathan Swift, you should remember such characters as strulburgi. These immortal beings who meets Gulliver on his travels, never die, but do not stop grow old. As a result, they look like a living mummy with reason marazmatik.
Jonathan SwiftEternal life - an eternal old age, eternal senility and feeble, miserable existence that eke strulburgi.
Organic designs tend to wear out. And even if the technology of the future will be able to keep the body from aging, not the fact that they are forced always to operate your brain as if he is still young.
You can begin to modify the memory. Now you often can not remember where the car keys Delhi, but what will bring back events that took place 1000 years ago? In addition, even the strongest reason people are not immune to Alzheimer's disease and other age-related failures.
And if these diseases do not learn to fully heal, we get a lot of accidents representatives of humanity, forever doomed to suffer senile insanity.
4. Social inequality will grow
Why do I always use the pronoun "you"? You have something for sure will not be immortal, because it is a pleasure not for everyone. First of all get a long life the rich guys like Jeff Bezos, who have an extra billion for editing the genome and transplant the brain into a new body.
Do you happen to have a billion? I thought so.
With the invention of immortality will be stronger and stronger growing class inequality. Wealthy people are accumulating wealth at home, and poor all get poorer, and it will be another reason for the social differences - up to the war. Classless society is controversial and very utopian concept, which will be implemented almost harder than the very immortality technology.
5. Count on a pension do not have to
I hope you love your job, because you have to deal with it forever. Let for his eternal life and you will be able to retrain and change the profession a million times, a chance to relax from work still will not.
Pay a pension to the immortal citizen - is too heavy a burden for the state, and therefore it is probably canceled.
The absence of mortality and lead to stagnation in almost all sectors, as well as the drop in labor productivity. If your boss and you are immortal and remain in office for several hundred years, what are your chances get a raise?
6. Overpopulation of the planet will become a reality
Earth can support life limitedWhat 11 Billion People Mean for the Planet the number of people. Already a huge number suffers from a lack of food and water, and if you stop the natural decline in the population, the shortage will only grow. the planet's resources will be exhausted sooner or later, and it can provoke not only hunger and suffering, but also a massive war.
7. The Company will cease to progress
Imagine that Middle Ages alchemists would fulfill his dream and found the philosopher's stone. People who inhabited the Earth then would become immortal and would have survived until our days. As a result, we'd still be burning witches engaged in racial segregation practiced and the restriction of women's rights.
How do you like the prospect of living in a constant society for thousands of years? A bit like the novels of George RR Martin, with its medieval period, which has lasted for 8000 years.
The older people get, the harder they adapt to changing society - including the moral and ethical. A person is not easy to give up their beliefs, with whom he lived all his life.
Therefore, the society changed, the need for continuity of generations. People with excessively conservative views must sooner or later die of old age, or they inhibit the development of of mankind.
8. Criminal sanctions will be useless
If people will become immortal, we will certainly be faced with the problem of crime control. Imagine it: if a man lives for centuries pall monotonous existence, and he will not want to have fun completely legal means - such as massacres and brutal rape - what measures will it contain? 30, 40 and even 100 years in prison is unlikely to become an adequate deterrent for someone who is going to spend tens of thousands of years.
A life sentences Company recognizes certain immoral: to be locked in a cell for a perpetual term of imprisonment may be considered in a personal hell.
You can, of course, to use the death penalty, but even today it is very controversial from an ethical point of view thing. A life - a valuable thing, and endless life even more valuable. Moral values will be revised accordingly by society, and the future of the people hardly dare to kill an immortal, if there is the slightest chance that the sentence is erroneous.
9. The meaning of life is lost
People are pretty lazy creatures, and if they are able to do nothing, they did not do. Sometimes just knowing that the time of human life is limited, spurs them to carry out their dreams, whether it is traveling around the world, the creation of masterpieces, or parenting.
And if you know what you have in front of eternity - why somewhere hurry? Or, on the contrary, over the millennia, you can try anything, and then realize that there is nothing else to do already.
And sooner or later it will be just boring.
It is not particularly promotes the appearance of life-affirming thoughts. Even flights to other planets and drastic changes in living conditions and activities stale, and eventually become the most amazing lesson monotonous routine.
Being immortal demigods, people run the risk of any ages engage in extreme forms of hedonism or languish in eternal procrastination. And then, and more ever get bored.
10. You will experience everything that you hold dear
You have become immortal. Then he started a family and children. Will they be immortal too? If yes, congratulations: you have contributed to the coming overpopulation of the planet. If not, you'll have to sooner or later, to see how your children are dying, and then their children's children and so on. However, perhaps because of what some mental abnormalities that appeared as a result of immortality (remember the same about the individual perception of time?), You do not particularly touches the death of children.
However, you can relive not only his family and grandchildren, but the whole world familiar to you.
Ever disappear country in which you were born. Will go under the water continent that you traveled far and wide during his travel. Face of the planet will change beyond recognition, and you will live.
And if they die, it just is not in his bed of old age. Most likely, your death will be unnatural - you can kill someone, you die during any regular war or accident. And it is unlikely before going into another world someone will hold your hand.
see also🧐
- What is cryonics and whether it is possible to find immortality in liquid nitrogen
- How to survive the death of a loved one
- What happens to the brain at the time of death