What if... there were immortals?
 

The subject of individuals gaining immortality has been well explored by books and movies. Highlander, Tuck Everlasting, the endless vampire stories... it's all been done before, and the consequences have been played out many times. Well, what if a whole bunch of people suddenly became immortal? What I mean is, what if a large portion of the population, at some random point in history, just stopped dying of old age? How might history be different?

Would the pioneers of the ancient west, the men who lived off the land and experienced nature's beauty as we do not see it today, really accept deforestation and pollution?

Would the American Indians try to take back their country, or at least some part of it? Would they use politics or force?

Would farmers of the old American south really accept the civil rights movement? Would it have even happened?

What would the adults of the 30's and 40's think of the open sexuality of 21st century culture? Would it be tolerated? Or would they have prevented it? Is our culture's open sexuality linked to women's sufferage?

How might our culture be different if one of these populations were still around to affect the future? Would they change their ways, or would they hang on to what they've always known? It's well known that old people become "set in their ways". Would their stuck-in-the-past mindset prevent cultural change? How much <i>new</i> is actually created by death? Is change itself linked to older generations dying off and the newer generations just not knowing any better?

I'd prefer to stray away from the subjects of individuals (e.g., What would Lincoln think?), as that has been done before. I'm also going to assume that being "set in your ways" is a psychological phenomenon rather than a biological one. We'll also assume that the immortals can be killed; they just don't die of old age. I do this because I have a specific factor of change that I want to focus on, and I just thought I'd try to limit the chaos.

Anyway, I just thought I'd encourage you Cellarites to try to use your imagination and see what you can come up with. What do you think?

If you have 3,000 children, how can you be sure that that girl you picked up at the bar for a one-night fling isn't your great-great-great-great-granddaughter?

All I'm gonna say about that is, I don't want to get spam for "Hot taboo great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter action".

But I wouldn't be surprised at all if I did.

If these immortals were resistant to change and (or) had the my way or no way at all attitude, we probably would have exterminated ourselves by now.

Were I an 'immortal,' I would probably hide that fact as well as possible from the authorities and the general public. The last thing that I need to be is a rat in a cage being poked and prodded to figure out why exactly it is that I won't die.

Assuming that I were wiley enough to stay out of that trap, I would probably become fabulously wealthy and use that power to run a part of the world the way I see fit. I've always thought that I could do things better than your average politician. Presumably, I would be able to better judge the 'welfare' of the state as a result of my having directly experienced so much of its existence.

If there a big group of people that I were a part of that were immortal, that changes things a lot. I would stilll say we would be systematically hunted and killed or experimented upon until the little people could wring our secret from us.

juju: the trick is, don't get her pregnant. If you haven't learned how to do that in three millennia, joo got some larnin' to do. Other than that, you would have so many extremely distant relatives, who would care? That sort of brings up another point:
How fundamentally different would your ethics be?

Since the world is constantly in flux, you may not make the same mistakes over more than a few times, but there would be new ones to make all the time.
After sending you checks for a couple hundred years, Social Security MAY get wise.;)

To return to juju's question, I think that a group of immortals would probably form their own society after a while, preferring to live amongst each other than with anyone mortal.

I think they would find that they would have no patience with the fads and fashions that change over what is, to them, a very short period of time. I think what is important to them would be a lot different from what is important to us.

But that changes if you had an immortal life span but a finite memory, or finite ability to recall stored memories, like we all have. 934, I seem to recall that was a pretty rough year. A lot of those decades run together though, I moved into a cave for safety and drank a lot of fermented beet juice. French? I speak a little French, but it's a strange dialect from the renaissance, no help in Quebec in 2003. Hey, you look like my girlfriend from maybe 27 girlfriends ago...

I dunno, UT. They might be like parents rambling on about every little thing their kid (or Grandkid) did or said. Pet owners also to a lesser degree.

Also, Juju do you mean long lived or unkillable?

I mean that they'd just not die of old age. If they couldn't be killed, then you jokers would come up with all sorts of ridiculous, non-cultural changes. :)

Well, if the immortals among us were to live forever, yet grow and age normally, it wouldn't be too long before that immortality were irrelevant anyway, their bodies becoming decrepit and minds feeble and wasted. A lot of folks might think "Wow, it would be fantastic to live forever. I'd do this thing and that thing, become wealthy..." But what if that immortality turned out to be a short mayfly moment of lucidity and the remainder an eternal persistent vegetative state?

Obviously they would be revered as teachers, sages and leaders. The wisest of all mankind to be respected and cherished.
Young nubile women would flock to their feet, wearing shear togas made of gossamer...er...ah...cough, cough...
Then in the 1960's they would be rounded up and interred for being over 30.
The end.;)

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sounds to me like we are talking about eternal youth, not immortality. I'll proceed on this premise.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I don't think I would change anything if I found that I wasn't aging. Truth to tell, it doesn't give you any "super-powers". Heck, you'd die just as easily. Also how would you get rich? All I can think of is buying a bunch of crap waiting 200 years till some of your items are expensive antiques and selling them. Doesn't do anything for ya today.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I do see a change of morality in order. Why live everyday like it was your last when you don't have to have a last day?

Well, I kinda figured that if a person didn't die of old age, then at some point they'd stop aging, too, since aging is the cause of dying of old age. Plus, in all the movies where there are immortals, the characters don't grow old. Besides, it's no fun if they're withered vegetables.

That definitely sounds right, although I don't see how they'd create their own society without the land to live on. Most of the big continents have already been occupied for quite some time. They'd have to form an army, risk their lives, invade some other country, and force it's current residents out. It seems to me that, like most people, they'd already have quite an attachment to the country they grew up in. It's probably more likely that they would attempt to attain an iron grip on the politics of their own country. The long years would give them plenty of time to become wealthy, and of course that money would help them buy whatever laws they want. In effect, they would become like an "upper class". They wouldn't be superheros by any means. They'd be just like all the rich old white men who control things today, only they wouldn't look all wrinkled and grey. Because they'd control all the politics, they'd have enormous power to effectively veto up-and-coming cultural trends that did not agree with their own morality.

I do think there might be a sort of predjudice or elitism that would develop. Regular people would be seen as inferior and child-like. I don't think they would hate them, they'd just think they were better than them. Sorta like how my mom treats me, magnified by a thousand.

I guess you'd have to use the normal methods, but you'd have more time to attempt to do it in. And also, once you did get a successfull business going, you could save up your money over a much longer period of time, thus achieving more wealth than an any mortal ever could.

They'd be reminded of the fragility of life every time one of their own died. It would be a huge deal, a great loss, on the news and everything. Perhaps morals and values would change, but I think they'd still fear death, perhaps more than normal people.

That sounds like the excuse of a guilty conscience, OC! :)

Yeah, it probably wouldn't matter biologically, but remember that they would probably still have the morals that they grew up with. I guess some people wouldn't care, but I know lots of people who would be really creeped out.

One of my forbearers and about a dozen or so of his brothers and cousins came to the east coast between 1627 and 1640. Can you imagine how many distant relatives I have from just that group. Damn, I've probably had one.:D

Just one, Bruce? ;)

:blush: Dunno.

I've always considered the tendency for people to become "set in their ways" to be mostly psychological, as you are assuming in your scenario... people find a psychological comfort zone, and they resist and resent anything that threatens to disturb that. People put themselves in a rut, and then fall in love with it. It can't be wholly biological, because people are capable of changing at any point in their lives, if they must.

But what of the biological limitations of memory? There is little understanding of how memory functions, but there is much evidence that even when we "forget" things, it's still stored up there somewhere, stuffed in a dusty old trunk which can still be opened and acccessed under the right circumstances. That being the case, it is very likely that there is a maximum capacity for human long-term memory. Once a person hit this barrier, they would be like an Alzheimer's patient, with only the temporary short-term memory to go on. Not much of an existence if you ask me.

Sure Hot, but people who are immortal are different. Those differences would probably accommodate memory. And Libido.:)

Well, what I was thinking is: What if we do find and defeat the cause of aging? Considering all the other things we've accomplished, it seems, abeit remotely, possible to me. There are even scientists working on that right now.

Given that thought, I thought it would be cool that all of the stuff we imagined might happen in a completly fictional scenario could still happen in reality.

The memory thing is a good point, I suppose, but I really don't see why you think there's an upper storage limit. Given that we have no idea how it's stored, how can you infer this? I'm not sure I understand your connection with forgetfulness.

As far as my understanding goes, and it may be flawed, the cause of the degradation in aging is due to errors in the duplication of DNA. It's a bit like what happens when a document is copied, and then the copy is copied, and so on... the quality erodes away until what is left is a blobby mess. Of course the process of quality loss is much slower in DNA replicatoin, but every time an error occurs replication, the new cells are less perfect.

So, if that theory is accurate, then all we must do to extend our lifesan is to improve the body's DNA replication process. To stop aging, we must perfect the body's DNA replication process. This would be exceedingly difficult, and is not even close to being on the horizon, but not impossible. Shit, we don't even have the flying cars we were promised yet.

There are other secondary causes of aging, for instance the body produces most of it's disease-fighting T-cells very early in life, so the immune system fights new invaders less effectively as one ages. Also, we spend or lves introducing toxins into our bodies, which cause eroding damage. But these secondary issues are nowhere near as hard to solve as the DNA replication issue. Eternal youth, though not immortality, is a distant but real possibility.

I presume that there is an upper limit to memory based on the fact that there is limited real estate in the human skull, and a science indicates that memory is a chemical and/or hardware mechanism. Now if you believe in spirituality then you might surmise that the physical body is not a limitation, but that's a discussion for another thread. My understanding is that long-term memory is WORM storage (Write Once Read Many), like a a CD with an open session. Then there's short-term memory, which is like RAM (Random Access Memory) which is quick but limited, so old and/or less useful information is removed as needed.

Alzheimer's Disease is basically when one loses the ability to store information reliably in long-term memory. Patients don't typically forget what they already knew, but learning new information is near impossible. This is why I conclude that there is a limit to human memory capacity, and once reached, one must rely wholly on short-term memory, which is a huge handicap to a normal way of life.

Or maybe I'm wrong, it happens frequently.

...it is worth noting that Alzheimer's Disease (AD) includes other effects, such as dementia, so even if my brain-gets-full theory is correct, it wouldn't be exactly like AD. Just that particular symptom.

More info on AD

Ideas change one death at a time, as new people come into the world and old people leave. I consider 'getting stuck in a rut' a consequence of becoming too comfortable with your life as it is; such that you are no longer prepared for your life's situation to change. Unless these immortals were open to change they would be lost in the past. Maybe immortals would all be cranky old drunks trying to forget the world because they are so confused by the modern world.

However, I also recall a conversation with my old Government teacher, who talked about how, when he was young and involved in the civil rights movement in the south, they were often helped by the elderly. The people had seen so much, he claimed, that they came to realize that what was happening wasn't right.

I imagine that immortals would have a tremendous cability for understanding, because they have seen so much. They could become wealthy because they could try, try, and try again. They could make all of the possible mistakes, then try yet again a decade later. They would be fascinating to talk to, I imagine. Maybe one or two of them would even get to the point where they could understand women!

It would suck if the whole population came too live too much longer. A world filled with perfectly viable bi-centarians would leave no room for the youth to get anywhere.

Oh, that comes in time. But when you do, you don't like it and by that time it's too late to be of any use. ;)

"They'd be reminded of the fragility of life every time one of their own died. It would be a huge deal, a great loss, on the news and everything."

The way I see it, one of two things could happen.

1) If the gene for immortality is present in all humans, we would see the eventual dying out of the homo sapien species. The presence of immortality among all sentient beings on the planet would result in an abandonment of the thought "leaving the world as a better place than when you found it" because, face it, you're not leaving any time soon. This would result in a change of the development pattern from the gradual increasing slope we have now as finite beings, to a period of stagnation interspersed with flurries of advancement whenever one immortal should meet his end - it would probably develop almost into a religious tradition, honoring the fallen with an improvement in the way the world is.

--OR--

2) If it is not present, then UT's theory of isolationism would kick in, and there would almost be a sense of a return to Greek mythology - a constant question of the sort that faced Prometheus. "Do we help them or not?" Millennia ago, the Great Library in Alexandria, Egypt held a copy of nearly every written scroll ever produced - literature, mathematics, philosophy, everything. There were scrolls outlining a theory that the earth revolved around the sun, long before Copernicus, and a working model of a steam engine thousands of years before James Watt. Most of all this knowledge was lost when Caesar, allied with Cleopatra against Ptolemy, ordered his troops to set fire to the Egyptian fleet anchored at Alexandria and the flames spread to the Library. Historians generally agree that this one act set back the species at least a thousand years, that if it hadn't happened, the Age of Exploration would have been centered on space and not North America.

If we had a clan of immortals in the world, this kind of thing would not be so devastating. Like the monks after Rome's fall, they would be living repositories of knowledge, a constantly updating biological archive. The trick is whether or not they would choose to divulge this information to us, if they think we can be trusted with the intellectual flames they bear.

Awesome post Chewie! (Where ya been?)

From what I understand, there are enzymes in our cells which actually go over our DNA periodically and double-check to see if it's right. And if there's an error in the sequence, it actually fixes it! But the enzymes can only correct so much, though, and eventually the errors just overwhelm it.

Anyway, all we'd have to do is understand and perfect that already-existing mechanism.

I see what you're saying as far as there being limited real-estate in the brain. It seems like any storage mechanism must neccessarily have an upper limit. My problem with this is that I am loathe to guess about something that I know nothing about. In any case, it's very interesting.

Unemployment, high school, E3, college...you know how it is, man. :)

/me offers thanks to the LAN of Pitt-Greensburg, freeing me from my dial-up hell and restoring me to my old home at the Cellar.

Not so sure, Chew. There is the go getters that can't sit still and us procrastinators that can. I'm not so sure "the gene" would change those traits. :)

Well, immortality would breed procrastination, I would think. I mean, why not say "Eh, I'll do it tomorrow" when there's an infinite amount of them?

I could argue that, but since I'm immoral, I've got plenty of time.
What? Er....immortal? Um......nevermind...

I hadn't realized that Ceasar was blamed for the burning of the library of Alexandria too -- I had thought that that was attributed to Christians much later on, that didn't like Hypatia.

I never heard about Christians and Hypatia. The Caesar thing, I heard as I was channel-cruising and landed on History Channel.

Ahh, History Channel. An insomniacal geek's best friend.

i think they would all be sent on deep space missions. think about it

The concept of an immortal race has been brought up in a number of books with some success. Anyone who has read the Lord of the Rings series remebers the Elves. An immortal race that was both wise and highly advanced. They isolated themselves from other races and thrived in doing so. Major issues came up when one of their own kind (Arawen) fell in love with a mortal (Aragorn). Understandably, Lord of the Rings is a work of complete fiction, but it does bring up some good points.

Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that an immortal race would most definitely see the need to isolate itself from the rest of humanity. They would gain great wisdom through the abilty to watch events for all time but they would also view mortals as fleeting moments in time. Mortals, including family members and friends, would constantly be passing while they lived on. I suppose this could swing both ways: one could become very bitter and contemptuous or very wise and affluent.

By living together with other immortals in a unique society there would probably be less angry and contemptuous immortals and more wise and learned immortals. When you have forever to work on a problem you know it will be solved eventually (not to mention the unique view on life immortality gives you). Maybe the immortals wouldn't be more technologically advanced then mortals but they sure would rule in thought and philosophy.

The idea that they would see a death among their own kind as a big deal is interesting but not probable. The immortals may see everything but themselves as decaying but the wisdom gained through hudreds of years of life would probably teach them that nothing is immune to destruction.

In summery, I believe that immortals living among us would do the same thing that mortals do: Seek out those like them, live together, and make a unique community.

Immortality used to interest me and seemed like a "desired" position for the human race.

Yet Asimov has a very interesting piece on it in his Caves of Steel series.

His idea is that the reason humans have achived so much as individuals and are so willing to share our knowledge is in our short lives.

We want to do as much as possible with out short lives.

Yet we know that out lives are not long enough to fully complete our goals.

So we willingly share it with others.

We work hard on our goals because of limited time.


In an immortal world, you'd have all the time in the world to achieve your goal, you'd be able to do it yourself, even if it took you a million years.

Salvatore expressed very much the same idea, but since he wrote then down long after Asimov, the credit goes to Asimov...

The fact is that it is our mortality that makes us human. If we were immortal we'd not be the same people.

I for one enjoy being a mortal Atheist, I could use another hundreed years, but immortality would suck the fun out of life.