Immortality

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Were you looking for immorality?

“”When there pass before our eyes examples such as these, so frequent and so ordinary, how can we ever rid ourselves of thoughts of death or stop imagining that death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment?

—Michel de Montaigne

Immortality is eternal life. An immortal being is supposedly immune to death. Many religions and cranks have promised eternal life, but none have been proven to deliver on the claim, but so far cultural immortality and having children are the only realistic way to attain any forms of immortality, although in both ways only parts of you will survive on the Earth. All other ways of immortality rely either on something that is unfalsifiable or something that has never been succeeded under current knowledge. To sum up, fighting against aging and death has always been like fighting a losing battle, and this may still be the case in the future.

Biological immortality

Despite claims to the contrary, only a certain type of jellyfish may have any sort of claim to immortality (assuming they aren't eaten by predators).

Several plants also seem to have no age limit with some of the oldest examples found, such as the "Pando" clonal colony of quaking aspen in Utah, reaching tens of thousands of years old.

Genetic immortality

This view is that you can achieve a form of immortality through your genes being passed on to your children and through them, others. The downsides are how you will likely be forgotten after four or five generations and your descendants will quickly be as similar to you as you are to anybody else.

Engineered immortality

Aubrey de Grey proposed a theory for the ways to cure aging, called strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS), maintaining that all causes of aging can be cured with proper strategies that are within the reach of current technological progress; besides, he also predicts that due to the progress of medicine, the humanity will reach longevity escape velocity (LEV) around 2035, that is, the situation in which the remaining life expectancy of humanity always increases more than one year in each year. His prediction of the timing of LEV has been rather constant over years. In short, longevity escape velocity is a form of biological immortality attained by constant engineering on the human body.

However, in reality, the increment of life expectancy is slowing down, and it is unlikely that the percentage of people living to 100 years old will ever exceed 15% for females and 5% for males without any means to slow aging; moreover, despite the impressive development of computer technology and artificial intelligence, the progress of scientific and technological innovation is slowing down in general, especially in medicine, as pointed out by Eroom's law, which means we should not realistically expect that there will be big breakthrough in medicine, and thus should not realistically expect that aging will be slowed or cured, therefore we should not expect the demographic trend that the increment of life expectancy is slowing down will be changed by future technological progress.

Supernatural immortality

Magic will grant you immortal life in Heaven! Or as a vampire. The first emperor of China's Qin dynasty died taking mercury pills in search of immortality.

Virtual immortality

Ha, we don't need that supernatural rubbish! We have neuropreservation, mind uploading and whole-brain emulation! Or we will have them, eventually. Or at least they don't provably contradict physics. YOU CAN'T PROVE THEY DO.

Cultural immortality

Make people remember your name (if not you) foreverfor longer than otherwise through good or bad deeds such as exemplary military service, political works, terrorist acts, artistic triumphs, etc. This can quickly fall into "The person they are remembering is barely a shadow of what they were". Woody Allen had this to say: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying."

Desirability of immortality

Some traditions (such as Christianity) regard immortality favorably as a worthwhile goal. Greek mythology, on the other hand, which featured a separate privileged class of immortals (gods and demi-gods), warned against the hubris of average humans aspiring to better their status in stories such as that of Prometheus, and portrayed the disadvantages of eternal punishment, as in the tale of Tantalus.

People who claimed to be immortal

• Count of St. Germain (born circa. 1691/1712–died 27 February 1784)

See also

• Aging

References

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