What We Know about Immortality 

“Biological immortality” means you don’t decay with the passage of time, not ever, you will never die from any cause related with old age. We can easily have a very good idea of how much this would change the world if we were able and wiling to grant it to every human being alive today. Turns out the answer is something between “not much” and “less than you imagine”. As for “practical immortality”, that is harder to define, because it depends on what you accept as your baseline. In general terms, it means being “biologically immortal” but also, in addition to that, being so hard to kill that chances of you dying by accident became for most practical purposes non-existent. Too implausible to be taken under consideration in the current state of reality. That is what vampires have, and that is what would drastically change our society if we could give it to all human beings alive today.

You still have **** and suicide as common causes of ****, but the passional variant of both is out of the table. **** now takes premeditation. Just the elimination of accidental **** already changes demographic projections drastically.

Biological immortality and practical immortality have one important element in common, however. For the individual, when we consider infinite time scale, both mean a **** sentence.

You will die, that is absolute certainty. You just don’t know when.

Only way to not die is to be actually immortal. That’s what we call “true immortality” and it is purely theoretical. We have the definition and it is self-explanatory enough, but I cannot point you any example in the know multiverse.

A true immortal would be someone who cannot die by suicide, or homicide, or under any other circumstance.

This is someone who do not age and cannot be permanently mutilated in any way. Forget the Ancient Greek punishment for the gods. Because if you could age, an/or get hurt permanently, that would mean you can be cremated and turned into ashes. Spread in the wind. Point me any difference between existing as ashes dispersed around and not existing at all. Take your time, I wait.

No, to be truly immortal mean you are physically invulnerable. Either no one can physically hurt you, or you go back to your previous state after some time. Every 24 hours, or every 9 minutes, or every 366 days. Your mutilated body disappears and a perfectly healthy body replaces it.

The third option is the only scarry one. The only sort of immortality that makes plausible that shallow babble about why “you don’t really want it, if you think about” that we often find.

Those who try to sustain that nonsense are usually referring to one of the other 2 variations. Often the most pedestrian biological alternative. Is so clearly a **** cry of a fox, swearing the grapes are green, that present arguments for why the thesis is invalid becomes hard. Because the argument is too self-evident.

You can and you will die, just like any non-immortal human. “Oh, but I may need to live longer than everybody I know, I would have to see everybody I love die!!” Oh, poor puppy!!

A year still takes a year, a day still lasts a day. You don’t drink a cup of coffee any faster or any slower than the average human ephemera. New people keep coming every moment in your live. And the experience of build relationships with them is always new. Even if humans happened to be a limited collection of people and identical people started repeating themselves in your life after some time. You would still keep changing. Ergo, your relationships with those people would never be the same.

On top of that, if you are immortal then there is one immortal being in this universe. By matter of reason we cannot deny the fact that the rules of this Universe do not exclude the possibility of immortal beings. Therefore, whatever made you immortal is at least in theory subject to be replicated.

If you don’t like being the only immortal around, you got yourself a long-lasting hobby.

But, what if all humans stop? What if humanity gets extinct. What if all living species in the universe end up extinct and circumstances change so drastically that life cannot start again anywhere? So, no new intelligent specie can ever evolve. As this practically immortal individual you find yourself completely alone.

Well, then, you die.

If you didn’t decide to suicide before that point. You can decide to suicide at that moment.

That’s the option strategically excluded from all those “immortality would be really bad for you, because…” scenarios.

If you can die, and you are an intelligent person, then given enough time to work the details step by step you can kill yourself. Necessarily. May take time, but, once you stablished that you want to die and there is nothing else that you would ratter be doing than suiciding. You are destined to success.

You cannot suicide if, and only if, you happen to be truly immortal.

And the good news I can give you already, right now is this: our real Universe does not do true immortality.

Both other options are on the table, that one is not.

Therefor, the only scary possibility we have on that table happens to be the one that will never really be on the table, for us, outside fiction. Isn’t that great?