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Could a world (similar enough to ours) "work" without anyone dying?
Shanadeus
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So basically, let's discuss the consequences of no one having to die (whether it's through magic, technology or it just being the natural state in an alternative dimension) and the potential problems such a situation might give rise to.
I can see several arguments being made for how horrible/awesome that would be and a lot hinges on the details.
If for an example no one could die, regardless of their desire to die, you might end up with a world where torture is indulged in to extremes or where death is merely replaced by being incapacitated for all of eternity.
Even if this immortal humanity wasn't a degenerated version of ours you might still have various problems arising from diverse emotions that might arise from people not being able to properly "shut down". Perhaps death would just be replaced by a state where they turn catatonic and I haven't even begun to hypothesize on how the bodies of people would be like (if there is no death, does that mean that brains and bodies are indestructible or...?)
On the upside, if one could for an example chose to die, you might have a world were people are never afraid of dying but where some simply chose to die out of their free will when they feel that they have nothing more to gain in this world.
So yeah, big topic.
I can see several arguments being made for how horrible/awesome that would be and a lot hinges on the details.
If for an example no one could die, regardless of their desire to die, you might end up with a world where torture is indulged in to extremes or where death is merely replaced by being incapacitated for all of eternity.
Even if this immortal humanity wasn't a degenerated version of ours you might still have various problems arising from diverse emotions that might arise from people not being able to properly "shut down". Perhaps death would just be replaced by a state where they turn catatonic and I haven't even begun to hypothesize on how the bodies of people would be like (if there is no death, does that mean that brains and bodies are indestructible or...?)
On the upside, if one could for an example chose to die, you might have a world were people are never afraid of dying but where some simply chose to die out of their free will when they feel that they have nothing more to gain in this world.
So yeah, big topic.
Shanadeus on
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Maybe, but if nobody dies, then it becomes a lot easier for us to get off our asses and go and explore the universe, and possibly other places to colonize.
Now have them not dying AS WELL AS adding more people through birth!
Short of cannibalism (oh wait that means people would die nevermind)...no can't work.
Paging Iain Banks.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That being said, I think the human sense of curiosity would get the better of people - many wouldn't want to live forever, and would want to "die" just to see what was next.
Reproductive rights, based either on the privacy of the family unit or on bodily autonomy, would go right out the window. I'm not sure that bodily autonomy would exist in such a world.
If people didn't die, we'd have to fundamentally restructure the way our society operates on a lot of really basic levels. While it might hypothetically work, it wouldn't look in any way "similar" to ours.
It's really a well-trod topic in science fiction, which is why I name-dropped Iain Banks above.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Perhaps there'd be laws analogous to current financial monopoly laws?
The consolidation of wealth, experience and contacts might somehow through law have to be split up somehow so that no individual will worse off merely for not being born early enough.
well food isn't a problem anymore, if you can't die from starvation theres no real need to eat except for pleasure.
space for the ever growing population would be the bigger problem, and all the things that everyone would want.
but we would also gain a lot of room, people could live in all the in-hospitable places you couldnt before like the middle of deserts or under the ocean. I would also guess that people would fling themselves at our nearest planetary neighbours on rockets (you could really cram a lot of people into one if you ignore all life support, landing systems, and the g forces) seeing as the need for oxygen wouldn't be a problem anymore.
In a few hundred years, everyone alive right now - the lowest, most pathetic crack baby crying in a hospital, the child prodigy born in a rich family, no matter - would be an ubermensch incomparable to any person that has ever lived before. In a few thousand years, everyone writing on this forum would probably be chilling on Alpha Centauri or so on. In a million years...well, we would probably not think anything like humans anymore.
You people are thinking about this in a way too small of a level. Political progress? If you have lived for a thousand years, what the fuck would you give about racism anymore? Are you going to fly the Confederacy flag around when the Beta-Opsilonians are going to fly past Earth? Born young? Overpopulation? Like we wouldn't have perfected our reproduction to a complete accuracy inside the first fifty years from nobody dying.
Fuck, we would conquer the galaxy. Anyone else coming across a 20,000 year old human would probably worship them as a god.
But not for long I suppose.
The Andromeda Galaxy is preparing for a battle against us, but once the light reaches them and they see what our World Eradicators did to the Magellanic Clouds I believe they will simply choose exodus. It is funny, during all this time they have never realized that humans are not even aware of their existence anymore, they stopped concerning themselves with sentient matters when they re-arranged Milky Way.
but seriously it was pretty rad when we could walk around in the Moon without any space suits
I also wonder at what point insanity would set in from having too much to remember, or severe boredom. It reminds me of Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space universe, in which post mortal humans volunteer to have themselves hunted in order to have some excitement back in their lives.
Panicking! Panicking!
Oh wait, the apocalypse. *whew*
In all seriousness though isn't there some sort of disaster that's supposed occur naturally, like a virus, when a species population becomes too big to sustain itself? I'm not trying to draw parallels between humans and lemmings here, but it seems that if the human population got too big then at the very least international tensions would flare for whatever reason and spark a conflict that would thin out the herd a bit.
Sounds a bit callous I know.
Having said that I'm sure society would be quite different. So much of our world is designed around the eventual death of the person. Certainly long term projects would be commonplace. I'm sure there would still be a great demand for instant gratification (I mean, I expect to live several more decades, but I still want ice cream NOW) but the above example of space travel would become easy to implement and follow through.
I image death would be replaced by the fear of ongoing pain (ie-trapped in a cave in ect.). When you live forever, agony can go on forever.
On a more biological and metaphysical level, a world without death or birth could still have evolution and change. Imagine if heritable material was exchanged in whole or small parts between individuals, incorporated, then changed the currently active individual. Those types of changing genetic parts that moved around and copied themselves best would succeed better and so forth even if the total number of individuals never grew or diminished.
Also the quality of life could depend on limited resources, without enough food air water ect (or too much fire) the body could go into stasis so that the speed of thought and movement would be reduced. Not death but a reduced impact on the world, approaching imprisonment.
I'm also reminded of Peter F. Hamilton's Confederacy, where everybody just ups and changes their lives completely every 150-200 years. They still live their lives essentially unchanged from the modern context; go to work, get married, have kids, make war. But when they get too old, they just pop into a rejuvenation chamber for six months, and pop out 18-years-old again at the end, and start all over.
Exactly what I thought.
And as you can't really kill enemy combatants in wars or certain criminals this would probably be the way to incapacitate them.
Throw them into a pit of fire and keep it locked up.
To make the discussion a bit more focused:
The brain is indestructible and doesn't consume nor expend any energy or waste, and with it our minds are immortal.
You can thus have your entire body dismembered and your skull cracked open to take your brain out of your body - which would, while not be death, be an end in which you'd probably go mad very soon.
I also assume that we after a while would be able to clone bodies to house brains that have been separated from their original bodies.
Your body need food to move about and function but if you don't have any it will just gradually cause you more and more pain until the body lacks the energy to move - at which part it will slowly but surely start using up it's own muscles and organs in order to get energy.
So that'd be kinda a situation that I think would allow "immortal" humans to live in a world similar to ours - instead of killing you, you are put in a sensory black out indefinitely and torture would probably be more effective. Things would change swiftly though once we can make brains contributing by putting them in bodies, and from that point I dunno how the world would change.
As it is in the real world the path of human technology is waiting to see if we'll get to mind-state backups or brain transplants sooner. Which one of those happens will pretty much determine what we try next: simulated bodies or organically-templated tissue development.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)