12. What If: Life Without Death

I like to imagine different scenarios in my mind, and there is one that I always wondered about and how absurd but interesting it would be. What if... We were immortal? Totally and utterly incapable of dying? In other words, live forever. Not many people think about this, but death is quite central to how we live our lives, we literally live to avoid death. If you think about it, pretty much everything we do is somehow linked to death and how our lives revolve around it. We eat so we don't starve to death, we take medicines to avoid getting sick and dying, we live in houses to avoid the elements that are potentially deadly, we sleep so our body can rest and be able to function more effectually in surviving, and even death itself has become a lucrative thing in the funeral business. Did you know that death is what pretty much drives our economies? One might say that, what is truly the point of living, or anything really, if we cannot die? Death is the great motivator.

But without death.. Where would we be? Off the bat most people would love it, eternal life sounds great on paper, come on who wouldn't want to live forever? Well as with everything in life, there is good... And there is bad. We all already know how great it would be to live forever, but nobody knows of why it would be bad, so I will focus on that in this post. First most obvious reason, over population. Since there is no death, people would continue to have children and with no deaths to balance it, the population would explode and things would go south fast. The Earth would eventually run out of resources and space, thus forcing the quality of life down significantly, we would all be shoulder to shoulder... Miserable, forever. While there are some obvious solutions, they are not without there own problems. We could ban child birth to stem over population. That could work, but then whoever is currently alive will be the only ones to ever live, the human race would become stagnant and without new minds, may never truly advance or bring new ideas. In addition most people wont take too kindly to the forced law of no child births, imagine the government said you can never ever have children because they say so. If that policy proves ineffective, then they might even outlaw sex or enact forced sterilization, as you can imagine, people will not react well to this at all.. A good idea, if it were possible for us now, would be to expand beyond earth and colonize other planets to help our over population. While this would be a great idea, in the future. Currently, we can barley get a robot on mars, our next closest planet. So the mass planetary travel technology is most likely centuries ahead of us and impossible to do now. Other cons to being immortal, is that you better hope that you are never stuck in a bad place. Say somehow you fall in a desolate canyon, where there is nobody around ever. Most would eventually die due their injuries or starvation, but you wont, you will just be stuck there.. Forever. Or if you are lucky, a few hundred or thousand years someone will find you. An even worse scenario, evil people will never have a better time to be evil then when nobody can die. Imagine, somebody kidnaps you and chains you up in a secluded space where nobody will find you(think SAW movies). Than lets say they decide to torture you.. Forever. Since you cannot die, your pain and suffering will never end, and since the evil guys cant die either.. He can just keep torturing you, forever. The sad irony of being immortal, you don't have to die to experience hell.

While there are many other pretty big downsides to being immortal, we will now focus on what is pretty much the worse one. This last one is the worst because if we were actually immortal, this would be inevitable, it has a 100% chance of happening. I asked earlier, what if humans were beyond death? I never said if anything else was. Apparently nothing is forever, not even reality itself. Yes if we had eternal life, we would literally outlive the universe. Scientists pretty much agree that the universe will eventually experience a heat death, as in it will collapse, time and space will cease to exist... But not you. Eternal life remember? Assuming humanity doesn't disintegrate upon the death of reality, we would literally just float there.. In an eternal oblivion of non-reality, just blackness forever. Or if we are lucky, someway somehow, history will repeat itself and eventually a new universe will be born. But this is all major speculation of course. In conclusion, I know this was a pretty odd and farfetched idea for a post, but I thought it would be fun to change it up a little. I imagine this would change most peoples perspectives on life, or not. For as much as we fear and despise death, we are one with death and for a short time we are apart, but one day we will all be called home.