Saturday, December 12, 2009

On Immortality and Selfishness

Here's an interesting paradox: Today, there exist several institutions not unlike the Immortality Institute; the purpose of these organizations is to reverse aging and, by doing so, gain the benefits of religion without any of the devotion. The curious thing is this: if everyone on the planet were to live 1000+ years, how would we ever make room (quite literally) for such things as procreation? Are we immortals to halt population growth all together? No doubt the CEO of the Immortality Institute would answer in the affirmative, at least until we have developed the necessary technologies to allow us to colonize other planets (that is, if living in a five-hundred-year-old body doesn't sterilize all of us.) And leaving aside this problem, other issues emerge: putting the breaks on aging won't save those in developing countries from epidemics or those of us in developed countries from car accidents. The effect that it would have--it seems to me--is to make us much more paranoid about health, work, diet, etc. ("Artificial sweetener can cause cancer, ya know.") My point is, much as we dislike mortality, shedding it will not create utopia; humans--or at least humans who live beneath the floor of heaven--may be selfish, but not nearly as selfish as they would be were they (tentatively) immortal.

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