Just found out I’m a god. There’s a blood test for it. Still processing the news.

Seriously though, I have been watching a documentary called The Immortalists, about the recent advances in understanding how and why we age and what we can do about it, and it has gotten me thinking about all the big questions concerning immortality.

First of all, do I want to live forever? Do I want to be forever young?

The answer is, of course, hell yes. More specifically, I don’t want to die before I’m ready. I would like the possibility of death to remain open should I decide I am done and want to put that final period on my life’s sentence, but other than that, I want to become young again and stay that way.

If I had to pick an age, I think I would go with 25.

If it was just a matter of nostalgia, it would be 20, because that was the best time of my life. I was in college, taking courses, with a circle of friends, and everything seemed pretty wonderful. My life had a plan, my friends were a hoot. All I had to do was get good marks and have fun.

But I am a cautious type, so I would go for 25, because by then I would have completely my final stage of brain growth, and honestly, who wants to face eternity with an incomplete brain?

Maybe 26, just to be safe.

Leaving the personal, let’s move on to the bigger issues of immortality, such as : what about aging? After all, to be immortal only means to take death out of the equation. Technically, it says nothing about youth.

What if someone invented this kind of just-past-the-post immortality? Would people choose it, knowing that it inevitably meant aging to the point of being little more than a pile of pain and imbecility?

I think some would. Certainly, if it was the sort of thing you did once and that was it, like taking a pill and then boom, no death, a lot of people would go for it. After all, nobody wants to die.

Which would lead to another of immortality’s issues, population. Eventually, all those young people who took that fateful pill would reach the drooling imbecile stage, and society would begin to accumulate them. They would be expensive to maintain for people who are not even there any more, and pressure would build to “pull the plug” on them.

But of course, that would not kill them. It would only increase the suffering of whatever was left of them.

That leads us to the quality of life issue. Sometimes, death is the only way out of intense suffering. What if someone suffers some profound injury, like getting torn in two, and yet continues to live? Would it be humane to deny them death however it might come to them at out hands? Euthanasia becomes a vital issue when it is literally the only way to die, period.

Another vital issue : brain death. At one point is the person, despite being physically alive, effectively dead?

But say we have the aging thing licked as well as the dying, which seems likely. What then? What would true immortality be like?

Well, for one thing, while an end to aging might keep our brains from becoming old, it does not keep them from becoming full. We act as though our memories are infinite and we can just keep on learning and remembering forever, but that is only because our lives, like our brains, are finite.

When life becomes infinite, we are on a collision course with brain capacity. No matter how efficient and capacious our minds are, they are still finite, and no matter how much our brain compresses the memories (which we experiences as a fading of memory), eventually we would hit the hard limit.

So what when? Hopefully, we would simply forget most of our previous life. Our brains would develop a form of helpful and limited amnesia, and we would carry on more or less the same.

That’s biographical memory, though. What about knowledge? If we lived forever, those two forms of memory would begin to compete, and it could be that for some people, biographical memory would have the higher priority, and they would lose knowledge in order to make room for it.

Not the basic things, of course, like speech and toilet behaviour and basic social rules. But a lot of non-essential knowledge could go. I find it hard to even imagine what that would be like.

Of course, for us cerebral types, the opposite might be true. We might find that we still remember all the trivia we love, but sincerely have no memory of the first fifty years of our lives.

As far as we know, we came into existence on our 50th birthday.

Another thing to consider in an immortal world is the stages of life. It used to be that puberty and adulthood were the same thing. This was necessary because people didn’t live that long and they couldn’t waste any years of reproductive potential.

But then we developed agriculture and civilization, and people started living longer, and so childhood could, in most senses, be continued past puberty. This let us invest more in each child, and that advanced the level of society far faster than ever before. Suddenly, we had a new category : teenager.

But what happens when everyone lives forever? Theoretically, childhood could last forever. Or it could end at puberty like before, and people could be teens forever, or whatever they wanted.

The phases of life would be, essentially, voluntary.

Of course, that assumes that we are all aging to adulthood before the immortality “kicks in”, so to speak. A truly horrifying possibility : the treatment that makes us immortal can be done at any age, and so some people are literally children forever.

Imagine if parents could keep their child all sweet and dear and innocent…. forever….

With that happy thought, I hereby finish the day’s speculation.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!