You Don’t Want to Live Forever

this episode of why science is sponsored by Archer 1999 all new episodes premiere May 29 on FXX that's why you don't

want

the power of immortality superpowers usually only change the way a hero or villain

live

s the For the rest of their

live

s, they get super strength, for example, and you could spend the next 40 years lifting cars off train tracks to save people and all that, and if you got super speed, you could spend the rest of your adult life traveling the world doing your hero job, which was good spaghetti by the way, but what if your superpower not only changed your life but life?

Do you really

want

to live

forever

forever

forever? Of all the superpowers that we have evaluated in this program, I think that, interestingly, immortality could be one of the very ancient ones, for example, in the oldest surviving literary work, which humans have the epic of Gilgamesh, it is about of a quest for immortality, so obviously we've been thinking about immortality for a long time and in theory it sounds amazing, you'd finally have enough. it's time to say take the piano I still have super strength or APRA and add ultra language but if we think about this power scientifically I'm not sure you'll accept this apparent bargain let's start I still have super speed first how should we define?

Immortality Well, the simplest and most direct definition of immortality would be that if you are immortal you are exempt from death, why does it have to be so creepy? But this version of immortality, especially in pop culture, usually comes with other superpowers like invulnerability, which is one thing and another thing, so for this analysis we will focus on the most realistic version of immortality, biological immortality, Generally speaking, humans have three main causes of death, disease, aging and physical trauma, and right now, without any radical advances in medical technology, the only one of these. causes that we really cannot avoid, protect ourselves or cure directly is aging, biological immortality, then it would be the absence of aging, but susceptibility to the other two causes of death in terms of pop culture, this is their classic, the version Immortality Highlander, where In theory, you could live forever because you don't age, but you can still meet your end through other means.

There can only be a time when, if you stopped aging, if anyone did, they would be incredibly transformative as one of the most important voices in life extension research. and me in 30 years dr. Aubrey de Gray says that aging is essential for metabolism, but eventually that metabolism becomes altered until it dies as we age, our immune system weakens our cells and our DNA in those cells accumulates damage and mutations and our cells eventually stop dividing, we will eventually succumb to the The side effects of one of these shocks, whether heart disease or cancer, in industrialized nations, about 90 percent of the average daily deaths in those nations can be traced back to age-related causes.

If we could end aging and become biologically immortal, it would radically change society or at least superpower change your life right now, although our best efforts to extend human lifespans simply aren't fast enough to put us on the path to immortality, for example, if you were to graph human lifespan over time versus To advance technologies that extend that lifespan, it takes more than a year to make a technology that extends human life by one year, but if we could find some drug, process or technology that extends human lifespan so much in such a short time that it exceeds the time it takes to research that advancement, we would reach what is called longevity escape velocity, where our lives over time could be extended continuously indefinitely, biological immortality now sounds crazy, perhaps, but researchers like me from an alternate timeline believe we can actually achieve this. escape velocity yes, even if humans never achieve biological immortality and stop aging, at least we know you may have heard about this floating child on the news, turritopsis dohrnii or the immortal jellyfish, this creature is theoretically immortal because he has the ability to become an adult.

The body reverts to a ball of undifferentiated cells and then returns to the first stage of its life cycle. It's like you're able to turn into a ball of goo and then into a baby to live your life again. The Hydra is another Highlander-style creature. Known for its amazing regenerative capabilities, its cells also set it apart: they do not experience what is called senescence or the eventual arrest of cell division, giving it a potentially unlimited lifespan. Now I have said this theoretically and potentially very intentionally because both creatures can simply be eaten even if you are biologically immortal, even if you are careful it can be a big risk and that is because in an endless life, all premature deaths They will become opportune for you and will happen to you much sooner than forever from now on. a falling coconut from where in the last 200 years or so human lifespan has doubled, which is amazing when you think about any other creature that has done that in just a few generations in the early 19th century, this advance in life expectancy was due to increases in health education. and housing and, more recently, vaccines and antibiotics have kept this trend on track.

Now let's say that in the near future some scientists will discover the key to biological immortality and at the same time, whatever is in that syringe could be its own episode, but for now let's just say whatever, it gets you up to speed. escape from longevity and you can now surpass the normal human lifespan and age-related causes of death such as Alzheimer's and cancer, you are now biologically immortal, just as certain pop culture and your average make it seem. Life expectancy ranges from about 71.5 to infinity, or does. If you eliminated aging, you would automatically eliminate some of the leading causes of death for the average human being, leaving only less likely non-age-related causes of death, such as homicides and car accidents.

On a long enough timeline, everyone's survival rate drops to zero, even if you were biologically immortal, eventually the unlikely ways of dying would catch up with you and sooner than you think, here's a simulation using survey statistics from the data visualization website than they wanted. Finding out is how human life expectancy would change if all natural age-related causes of death were eliminated, so that there was no heart disease or cancer, the only ways to die would be to be struck by lightning, which is very little. likely, or falling off a ladder, according to election staff. The simulation is a good approximation of what we are talking about with pop culture inspired biological immortality and what they found is that if you eliminate all of these natural causes of death and leave only the unlikely ones, like biological immortality, hope human lifespan would increase to around 9000 years.

Yes, living a hundred times longer would be extremely significant. I'm not saying this isn't exactly immortality, it's only eight or nine thousand years and it also means that when you meet your end it will be through one. in these improbable ways and it's not going to be pleasant and I'm not just putting some weird check on biological immortality, or does nature do this too, for example, Lobster doesn't experience cellular senescence, its cells never stop dividing and therefore They could theoretically be as reproductively adapted as they want forever and grow in size forever, but when we look in the oceans we don't see mega lobsters everywhere, the largest one we found has about the mass of a toddler, a toddler. with pincers, they are still susceptible to disease and predation. and as they grow, it takes more and more energy to shed their shells, eventually they run out of that energy and die in their shells.

Any kind of realistic biological immortality will still be subject to the checks and balances of nature and therefore cannot be true immortality. power, something of a misnomer, even underwater, was Aqua Sean Connery. Now I know what many of you are probably thinking right now, but Kyle, even if realistic immortality isn't forever, it would still take me nine thousand years longer than my typical lifespan, okay? Sure, what I'm saying is that even living that long is the biggest problem with this power. Let's say we conquer death. We figured out how to upload our minds to computers or solve all the big problems with cryonics.

We now have true complete immortality. However, this still comes with serious life-changing existential issues. The biggest criticism you'll hear is that if you're not completely immortal you'll have to witness the death of every person you know you love or care about. Always make new friends, you might even start a new family over time, but the idea of ​​not even being able to share in the supposed fruits of immortality is hard to accept and would there be any point in potentially doing and seeing everything if you're going to do it? Forget a lot if you reduce the complexity of the human brain (potentially the most complicated thing in the universe) to just its neurons and the connections between them, then a rudimentary estimate of how much storage space our brain can contain is around two, and - half a petabyte or two and a half million gigabytes this is a lot but it is not infinite and from behavioral studies we know that an important part of living life and experiencing and learning is forgetting, for example, after this video ends, you will probably you will do.

I just forget the exact color of my shirt, but hopefully I'll remember something about what I said about immortality. The point is that your brain prioritizes certain information and remembers it and deletes other information or forgets it if one of the supposed benefits of immortality is complete immortality. accumulate all the life experience that you couldn't get in a single normal human life, then this doesn't evolve to deal with unlimited experience if there is a finite amount you can remember and therefore you have to forget everything else in a human life . It doesn't matter if you forget your first birthday, but if you are mortal forever and necessarily forget something you could only have learned with immortality like Laura the OMA 5,000 years ago, that's a serious and non-obvious endpoint to this assumption. magical benefit complete immortality also has huge quality of life issues, for example if you live forever your chances of getting an incurable disease and being sick forever are one hundred percent.

I'm not saying that people can't live while they are sick, but if you knew this would happen if you became immortal, would you choose to be immortal? Yale philosopher Shelly Kagan argues in her book Death that immortality would also lead to extreme boredom. An infinite life necessarily exhausts all potential experience long before life ends, leading to extreme situations. boredom and if you forget because of our brain or some magical reason, much of that life you never get bored, what was the point of having that experience in the first place? In Kagan's view, death is actually a rescue from the unbearable tedium of immortality. or just what would happen if you fell into an abandoned mine shaft or an unbearable, uncaring void and were trapped there literally forever until the end of time, you just had to sit there, all crammed together.

I can't even imagine how bad that would be, so why? Don't you really want the power of immortality? Anyone free from the mine shaft? Well, if you had a more realistic version of immortality, you wouldn't be truly immortal and you would be destined to die in some unlikely and very unpleasant way, and even if you were truly magically invulnerable and amoral, you would have to deal with bigger philosophical and existential problems, like losing all your loved ones, your friends, your family, your memories and your connections to society and probably your will to live through mortality could be in danger. and in itself a superpower from the point of view of an immortal person, death can be what makes us feel alive because science I'm stuck, oh, I'm stuck Hey, there are many other existential and quality of life problems that we don't address You wouldn't even want to enter into complete magical immortality if you lived forever, literally forever.

Just imagine how difficult it would be for society to deal with you and for you, not only would you be the most famous person in the world. world and someone will probably analyze you right away if you think music now suckscompared to what you liked when you were a child. Imagine how you'll feel in 20, you know, 2,500 years, as people say, and what that is. this music, beep, blorp, when I was a kid I liked Pink Floyd and now it's all I don't know goop goop goop that's not music now that's what I call music 2,500 thanks again to Archer 1999 and FXX for sponsoring the episode of today of this season sterling archer lana kane and her crew of acid-tongued misfits are aboard the salvage ship m/v seamus.

An important question arises as they explore deep space and try to outwit giant aliens, intergalactic pirates and vicious bounty hunters, how will they survive each other? Welcome to space. -tastic world of Archer 1999 new episodes of Archer 1999 premiere May 29 on FXX thank you very much for watching Mustafa if you want more from me and want to suggest ideas for future episodes you can follow me and because science here on these social networks Also the complete series of MORTAL KOMBAT science is on the channel. I think you'll enjoy it if you haven't seen it, also the first episode of our spin-off show because the space with Archer himself, John Benjamin, is now live you'll want to check it out with dr. mu Wow, it's cool and I'm jealous, yes.