I thought about this while I was answering a question about cryogenic preservation.
So it finally happens. They have gotten it down to a single pill. It alters the way your body works. You become immune to all disease. You can also heal from almost any injury speedily and completely Deadpool style. As well the Hayflick limit on your chromosomes resets regularly so your body will self repair forever. You are rejuvenated and will always look and feel around 25 years old. The trade off is that you are sterile.
Just for fun, lets say they were only able to make one of these pills. You are the only immortal. If it were me, I might be inclined to try and keep that fact about my existence on the down low. Not doing so would create a celebrity that would never go away and perhaps attract perverse and unwholesome types of people into my life. That would necessitate a regular reinvention of my identity which would likely become more difficult over the years, but it could be managed.
So accumulating wealth shouldn't be that difficult. I can afford to be patient enough for investments to pan out over time. Things with very long term payoffs would make sense to me.
My relations to other people would start to change as I moved pat my 100th birthday. I would have few contemporaries and then none. Making new friends when you are over 50 is already difficult. Making them when you are over 100 and share little common historical experience with anyone is likely even more difficult. I will have colleagues and acquaintances, casual friends and lovers, but a best friend or a wife seems unlikely. That other person who I am sharing every stage of the adventure of life with. that person won't exist.
Decades will melt into centuries. Culture and language will change. I will learn and adapt of course for it will all come in its natural time. The human brain and memory has limits. I wonder if I will finally forget ever having been a child or a young adult. I could become a diligent diarist. It would be interesting to go back and read about a day I recorded hundreds of years before. A day that I could well have no memory of at all. I would literally be different people over time where I could see the historical person that I had been has almost no relation to who I am now.
Centuries melt into millennia. Humanity itself is changing. I may no longer resemble any existing racial type. I don't disappear into the crowd as well as I used to. Maybe I choose to become more reclusive.
100,000 years. A few things could have happened. Humanity may have gone extinct or humanity has actually evolved into something else, perhaps a higher type, perhaps several types, perhaps has given up the dubious experiment of civilization or perhaps has diversified into innumerably types out among the stars none of whom I would have a natural place among.
I face a future completely on my own.
There are other models of course. All humans made immortal. Only a select cohort made immortal, a group of Olympians of a sort. Only a few from every generation.
How would you feel if it was you. How would you feel if it was everyone except you?
True immortality cannot exist in this physical Universe. Entropy will eventually cause everything to be isolated and near absolute zero.
To be able to live for say several 100 thousand yrs, may be interesting I think increased lifespan (several hundred yrs) is within our reach within just the next few decades.
Regardless of how few or how many of the humans became immortal, how could they survive the eventual destruction of the Earth itself? Well, they might be able to leave the Earth, I suppose. But if it was only you? Or only me? I don't see that working out. And then there's the end of the universe to worry about, if you're truly immortal.
I've loved the subject of the consequences of immortality for quite a long time now. I think it would be at first, fun, then painful, then numbing. You would be the only constant and very quickly you would be alone, completely. 100,000 years, what about billions, you would become an unrecognizable husk of yourself, you wouldn't speak, barely think, what is there to think about when you've thought every thought. Why build when everything turns to ash crumbling in your palms, you would slowly end up simply existing, alone. Would you even remember who you were, what you were? You wouldn't even want to die, you would loose what it is to want, or would you already be dead?
So, to simplify, from my years of thought and research:
Mortals + Immortality = bad idea
I'd would allow everyone to know that secret. Even if it has certain negative repercussions, they'd fade in time. If I never get hurt, can literally NEVER die from ANYTHING, then what's the harm to me? Eventually anyone who had bad intentions with me would die. Eventually my Immortality would fade from interest, just like any other amazing thing that has ever happened in history.
I would take the opportunity to, obviously, become rich. Since I am Immortal, I can make investments and wait patiently for them to pay off. I could work regularly for a long time, and save up money and buy bitcoins, since they're a big thing now, and then sell them off when they prove to be losing interest, like everything else ever in history. I'm not quite sure how I'd become rich, but I'm Immortal, it wouldn't be too hard.
After I accumulate enough wealth, or make it so I have ways of making constant passive income without me doing much work, I'd go on and start writing. I wanna publish books anyway. If I'm Immortal, then I can write even more stories. I'd make this my only source of income and influence, until I run out of good ideas.
Luckily, since I'm Immortal, it would make sense for me to be able to learn various things, and live out numerous interests until their full course is done. I'd be a literal Jack of All Trades.
It'd be fine for me to change. The World is Immortal, I'm Immortal, Existence is Immortal, Change is Immortal. I can do whatever I want, be whoever I want. There would be enough space in my life to live out many different lives. So what, things change. So can I.
Love would be tricky. On one hand, everyone I love, and grow to love, will die. But at the same time, throughout my existence, I will have loved more people than anyone ever had, or ever will. I will experience love and hurt and pain, but I will live through it. Pain is a part of life, and massive pain is a part of Immortality. As long as I build relationships I don't regret, how could I rue their passing?
Immortality would be Amazing.
There is a TOTALLY GREAT movie that deals with this very topic.
"Man From Earth"
My wife and I watch this every year at Xmas time. It's our guilty pleasure that was written by famous Sci Fi writer Bill Bixby on his deathbed. Watch it with some of your "true believer" friends if you want to TOTALLY mess with their heads.
This is one of my top three movies.
I have no idea... as it is plenty of times I feel I have enough of this life in this world but I won't trade it for the unknown... I still like it here... I think I gonna stay as long I am allow to be. Tired or Not Tired of it. Existing without a concept of time and space is beyond my little comprehension. Everything that is born must die. So... if souls are not born can they be destroyed? Maybe there is really no souls... maybe there are only spirits that move from one human at death to another on birth. Maybe broken spirits produce broken humans. And there may be those with little souls. Immortality means absence of Death... I want to Die one die just as everyone else I know will one day die. I do not expect to see anybody i know in the "afterlife". Many religions grant immortality to the soul. I am not religious. I expect me not to live in any shape or form to the end of times.
watching your kids get old and die and all your friends and finally when the world ends floating around in space self-healing. this is a curse for sure.
it would be a terrible curse in the end.
end?
good point. it would be a terrible curse when everything else you care about ends.
It would eventually become nightmarish. As you stated "I face a future completely on my own"
but you self heal
I asked this question in another forum and was surprised to learn that very few people liked the idea of living forever. Ray Kurzweil claims that we will be able to cure death within the next 15 years. Other knowledgeable scientists say it will take longer, but few deny that it could happen... I think it's not too early to be giving serious consideration to the prospect. When that pill comes out I'll be the first in line for it!
But it won't be just for one person, or even just a few. They used to say that if portable telephones were ever invented only the wealthy would have them, and that was true for a brief moment, but look at things now.
I had not thought of that, but if we have not come up with any other solution for overpopulation by that time it would indeed be a reasonable tradeoff.
If we learn to cure death then that would be the death knell for us all. We are fast approaching unsustainability. We already have the majority of the social wealth in the hands of the few. We would be further divided into the mortal and the immortal. Death is the only equalizing factor and without it we would create more of hell on earth. Ray Kurzweil also said that he doubts humanity will continue for more than four hundred years. (Is his immortality downloading our memories into some giant matrix type technology?)
There was a very good film called "Highlander " that portrayed a small class of people who were immortal. The answer seemed to be they had to be very resourceful as they had to live in a mortal world without being spotted,,,not an easy task
I can highly recommend the film,