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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prey species are very aware of their own death.
Found the rabbit. But seriously they aren't aware of death they just act based on evolutionary impulses that in the past made their ancestors not die. A prey creature has zero cognition of its own death.
In order to be truly immortal one needs to be indestructible. The chance to die in an accident essentially limits the average human life span to around 200 years. (Ironically, indestructibility, on the other hand, can lead to situations that are worse than death.)
In order to be truly immortal one needs to be indestructible. The chance to die in an accident essentially limits the average human life span to around 200 years. (Ironically, indestructibility, on the other hand, can lead to situations that are worse than death.)
err... just ask #math, use geom distribution...: 0.9995^n = 1/2 = 1386 lifetimes...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prey species are very aware of their own death.
Found the rabbit. But seriously they aren't aware of death they just act based on evolutionary impulses that in the past made their ancestors not die. A prey creature has zero cognition of its own death.
That's exactly what we do also.
"> A prey creature has zero cognition of its own death. "
Well, they look scared to me, the simplest explanation is that they feel the same way that us. Why to add anything else to the simplest explanation? In order we can feel superior to them? Sounds like chauvinism to me. Or in order we don't feel guilty when we kill them? Sounds like cowardice to me.
Or put it another way, why I can't say the same thing about you? Maybe you are not aware of your own death, you just act based on evolutionary impulses that in the past made their your ancestors not to die.
SciFi author Ian Banks 's culture series explores a future civilization where people is potentially immortal but in that society it happens that lots of people lives 150 / 200 or 300 years an then they choose self termination.
Another interesting treatment of "immortality" in fiction is the Chasm City/Glitter Band/Yellowstone society from Alastair Reynolds' novels. Rather than achieving true immortality through some one-off miracle pill a la Golden Age pulps, "immortality" is a sequence of stopgaps - one life-extension therapy gives an individual enough time for science to advance to the point where it comes up with another extension. Rins…
“To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death. – Jorge Luis Borges” There’s evidence this is not true. Many animals mourn the dead, and many animals will routinely remove older animals from power/leadership.
You don't want to live forever. Because if you live forever, the probability of you eventually getting trapped somewhere forever is 1.
The cycle of life is what keeps things lively and interesting. You can get stuck at the bottom of a well in a figurative sense, too.
I suppose that the biological immortality that author has talked about, the kind that our future generations will see, will still require all the necessary resources like we do. They'll still get sick and will need medical care sometimes, environment will still affect them, the only thing that will change is the deterioration that our body goes through as we age. I don't know much about the concept but I think it is pretty easy to picture it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Found the rabbit. But seriously they aren't aware of death they just act based on evolutionary impulses that in the past made their ancestors not die. A prey creature has zero cognition of its own death.
Without knowing the perspective of the animal how can you make that definitive of a statement?
The piece is very concerned with the individual effects of immortality, or extreme longevity, but the first thought that scared me was the cultural effects on our species. I'm already worried about the number of very old people that predominantly govern our countries, but a congress full of 500 year old boomers, now that's material for a horror novel. For me immortality seems like a recipe for stagnation and inequali…
I suspect a Congress that was completely reshuffled every 8 years wouldn't have anywhere near these issues.