Re: The Problems With Immortality

On 2025-02-11 04:29:35 +0000, shawn said:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 23:26:09 -0500, shawn
<nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com> wrote:
 

On Mon, 10 Feb 2025 19:31:51 -0800, Arthur Lipscomb
<arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:
 

On 2/10/2025 7:22 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

BTR1701  <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

Hypothetically, how long do you suppose would someone who is immortal be able to live a normal life before being found out in modern society?
 (As to what defines immortal, I'm assuming that telomere wear and disease would be covered, but it is up to our hypothetical immortal to remember to eat, breathe, and avoid fatal bus encounters. So if you are the seventh son of a seventh son, try to avoid making contact between a broadsword and your neck.)
 A hundred or so years ago it would be very easy for an immortal person to walk into a village, claim to be 20 years old, stay for a few decades, then move to another town and do it all over again. In the U.S. you could simply move to a neighboring state and you were basically anonymous since state databases rarely communicated with one another.
 Even as recent as 50 years ago, there were many gaps in government systems that were especially susceptible to human error. Spy novels liked to suggest finding an infant's grave, obtaining the child's birth certificate and using it to apply for other ID like a driver licence, because it was unlikely that a death certificate for a child that young would have been filed. But those loopholes have been closed off over the years.
 Now, however, any arrest will enshrine your fingerprints and DNA in a national database forever. If you're arrested again 90 years later, questions will arise.
 As for employment, there's a gray market for jobs but I doubt you'd want to spend eternity mowing lawns or squirting the guac bottle at Taco Bell. The super rich can circumvent a lot of the bureaucracy and someone who has lived for centuries may well indeed be super rich. Bribes to doctors and other officials to generate documentation could go a long way, but great wealth brings notoriety and that's the last thing an immortal would want.
 Of course one could just not try and hide it and take your chances, since it's not illegal to live forever, and hope that you can defend yourself against the government goons who will inevitably show up to take you in for "further study".

 I'm less worried about the government than some billionaire kidnapping
me to perform experiments endlessly.

 Is that the plot of a movie?  It sounds a little familiar.  Or am I just
thinking of a random episode of Highlander?

 Sound to me like THE GANYMEDE CLUB by Charles Sheffield. It's based
around such a group of long lived individuals who become so rich they
buy their own asteroid and turn it into their private home so that
they avoid all of those issues of people discovering their long lives.

 Though now that I think about it, it is more like the idea behind THE
IMMORTAL, a 70s TV show with Christopher George playing the role of
the immortal who is constantly trying to avoid becoming known and the
subject of those endless experiments.

The vampires and demons in "A Discovery of Witches" lived for centuries. Much of the show was set in modern times. The main vampire chacater was essentially experimenting on himself to try to cure / ease a genetic problem affecting them.
Forever is another show set around an apparently immortal character in modern times trying to discover why he is, while also solving criminal cases with a detective partner.