5 Reasons Immortality Would be Worse than Death

If you're reading this, congratulations on having achieved the primary goal with which we begin each day: You have avoided death.

We're big on this idea of not dying. We love stories of immortal vampires and invincible superheroes, each of us wishing on some level that was us. If we didn't have to worry about death, we could finally get shit done.

But could we? If you take a moment to think about it, you realize immortality is grossly overrated.

Contrary to what many people believe, humans are still evolving. That's not a big deal if you have the kind of immortality that only lasts 1,000 or 2,000 years, but of course real immortality means you'll still be walking the earth, in your current body, a million years from now.

Science has no idea where future mutations might lead us by that point, so it's anyone's guess what your neighbors will look like in the future. You, on the other hand, will be walking around as the future equivalent of this:

Their bodies and brains are going to continue to adapt to an ever-changing world. Yours won't. Will your digestive system be able to handle the same food they eat? Will your brain enjoy the same entertainment? Will your non-evolved tongue even be able to speak the languages they speak in the year one million AD? Would an unfrozen caveman be able to do all of that now?

One thing we do know: You won't be getting any lovin'. It turns out that mother nature hates inter-species breeding, and is such a big cockblocker that science had to come up with a name to describe it: Reproductive Isolation. It's the reason there aren't packs of ligers or centaurs roaming around.

Basically, it's nature's complicated "the triangle doesn't go in the square hole" law, with a bunch of subset rules that will kill off your children if you decide to take a hammer to the triangle. Meaning that as that species further evolves, there is no possible chance for you to create a new species closer to your own that you could stand to look at for five minutes.

Of course, that's assuming that you're even safe walking around among the members of this new freak species. Will they treat you like a novelty and cast you in hilarious insurance commercials, like the Geico cavemen? Or will they do to you what current humans would do if they finally caught Sasquatch roaming around through the forests (that is, stick you in a zoo)? Though whatever the freak-species decides to do with you won't be as bad as no sex for the rest of your life. Who knows, maybe someone will decide to make you the donkey in their next show.

And it's probably irrelevant, since your inability to make friends with mortals will go out the window long before then...

Let's say some kid goes rummaging around in your basement, finds that witch's old portrait of you and discovers that you are immortal. Word spreads and suddenly you're famous the world over. Sure, a lot of people might not buy the story at first, but folks have become famous for much less.

Sounds pretty sweet, right? Probably get a reality show out of it. But that's just scratching the surface. You're not just going to be famous; you're going to be a god. You have eternal life, which means you must know the secret to eternal life, which means you will immediately be the center of the world's newest and most popular religion. You'll be like a guy revealing himself to be Jesus, and proving it. Why would anyone continue to worship an invisible deity when they have a god walking around amongst them? Each morning your yard will be packed full of several thousand terminally ill people, or parents with their sick kids, asking you to grant them the same immortality you have.

That, of course, is assuming a government or crime syndicate doesn't get to you first. Literally every powerful and wealthy person on Earth will decide that in your veins pumps the one thing they can't buy: freedom from death. They're not going to stop until they've spent every penny they can spare to see if they can turn your blood and organs into unending life for themselves. Think about the wars that are being fought over oil. The secret to eternal life would be worth far, far more.

So we're not talking about the occasional blood test and urine sample here and there while they let you stay in some five-star facility. It's more like you getting kidnapped and kept in some damp underground shack away from any civilization while they go balls out on your organs E.T.-style.

"Just contact our concierge if you need anything."

Get comfortable, because since nobody will know where you are, they can keep you there for as long as they want.

But let's say you give them the slip, and successfully keep your secret under wraps with a series of new identities. It's going to get awfully hard to keep track of all of them, because...

We're not saying that if you were to be magically granted immortality, you'd eventually get Alzheimer's anyway--we assume that the Elixir of Life you sipped will keep your brain physically young just like the rest of you. We're saying it won't matter.

Imagine if your cell phone number changed every week, and every week you were forced to memorize the new one. It gets exponentially harder because all of those old numbers are still in your memory, clogging up the works. Then imagine someone asked you to instantly recall the number you had five numbers ago.

"Wait! It had a six in it."

That's one reason your memory degrades as you get older. Your brain and its ability to store and recall memories is limited, but the amount of stuff you're asking it to remember keeps piling up over the decades.

That's a problem because your brain relies on not just storing information, but being able to rapidly recall it at a moment's notice. As time goes on, more and more memories pile up, along with names and dates and birthdays and anniversaries. Your brain can keep all that stuff organized for a while (say, the span of most of a normal human lifetime) but it's not like you can go into your brain and just delete files like cleaning up a hard drive. So useless stuff starts accumulating, clogging up the works and slowing everything down, like all those toolbars on your mom's Internet browser.

"Thanks, Yahoo!"

Your immortal life and experiences may be infinite, but your brain's ability to store and recall them is not. It wouldn't be very long before your brain is piled up with junk like one of the houses on Hoarders. Your body will be young, but you'll still be forgetting people's names and telling the same jokes to the same person twice in one day. Though you'll still be perfectly capable of giving a grumpy speech on where you were when the World Trade Center was destroyed and how kids in the future have it so easy.

And, even if you find a way around this, you still have to deal with the fact that...