Immortality?
Sep. 25th, 2025 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eerietomImmortality is a common trope in science fiction. There are frequently characters who, if they have not achieved actual immortality, are extremely long-lived. But what does immortality actually imply? Let’s discuss some definitions first. Be warned: there are many spoilers below!
Immortality just means you live forever, right? But what does that mean, physically? Do you continue aging but just don’t die? If you lived to be 300 would you just be a bag of sagging skin and bones and liver spots? What about your organs? Would they slowly deteriorate? Or would you stay looking youthful? If so, at what age does your body stop aging? Presumably, unless you were born immortal, you stop aging at whatever age immortality was conferred upon you. But even if you were born immortal, one assumes you don’t stay a baby forever. It’s a convenience that in such stories, immortals usually stop aging when they reach their physical prime in adulthood.
In the original Star Trek series episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”, our heroes encountered aliens called Platonians who were long-lived. Their leader, Parmen, was born in 44BC, and his wife, Philana, in 32BC. Philana claimed she had stopped aging when she was 30. The actors playing them, Liam Sullivan and Barbara Babcock, were 45 and 31 at the time they filmed the episode. Parmen and Philana, like most of their fellow Platonians, had achieved longevity through a eugenics program.
In another episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, Kirk and crew encountered a Cheronian named Bele who said he had been pursuing an escaped political prisoner for at least 50,000 Earth years. This longevity seemed to be a natural condition of his race. Actor Frank Gorshin was 35 when he played Bele. In “Requiem for Methuselah”, there is a human named Flint who was born in 3834 BC, played by James Daly, who was 51 at the time. His seeming immortality was due to an ability of instant tissue regeneration.
A group of humans, calling themselves Eternals, shut themselves off from the rest of the race in the 1974 film Zardoz, and achieved immortality by way of a supercomputer called The Tabernacle. One character, Arthur Frayn (played by Niall Buggy when he was about 26) claims to be 300 years old.
Now let’s look more deeply at what constitutes immortality. The Platonians may have been long lived but they were also highly susceptible to even minor injuries—a mere scratch could be life threatening. When the Enterprise reached the planet Cheron, Spock discovered everyone on the planet was dead, meaning Cheronians weren’t conventionally immortal--they had all murdered each other in a race war. Flint, as Dr. McCoy discovered, had lost his immortality when he left Earth and would eventually die. In Zardoz, the Eternals could still die from conventional means—for example, Arthur Frayn fell to his death, but his body was instantly regenerated by The Tabernacle. Also, in the society of the Eternals, any act of rebellion was punished by forced aging, which caused some of the rebels to look quite elderly, weak, and frail.
Is there a difference between being immortal and invulnerable? In the Space: 1999 episode “End of Eternity”, the Alphans encounter an alien named Balor who boasts of being immortal. Similar to the X-Men’s Wolverine, Balor is capable of being injured but has an accelerated healing ability—the episode begins with Balor caught in an explosion and gravely wounded but within minutes he’s fully healed. In the end, he is trapped in an airlock and blasted into space. If he can be injured, then surely he would succumb to the effects of being in a vacuum. Unlike in the movies where an unprotected person in space explodes, in real one would suffer a number of other effects, but let’s concentrate on just one: with no oxygen to breath, an ordinary person would fall unconscious then die. So if that happened to Balor, if his body was then brought back into a normal environment, would he come back to life? Or would he actually, finally die?
In The Avengers story “Born Again (And Again and Again...)” (issue #218, cover date April 1982) the Avengers met a boy who, if he died, would instantly regenerate a new body. There is a scene where he stows away aboard a rocket ship not meant to carry passengers. As the rocket takes off, the boy goes through a series of rapid deaths and regenerations, staying alive just long enough in between deaths to reprogram the rocket to fly into the sun, where he hoped the intense heat would be enough to permanently kill him.
Taken to the extreme, what if you were truly immortal and impervious to harm? Does that mean that when our sun goes nova and Earth is destroyed, you’d just be floating in the vacuum of space? Would you still be alive then? If you are impervious to all harm does that mean you don’t need food or oxygen or water? If not, would floating in space for all eternity just be nothing but sheer torture, unable to eat or breathe, freezing in the vacuum, and yet unable to die?
Another aspect science fiction tends to associate with immortality is that with it comes boredom. The Eternals have been alive for “only” a few hundred years but they’re bored and they just want to die. Flint says he’s had to endure watching too many loved ones die. But to me that’s just a lack of imagination on the part of the writers! I’m not saying it would be fun to watch your loved ones die, but after all, the rest of us are not immortals, and we’ve seen loved ones die, maybe several, and yet somehow most of us still carry on!
As for boredom, I feel like I simply don’t have time to study or do everything I would love to! I don’t have time to keep up with all the ideas I get for stories and songs and art. If I were immortal with all the time in the world, would I ever reach the point of having learned and experienced everything? I doubt it. Someone born in the 1940s could not have guessed we’d have cell phones, computers, the internet, etc.
If one were truly immortal, wouldn’t one’s sense of morality or philosophy change? It would be like if one could read minds, or fly, or turn invisible, or teleport. Having such abilities would fundamentally change you. I doubt very much one would stay the exact same person you were before you could read minds. One might despair over reading all the ugliness that people think about, or one might actually see the beauty in everyone and feel more optimistic.
If you thought you might live forever, that might change your philosophy. They say, don’t wait too much, you never know when you might die. Do what you want to do in life, you may never get another chance! Would immortality thus make you lazier?
And if you were immune to harm, you might turn to a life of crime! If nobody could kill you, you might go rob banks or kill people wantonly and laugh as the bullets bounce off of you. I suppose they could still drag your ass to jail, let’s just hope you don’t get a life sentence! LOL
But you might also realize you could use your abilities for good. You would make a very good firefighter because you couldn’t be harmed. So immortality, like any other thing in life, could be a blessing or a curse, or both. There are able-bodied people who see nothing but what’s wrong with their lives, and there are people in wheelchairs or people who are blind or deaf who still manage to enjoy life and count their blessings.
Think about the religious idea of immortality in the afterlife. You die, you get judged, and then you go to heaven or hell where you spend the rest of eternity. It would not be fun to burn for eternity, but what would heaven be like? The idea that everything is perfect and beautiful and wonderful, wouldn’t that get boring? What if someone you love very deeply ended up going to hell? Wouldn’t you be upset thinking that they were being forever tortured? Or would your memories be erased so you wouldn’t think about them? But memories are like a house of cards. Remove an important one and the rest collapse.
It’s an interesting idea, but it never seems fully explored. I wouldn’t choose immortality, but wouldn’t say no to a longer life if I stopped aging, or maybe some kind of delayed aging agreement? “Okay, Joe, we guarantee you will live to be 150, and you will not physically age until you turn 149, and then aging will rapidly catch up with you.” I think I might just agree to that!
Immortality just means you live forever, right? But what does that mean, physically? Do you continue aging but just don’t die? If you lived to be 300 would you just be a bag of sagging skin and bones and liver spots? What about your organs? Would they slowly deteriorate? Or would you stay looking youthful? If so, at what age does your body stop aging? Presumably, unless you were born immortal, you stop aging at whatever age immortality was conferred upon you. But even if you were born immortal, one assumes you don’t stay a baby forever. It’s a convenience that in such stories, immortals usually stop aging when they reach their physical prime in adulthood.
In the original Star Trek series episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”, our heroes encountered aliens called Platonians who were long-lived. Their leader, Parmen, was born in 44BC, and his wife, Philana, in 32BC. Philana claimed she had stopped aging when she was 30. The actors playing them, Liam Sullivan and Barbara Babcock, were 45 and 31 at the time they filmed the episode. Parmen and Philana, like most of their fellow Platonians, had achieved longevity through a eugenics program.
In another episode, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, Kirk and crew encountered a Cheronian named Bele who said he had been pursuing an escaped political prisoner for at least 50,000 Earth years. This longevity seemed to be a natural condition of his race. Actor Frank Gorshin was 35 when he played Bele. In “Requiem for Methuselah”, there is a human named Flint who was born in 3834 BC, played by James Daly, who was 51 at the time. His seeming immortality was due to an ability of instant tissue regeneration.
A group of humans, calling themselves Eternals, shut themselves off from the rest of the race in the 1974 film Zardoz, and achieved immortality by way of a supercomputer called The Tabernacle. One character, Arthur Frayn (played by Niall Buggy when he was about 26) claims to be 300 years old.
Now let’s look more deeply at what constitutes immortality. The Platonians may have been long lived but they were also highly susceptible to even minor injuries—a mere scratch could be life threatening. When the Enterprise reached the planet Cheron, Spock discovered everyone on the planet was dead, meaning Cheronians weren’t conventionally immortal--they had all murdered each other in a race war. Flint, as Dr. McCoy discovered, had lost his immortality when he left Earth and would eventually die. In Zardoz, the Eternals could still die from conventional means—for example, Arthur Frayn fell to his death, but his body was instantly regenerated by The Tabernacle. Also, in the society of the Eternals, any act of rebellion was punished by forced aging, which caused some of the rebels to look quite elderly, weak, and frail.
Is there a difference between being immortal and invulnerable? In the Space: 1999 episode “End of Eternity”, the Alphans encounter an alien named Balor who boasts of being immortal. Similar to the X-Men’s Wolverine, Balor is capable of being injured but has an accelerated healing ability—the episode begins with Balor caught in an explosion and gravely wounded but within minutes he’s fully healed. In the end, he is trapped in an airlock and blasted into space. If he can be injured, then surely he would succumb to the effects of being in a vacuum. Unlike in the movies where an unprotected person in space explodes, in real one would suffer a number of other effects, but let’s concentrate on just one: with no oxygen to breath, an ordinary person would fall unconscious then die. So if that happened to Balor, if his body was then brought back into a normal environment, would he come back to life? Or would he actually, finally die?
In The Avengers story “Born Again (And Again and Again...)” (issue #218, cover date April 1982) the Avengers met a boy who, if he died, would instantly regenerate a new body. There is a scene where he stows away aboard a rocket ship not meant to carry passengers. As the rocket takes off, the boy goes through a series of rapid deaths and regenerations, staying alive just long enough in between deaths to reprogram the rocket to fly into the sun, where he hoped the intense heat would be enough to permanently kill him.
Taken to the extreme, what if you were truly immortal and impervious to harm? Does that mean that when our sun goes nova and Earth is destroyed, you’d just be floating in the vacuum of space? Would you still be alive then? If you are impervious to all harm does that mean you don’t need food or oxygen or water? If not, would floating in space for all eternity just be nothing but sheer torture, unable to eat or breathe, freezing in the vacuum, and yet unable to die?
Another aspect science fiction tends to associate with immortality is that with it comes boredom. The Eternals have been alive for “only” a few hundred years but they’re bored and they just want to die. Flint says he’s had to endure watching too many loved ones die. But to me that’s just a lack of imagination on the part of the writers! I’m not saying it would be fun to watch your loved ones die, but after all, the rest of us are not immortals, and we’ve seen loved ones die, maybe several, and yet somehow most of us still carry on!
As for boredom, I feel like I simply don’t have time to study or do everything I would love to! I don’t have time to keep up with all the ideas I get for stories and songs and art. If I were immortal with all the time in the world, would I ever reach the point of having learned and experienced everything? I doubt it. Someone born in the 1940s could not have guessed we’d have cell phones, computers, the internet, etc.
If one were truly immortal, wouldn’t one’s sense of morality or philosophy change? It would be like if one could read minds, or fly, or turn invisible, or teleport. Having such abilities would fundamentally change you. I doubt very much one would stay the exact same person you were before you could read minds. One might despair over reading all the ugliness that people think about, or one might actually see the beauty in everyone and feel more optimistic.
If you thought you might live forever, that might change your philosophy. They say, don’t wait too much, you never know when you might die. Do what you want to do in life, you may never get another chance! Would immortality thus make you lazier?
And if you were immune to harm, you might turn to a life of crime! If nobody could kill you, you might go rob banks or kill people wantonly and laugh as the bullets bounce off of you. I suppose they could still drag your ass to jail, let’s just hope you don’t get a life sentence! LOL
But you might also realize you could use your abilities for good. You would make a very good firefighter because you couldn’t be harmed. So immortality, like any other thing in life, could be a blessing or a curse, or both. There are able-bodied people who see nothing but what’s wrong with their lives, and there are people in wheelchairs or people who are blind or deaf who still manage to enjoy life and count their blessings.
Think about the religious idea of immortality in the afterlife. You die, you get judged, and then you go to heaven or hell where you spend the rest of eternity. It would not be fun to burn for eternity, but what would heaven be like? The idea that everything is perfect and beautiful and wonderful, wouldn’t that get boring? What if someone you love very deeply ended up going to hell? Wouldn’t you be upset thinking that they were being forever tortured? Or would your memories be erased so you wouldn’t think about them? But memories are like a house of cards. Remove an important one and the rest collapse.
It’s an interesting idea, but it never seems fully explored. I wouldn’t choose immortality, but wouldn’t say no to a longer life if I stopped aging, or maybe some kind of delayed aging agreement? “Okay, Joe, we guarantee you will live to be 150, and you will not physically age until you turn 149, and then aging will rapidly catch up with you.” I think I might just agree to that!
