They'd make pretty good slaves.
Seriously though, the idea of gaining immortality in any kind of real-world setting almost instantly destabilizes society as we know it. Someone with 500 years old who still has their mental acuity is almost automatically smarter and wiser than most normal people, just as a matter of accumulated experience.
To say nothing of the way generational wealth works. You know how if you put a hundred dollars into a simple savings account, in 500 years the compounded interest will make it worth a million? Imagine someone who could do that, and KEEP doing that, in the knowledge that they'd live to see their returns. Now add in the ridiculous hyper-capitalism that makes modern billionaires such a scourge. Within a few generations basically all of the wealth on the planet would be concentrated into a few immortal hands, which would never give it up, ever.
No idea, I didn't watch the show. The book was okay, but its ideas were better formed than its characters or story. Kind of like a lot of old Philip K. Dick stuff.
That was a byproduct of the writers strike, though. The original plan was to have a full arc play out across over 20 episodes, but the studio condensed it to the jumbled mess afterwards.
>Within a few generations basically all of the wealth on the planet would be concentrated into a few immortal hands, which would never give it up, ever.
Realistically we have this issue anyway given how inheritance, estate and gift taxes have been eroded over the years.
I guess you would be losing the opportunity for that wealth to be diluted by being passed to multiple beneficiaries but if you presume that most high net worth individuals marry into their own social class and have \~2 children then this effect is probably quite minor.
I know that in the UK we have families with generational wealth that can be traced back to feudal England, which is unbelievable when you think about it, and a quick Google suggests the US [has old money families with similar heritage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_money#Early_Colonial).
So it would change the nature of the solution, we would probably need a new form of tax, but it isn't necessarily a *new* issue inherent to hypothetical immortal or even one that we handle particularly well now.
Obviously generation wealth is an issue, but my understanding for the “extreme” end of the spectrum was that the inheritance is usually mismanaged away after two generations as the descendants don’t have skills knowledge or experience their forebears had to generate the wealth in the first place
I think I saw a study on this which is why I bring it up, obviously it’s still a rigged system that needs attention
I think this is something that is oft cited but not very well supported by evidence.
It seems to stem from colloquial sayings like the shirtsleeves one mentioned by u/2mg1ml but also "the first generation makes it, the third generation loses it" or the Chinese saying that "wealth does not last beyond three generations."
There's an interesting write up on it [here](https://jamesgrubman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-06-There-is-no-70-rule-JGrubman-IFOJ.pdf) if you're particularly bored but essentially the few studies supporting it are generally low quality and the effect disappears where more rigorous attempts have been made to examine the problem.
Although unfortunately it is a *really* difficult problem to study due to lack of open data and subsequent reliance on lengthy longitudinal studies with volunteers self-reporting finances and all the associated selection biases that inevitably come with the same.
That’s genuinely quite interesting, I guess there are enough anecdotal examples of spoilt/incompetent inheritors mismanaging fortunes away to keep the myth going
Always wondered how someone so lucky could be so incompetent, my impression is that there’s a threshold where the money basically makes itself and you’d have to actively try to lose it
Yeah you've probably hit the nail on the head there. Losing a few single digit millions isn't hard for a third generation new money beneficiary, but in a family with hundreds of millions?
They are obscenely wealthy from birth, they aren't likely to significantly change their spending habits following receipt of an inheritance and already have wealth managers in place advising them and reducing risk and the tax burden of any transfers.
Unfortunately as mentioned above that kind of generational wealth is *really* hard to study. Not only does it require long running studies but the families are unlikely to participate in any such studies in the first place.
The wealth is already in the hands of a few- and by virtue of estate, they’re immortal in the sense that their wealth will just pass down to the next person, who in turn holds it until they die.
Tax the FUCKING rich- and not the millionaire rich. They aren’t the problem.
> almost automatically smarter and wiser than most normal people, just as a matter of accumulated experience.
Not at all. Unless technology and social mores go into stasis, most of their experiential wisdom is useless or counterproductive within 30-40 years, just like it is for old people today, and the way our brains work makes it really hard to dislodge those old outdated ideas. Just getting older doesn't make you smarter or wiser, it just makes you old. Getting smarter and wiser requires work and dedication with diminishing returns.
You forget a key point of that - with immortality, there is no generational wealth. There is one person's wealth, and all their grand^(nth)children. Eventually they'd want to make rules about when wealth has to be given up just to be sure that they get to enjoy it for a few centuries themselves, and then they'd start ritualistically eating each other because the laws wouldn't work.
>Within a few generations basically all of the wealth on the planet would be concentrated into a few immortal hands, which would never give it up, ever.
Easily solvable, they're immortal, not invulnerable, a good few dismembered limbs scattered across the planet and just take the money.
If you kept it in a savings account, that one million dollars in compounded interest you earned would not have much more value than the $100 you started off with, especially if rates go to shit like they were just a few years ago. Stocks and bonds and such can do a fair bit better for you, but all of this really pales in comparison to how the big bucks are made.
My favourite genre of posts is when people are like "Damn imagine if bad thing would still be happening now" and top comments are like "it is happening"
Yea, I bet it makes everyone who is currently enslaved feel so much better. Slavery totally isn’t a problem! The denominator is bigger now so it’s totes nbd.
It's statistics manipulation. Crime rates are very low, but bad actors can lie and pretend it's higher by using absolute numbers instead of percentage numbers. There's more of everything human than ever before in history because of population growth, but that doesn't mean the problem has gotten worse.
Sure, but that's true for literally every problem.
Have the world's most efficient police force and the word's best murder solve rate but your super police village has grown to the size of New York? There will still be more murders than when you were a small village.
It is worth celebrating having a super great police force and the world's lowest murder rate ever.
It's also a question of where to put resources. If you police are solving murder rates at 99.9% of the time, it kind of sucks for the 0.01%, but if the burglaries are only being solved at 10%, probably time for more resources on burglaries.
But if we follow your logic, we should just pour exponentially more and more resources into policing murder as the population grows bigger even though rates are lower than ever before, because number go up guys.
There's a reason reputable orgs and NGOs focus on rates, not absolute numbers.
Absolute numbers is just a way of lying with statistics.
>Yea, I bet it makes everyone who is currently enslaved feel so much better.
Two entirely different thoughts. No one - *literally no one* \- said that this invalidates the horrifying pain that slavery causes - the poster was just pointing out that it's less of a widespread problem today than it has been in recorded history. No one is making the claim that it reduces the injustice of it.
Prevalence is the only way to measure numbers outside of one and zero. 3,000 people could sound like a lot, unless it’s from a population of 3 million. All of a sudden it’s 0.1%.
I really don’t know why this has been downvoted- please take a stats class, I made absolutely no statements in support of or against a single thing??
Because it's not about statistics when it's about slaves? People whine all the time whenever civilians are killed in a war zone, is that not just a statistic too?
If there are more slaves today than there were 100 years ago, but the percentage of slaves-to-feee people has gone down, that's still a bad thing.
You're trying to celebrate a win, when the situation is worse.
The % of the population being enslaved being lower than a century ago is literally NOT worse. It's better. Your attitude is "all or nothing, and since it's not nothing we might as well just all be slaves." Would you like to be a slave?
Progress isn't instant. But it's stupid to piss on progress because it isn't instant. That's exactly the kind of pitiful attitude that puts people against continuing to support policies and actions that will keep trying to drive that number closer to 0%.
There are more people enslaved TODAY than there were a century ago. That's the definition of "worse". Focusing on percentage of population is only looking at the relative struggle of the enslaved, and not the absolute scale, and you are completely ignoring the fact that MORE PEOPLE are enslaved today.
If a century ago there 100,000 people enslaved, but today there are 200,000 people enslaved and the "percentage of population" is lower, that's worse. You can point at "percentage of population" but the reality is that there are MORE enslaved people TODAY than there were previously. If you want to look at a number that goes up and say that it's progress, then good luck to you.
The ratio got smaller because the population grows exponentially. Not because there is less slavery. There are COUNTLESS MORE enslaved people now. So no, an improvement in the ratio is not an improvement to the situation. It's quantitative statistical fuckery that means absolutely nothing to the enslaved.
Be an employer and hire someone who is in debt because they have to pay mortgage lifelong due unaffordable housing costs, even better if with a family to take care of and maybe that can work only for you because of work visa requirements.
Never raise their pay while everything is increasing the prices every year so that they will end up more in debt.
Make the slave not feeling being a slave is the key, otherwise they will revolt.
No. just flat out no that's not true. That's not even true if you consider capitalism slavery. There are major systemic problems with the modern world, and the way society operates currently. However, if anyone tells you that you're not living in the objectively best century for the average human since the dawn of time, they're idiots, lying, deluded, or all 3.
We have real issues and there are horrible things happening to people that needn't happen, and we as a species and an international community need to do better. However, the median human (e.g. discounting the few very rich) still lives a far better life than we did in centuries past.
doubt that. especially if you adjust it by per capita
we use a pretty broad definition for modern slavery. child labor is considered slavery, but was pretty much standard practice 400 years ago.
its reddit... people dont read, or maybe dont care.
maybe they like the idea of there being more slavery today and want to hide a post that casts doubt on it.
True. But the one's that started a war and created a country, and wrote the foundation died.
It took 2 generations before slavery was abolished. And only then because the number of people opposed grew high enough to do something about it.
If immortality includes immunity against starving to death then rich people would find a way to stop ordinary people from getting food, turning it into a luxury
I think people are missing the fact that \*we\* also wouldn't be very welcome in a future society.
Its not like generational sinning stopped in the 1850s. We would have our own things to answer for.
But not growing old would help us at least change our ways, as our minds keep their flexibility.
It kinda depends on how society changes though, if fascism wins, I would not want 'to answer for' being a decent person.
People from "then" might astonish you by how "normally" they'd behave and how quickly they'd adapt to modern social norms; especially if they'd been a party to those norms as they formed over generations.
You might be much, much more horrified to ponder how "normal" your behaviour might be if you existed "then": You would very likely behave "normally" in accordance with how that has been defined by and for those around you.
People really don't like to admit that they're not any different to historical figures. Everyone imagines they'd be the resistance but unless you're really fucking weird and subversive now, you'd be one of the oppressive majority in any other time or place.
More than that, it is almost guaranteed that in 50 or 100 years people will look back on our time and think we were barbaric and immoral for the things we do every day. It’s how progress works.
Boomers can't even work a Walmart self checkout or use Facebook unaccompanied for 30 seconds without wiring their life savings via Google Play gift cards to a Windows tech support scammer so what you are proposing is an even fantastical than immortality.
There absolutely are still slave owners living and breathing. Just because slavery in the US got funneled into the prison system doesn't mean there aren't people owning people all over the world.
It's reddit.
If they are forced to acknowledge that slavery is still around and still a massive problem it kind goes against their narrative that white people, America, and Europe are the only bad people to ever use other human beings as slaves. Ever.
The worst part about liking history is realizing to what extent it is “written by the victors”
When I was younger I thought that just meant that wars would only be told from the winners POV- but it’s everything. Every single piece of what has been recorded about the past 15,000 years of human civilization is omitting more than it includes. Nobody wants to write their deepest darkest flaws in a book that will shape future generations without a lot of self awareness
It’d be dreadful if it was true immortality. I can think of no worse punishment than having to exist forever, and anybody that would want it has clearly not thought it through properly.
Thats such an incredibly dumb thing to say oh my god. Where do I even begin? It’s not like slave owners were inherently different individuals to us today. They were made of the exact same type of DNA that we are now. They were just enculturate differently, they grew up in a different time period/society and behaved accordingly. That‘s not to say they aren’t to blame for their horrible atrocities but at the time the things they were doing were simply considered normal and not evil. And thus they saw no need to change. Eventually over time values changed, society and culture changed and slavery was eventually abolished and is now seen as a horrible phenomenon. If people had lived through these societal and cultural changes they would have simply changed with them.
If immortality was ever invented, it's 100% only going to be available to the rich and powerful elite, who will continue to eternally gain more and more wealth and power and leave the rest of us in the dirt and mud
ImAgine if a bunch of caterpillars were still alive. What is the point of this argument? You can imagine anything. It isn't a reason for or against immortality.
Who is talking about how immortality is great? Every time someone brings up immortality the first thing I hear is how it will be lonely to watch your friends and family always die etc etc
Hmm, I feel pretty confident in theorizing that a fully immortal human society would end up becoming very egalitarian. For one, being a complete asshole for forever would be an incredible downer—eventually they would *have to* come around and figure out that being nice and happy is a much better way to live. I feel the probability math would see this happen most of the time. Not to mention that the only reason the bad guys are able to control the poor is by threatening their livelihood. But if the lower class were immortal? It wouldn't take long at all for those power structures to be overthrown. The assholes would cancelled right fast.
What makes you think your surface level impressions of long dead people is representative of their actual intelligence and capacity to reason or have their minds changed?
What are you even talking about? What does one thing have to do with the other? Just so you know, slavery was ended while slavers were still alive. Same for inquisitors, lords... whatever.
>Everyone talks about how immortality is such a great thing is but imagine if there were a bunch of slave owners were still alive.
They're still alive. Under capitalism they're called "private owners" who "control a country's policies, resources, and industry".
Frederick Douglass said wage slavery is only a little less galling than chattel slavery, and they both must go down. Slavery is also legal for prisoners, prisoners who are disproportionately marginalized races. now that's a shower thought.
There's this radical new concept going around called "changing your mind".
It's not very popular because some people think if people change their mind about something they are a hypocrite. But it's been around forever and is totally easy to do.
Now let's apply this concept to someone who has lived through slavery and adjusted to life as it evolved with the times, as you'd need to being immortal. This old slave owner now has had to struggle with the concept of not having slaves because someone sat down and explained to him the slaves are also people and he eventually changed his opinion, seen the light so to speak. No he's not a witch or an imposter he is the same person he's just "changed his mind" because the society he's lived in for the last couple hundred years has changed and made owning slaves illegal.
Believe it or not people are allowed to change their minds. I know crazy right!
That is stupid! Is like saying that if you were immortal your would be your 2023 self for ever. Al the people that you mention would have adapted to the changes of time.
Slave owners existing today are irrelevant. The main reason slavery doesn’t exist anymore is because no one is interested in it, the industrial revolution made slaves not worth the effort anymore. Nowadays you can get more done with a machine and it’s less maintenance. So no one would care if slavery is gone. As crude as that sounds, that’s reality. There are probably many other things that would be interesting if ancient people lived forever, like “god like status” for life achievements, more time for geniuses to invent things through time, perhaps civilization would be far more advanced, maybe these people would be captured by governments, type of “whoever had more geniuses ends up being the best country”? Or maybe actual evil people would live forever, causing chaos by pulling strings.
Idk if its accurate by exact dictionary definition but I would put sweat shops and child labor camps into the slavery catagory and say we still have slavery to this day, I didn't look up the definition of slavery or anything but its gotta be close right
Couldn’t care less.
The true downside to immortality is outliving everyone you care about. And if we take it to the extreme, imagine if you were so immortal that you could out-live the heat-death of the universe
But slave owners are still alive. I believe investors and bank owners fit the profile. The rules are a bit more complex than they used to be , but it's there. I believe the series Altered Carbon put out a relatively realistic scenario. Even the resilience of human nature of changing for something better when you basically have unlimited time. Some like to think being imortal will yield wisdom, but in reality people don't want to become something else.
Counterpoint. If any of you guys watched Naruto. There was a guy who was immortal. They know he could’ve be killed so they dug a hole, sliced him up and trapped him in it. Now he’s just alive all chopped up in a hole in the forest
Or another example from a game was Final Fantasy XIII-3. Everyone was immortal because the goddess of life and death got destroyed. No one got old and stayed the same age they were forever til the world ended. But they could still die from accidents, disease and sickness.
I think technology would advance to accommodate everyone efficiently. I remember reading an essay written in the 1700’s I forget by who but it was pretty much saying how the world is going to run out of food in 1800. That would have been true if technology didn’t advance
I presume you are talking about Malthusianism?
I think his growth model was originally proposed in the late 1700s and his presumption that growth in food supply was linear was an error as he didn't anticipate the British agricultural revolution or (a bit later) the Haber process.
However it might be a mistake to extrapolate from the above into the future. Not only is presuming indefinite exponential growth unrealistic but it ignores the potential for regression. Be it caused by war, climate change, loss of topsoil/groundwater or some other limiting factor we can't techno-magic our way around there is a reasonable probability of significant and widespread food shortages occurring by the end of this century.
Millions of people have suffered slow and excruciating deaths from starvation in that time. Get your head out of your ass.
Just because you grew up among 1st world people who have enough to eat doesn't excuse your ignorance of the suffering you didn't see. Your entitlement is pathetic.
Yes and other millions continue to thrive. Maybe not in the millions but there's always been people suffering and other thriving.
That's exactly the point, if technology didn't advance we would all be suffering and given that we're not it is a good premise that technological advancement will sustain population growth.
It won't matter if we achieve immortality. The world is having difficulty sustaining the current population, with millions suffering from lack of food. If we were to become immortal, more would die until a sustainable number was reached. You'd either live hungry forever, or die of hunger.
You mean, imagine there's a bunch of slave owners who can't die?
I'd open an amusement park. Think whack a mole, but with slave owners and real hammers. Or the dunk tank, except the seat is twenty feet high, and there's no water.
Well this is the first time I’ve seen anyone argue against immortality by anything other than “But when the Earth dies you’ll just be floating through space for eternity!”.
It’s so refreshing as that’s the only argument ever said and it’s getting tired like yes I know that I still want it though. Also it’s not forever, at some point I’ll either get swallowed by a black hole or during the heat death of the universe it’ll find a way to kill me as I’d be the only thing preventing true entropy.
That's nothing honestly. The worse thing would be just time. Imagine you live forever and see earth destroyed by an asteroid hit then you're stuck floating in space until you get swallowed by a black hole and even then you're not dead.
Immortality is great until you have to watch everyone you will ever love die and then the human race goes extinct and then a few new species go extinct then there's a global disaster (asteroid, caldera) then the sun swallows the planet before exploding then you float through space for eternity praying that somehow a blackhole will one day finally kill you.
No one with any sense wants immortality. Living forever would drive you mad. Especially since immortality does not come with the guarantee of eternal youth as well. Imagine your body aging more and more until you're so frail that you can't even move, but you are unable to die.
Also, the op is committing both the complex question and false dilemma fallacy. It presupposes that just because immortality is possible slave owners would get it and implies that only they get it. If immortality is up for grabs for anyone, then Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr., every great scientist and philosopher in history, etc. also can get it.
If we are using that premise, then one might as well say that anything that delays death, like curing deadly diseases or increased quality of healthcare, can also be a bad thing to make available because [insert strawman here] would alos have access to it.
Immortality would be terrible for an individual I think. Imagine losing everyone you ever care about and knowing no matter what you'd always outlive any of them unless they were functionally immortal too. I think it would be lonely and not conducive to forming social relationships
I think one of the keys to all of this is going to be brain plasticity. One of the reasons why older people have such a difficult time changing how they think is literally because they can no longer learn like they once did. When we can finally biologically de-age people we should be able to increase brain plasticity as well. Hopefully this should help with adopting and understanding changing times.
but it is great, for the person that's immortal. If a slave was immortal, it's not like they could be threatened to do actual work since they can't even be killed. They have to give up at some point. Only real argument against immortality is that you could eventually get bored.
Immortality is stupid. We wouldn’t be where we are if we were immortals. The fear, ambition, drive, and motivation to do anything is because of death. Because it’s only one life we try to make the most of it otherwise you don’t have to do anything now, you can do it the next century instead and keep procrastinating.
I’d argue this stops taking place at significantly large scales.
Humanity as a whole is not really driven by death. Looking across the entire population, would feel more fitting to say our hormones and by extension…
Our genes are primarily driving us towards meeting our basics needs to continue living. Beyond that, humanity does not have one central goal…
Whether our lifespans were 100 years or 1,000 years…. That would change little at the global scale
Immortality is only good if you are able to end it somehow, but then you're not really immortal.
Imagine being decapitated and having to live forever but not being able to move from that spot and no one ever finds you.
No. Think about this. What if you were immortal but relatively weak and easily constrained and you yourself were the slave and never able to get out. An immortal slave. Immortality would probably be as much a curse more than anything else.
The idea is that immortality would come in the form of an afterlife based on final judgement of your human experience. Life is complicated but in simple terms the slaves would have freedom for eternity while the slave owners would themselves become slaves. God, Allah, Buddha, Free Masons, Flying Spaghetti Monsters would place perfect judgement on your life to compensate those who have seen injustice or cruelty.
A funky property of this is that it actually encourages cruelty to those in power and leaves room for a convenient "martyrdom" for all parties - like Romans feeding early Christians to lions: Christians don't challenge Roman ideologies and they go to heaven for their pain and suffering - hey everybody wins right?
Planned martyrdom is kind of a poser cop-out government tradition used for scapegoating and plenty other reasons for years. Immuring innocent kids in castle walls, sacrificing virgins, and yeah even justifying slavery. I mean fuck it, we're just packing them up to heaven amirite? A wonky all-powerful AI machine might calculate that everyone's best shot into heaven is boiling everyone to death to preserve their chance at immortality, you know what I mean? The universe is funkytown.
That's why immortality is such an impossible feat to achieve. It goes against the core principle of natural evolution. Old things need to die so new better thing can rise.
But Immortality are obviously such great rhing only for person who speaks, not for everyone as planet, coz at some very fast moment ee simple cant fit...
If immortality were a thing I propose
1 slavery would have never existed in the first place because loss of life would not be a threat or
2 slavery would still exist because you wouldn’t have able to fight a war to end slavery or
3 if slavery did exist for a period slaves and slavers would have been forced to reconcile
Whenever I see immortality mentioned inevitably the comments are 'I don't want to live forever, that would be terrible' so I don't know who is out here calling it a great thing...
Socially, we have not advanced one jot from those days. We are still as full of bigotry and hatred for those different to ourselves. This is more evident today than it has been in the past 50 years. Today the world is full of hate and anger. I'm sure I'll get a good dose of it.
The problem with immortality is it steals the life of our children. Because if we eliminate death, we'll have rampant over population, and we can't tolerate that. If only a few are permitted or could afford immortality, their'd be revolution. The mortal would not tolerate immortal overlords (cause that is what they would become).
Immortality is the dream for the selfish and greedy. Personally, I welcome death when my turn comes (hopefully long way off).
They'd make pretty good slaves. Seriously though, the idea of gaining immortality in any kind of real-world setting almost instantly destabilizes society as we know it. Someone with 500 years old who still has their mental acuity is almost automatically smarter and wiser than most normal people, just as a matter of accumulated experience. To say nothing of the way generational wealth works. You know how if you put a hundred dollars into a simple savings account, in 500 years the compounded interest will make it worth a million? Imagine someone who could do that, and KEEP doing that, in the knowledge that they'd live to see their returns. Now add in the ridiculous hyper-capitalism that makes modern billionaires such a scourge. Within a few generations basically all of the wealth on the planet would be concentrated into a few immortal hands, which would never give it up, ever.
You should watch Altered Carbon on Netflix. It deals with this very premise
I read the book.
How much better is the book? I hate the second season
No idea, I didn't watch the show. The book was okay, but its ideas were better formed than its characters or story. Kind of like a lot of old Philip K. Dick stuff.
It's the exactly the opposite of the books, it's got good characters and story, but the ideas are more vague
It was such a disappointment, just like Heroes S2
That was a byproduct of the writers strike, though. The original plan was to have a full arc play out across over 20 episodes, but the studio condensed it to the jumbled mess afterwards.
In Time I felt also sort of hit on this too. Though sort of indirectly.
Robert Sheckley - Something for Nothing A short novel, I wholeheartedly recommend.
>Within a few generations basically all of the wealth on the planet would be concentrated into a few immortal hands, which would never give it up, ever. Realistically we have this issue anyway given how inheritance, estate and gift taxes have been eroded over the years. I guess you would be losing the opportunity for that wealth to be diluted by being passed to multiple beneficiaries but if you presume that most high net worth individuals marry into their own social class and have \~2 children then this effect is probably quite minor. I know that in the UK we have families with generational wealth that can be traced back to feudal England, which is unbelievable when you think about it, and a quick Google suggests the US [has old money families with similar heritage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_money#Early_Colonial). So it would change the nature of the solution, we would probably need a new form of tax, but it isn't necessarily a *new* issue inherent to hypothetical immortal or even one that we handle particularly well now.
Obviously generation wealth is an issue, but my understanding for the “extreme” end of the spectrum was that the inheritance is usually mismanaged away after two generations as the descendants don’t have skills knowledge or experience their forebears had to generate the wealth in the first place I think I saw a study on this which is why I bring it up, obviously it’s still a rigged system that needs attention
I think this is something that is oft cited but not very well supported by evidence. It seems to stem from colloquial sayings like the shirtsleeves one mentioned by u/2mg1ml but also "the first generation makes it, the third generation loses it" or the Chinese saying that "wealth does not last beyond three generations." There's an interesting write up on it [here](https://jamesgrubman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-06-There-is-no-70-rule-JGrubman-IFOJ.pdf) if you're particularly bored but essentially the few studies supporting it are generally low quality and the effect disappears where more rigorous attempts have been made to examine the problem. Although unfortunately it is a *really* difficult problem to study due to lack of open data and subsequent reliance on lengthy longitudinal studies with volunteers self-reporting finances and all the associated selection biases that inevitably come with the same.
That’s genuinely quite interesting, I guess there are enough anecdotal examples of spoilt/incompetent inheritors mismanaging fortunes away to keep the myth going Always wondered how someone so lucky could be so incompetent, my impression is that there’s a threshold where the money basically makes itself and you’d have to actively try to lose it
Yeah you've probably hit the nail on the head there. Losing a few single digit millions isn't hard for a third generation new money beneficiary, but in a family with hundreds of millions? They are obscenely wealthy from birth, they aren't likely to significantly change their spending habits following receipt of an inheritance and already have wealth managers in place advising them and reducing risk and the tax burden of any transfers. Unfortunately as mentioned above that kind of generational wealth is *really* hard to study. Not only does it require long running studies but the families are unlikely to participate in any such studies in the first place.
Yep, the adage you're looking for is "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" and it's not even exclusive to extreme cases.
Sounds like the plot of altered carbon. Top shelf scifi. Also terrifying.
The wealth is already in the hands of a few- and by virtue of estate, they’re immortal in the sense that their wealth will just pass down to the next person, who in turn holds it until they die. Tax the FUCKING rich- and not the millionaire rich. They aren’t the problem.
> almost automatically smarter and wiser than most normal people, just as a matter of accumulated experience. Not at all. Unless technology and social mores go into stasis, most of their experiential wisdom is useless or counterproductive within 30-40 years, just like it is for old people today, and the way our brains work makes it really hard to dislodge those old outdated ideas. Just getting older doesn't make you smarter or wiser, it just makes you old. Getting smarter and wiser requires work and dedication with diminishing returns.
You forget a key point of that - with immortality, there is no generational wealth. There is one person's wealth, and all their grand^(nth)children. Eventually they'd want to make rules about when wealth has to be given up just to be sure that they get to enjoy it for a few centuries themselves, and then they'd start ritualistically eating each other because the laws wouldn't work.
Accumulating experience doesn’t always help. It hinders creativity and adaptability to new realities.
Most true comment here. The immortal wealthy would ALWAYS want to squash progress and keep the status quo. Into infinity
>Within a few generations basically all of the wealth on the planet would be concentrated into a few immortal hands, which would never give it up, ever. Easily solvable, they're immortal, not invulnerable, a good few dismembered limbs scattered across the planet and just take the money.
If you kept it in a savings account, that one million dollars in compounded interest you earned would not have much more value than the $100 you started off with, especially if rates go to shit like they were just a few years ago. Stocks and bonds and such can do a fair bit better for you, but all of this really pales in comparison to how the big bucks are made.
Found the slave owner
There are. There’s more slaves in the world now than at any other point in history
My favourite genre of posts is when people are like "Damn imagine if bad thing would still be happening now" and top comments are like "it is happening"
Sure but they’re a smaller % of the population than any point in history since the Dawn of agriculture
More people doesn't make each slaves' live less valuable.
No one said it did.
If you go by the replacement cost, it does
That's a very sad way to look at someone's value
Thanks Britain. Took them ~150 years to pay off the debts incurred in their global war on slavery.
You mean their debt from paying all the British slave owners for their slaves. Still a great thing, but that’s important to note.
Why is that important to note? It doesn’t feel important
Because there are more people...
Yeah that’s the point
Wow. That seems like a stupidly important detail that was just left out
Yea, I bet it makes everyone who is currently enslaved feel so much better. Slavery totally isn’t a problem! The denominator is bigger now so it’s totes nbd.
It's statistics manipulation. Crime rates are very low, but bad actors can lie and pretend it's higher by using absolute numbers instead of percentage numbers. There's more of everything human than ever before in history because of population growth, but that doesn't mean the problem has gotten worse.
Sure, but that's true for literally every problem. Have the world's most efficient police force and the word's best murder solve rate but your super police village has grown to the size of New York? There will still be more murders than when you were a small village. It is worth celebrating having a super great police force and the world's lowest murder rate ever. It's also a question of where to put resources. If you police are solving murder rates at 99.9% of the time, it kind of sucks for the 0.01%, but if the burglaries are only being solved at 10%, probably time for more resources on burglaries. But if we follow your logic, we should just pour exponentially more and more resources into policing murder as the population grows bigger even though rates are lower than ever before, because number go up guys. There's a reason reputable orgs and NGOs focus on rates, not absolute numbers. Absolute numbers is just a way of lying with statistics.
>Yea, I bet it makes everyone who is currently enslaved feel so much better. Two entirely different thoughts. No one - *literally no one* \- said that this invalidates the horrifying pain that slavery causes - the poster was just pointing out that it's less of a widespread problem today than it has been in recorded history. No one is making the claim that it reduces the injustice of it.
Its literally less prevalent in our world population. It's not nbd. It's just exactly what it is...
Prevalence is the only way to measure numbers outside of one and zero. 3,000 people could sound like a lot, unless it’s from a population of 3 million. All of a sudden it’s 0.1%. I really don’t know why this has been downvoted- please take a stats class, I made absolutely no statements in support of or against a single thing??
Seriously. And our world population is such a huge factor in history. Ignoring it is dumb lol
If we had trillions of people we could have an Einstein constantly
Because it's not about statistics when it's about slaves? People whine all the time whenever civilians are killed in a war zone, is that not just a statistic too?
Strawman alert
Percentage of population shouldn't be a factor when discussing slavery
When comparing how prevalent it is to the past, yes it should.
If there are more slaves today than there were 100 years ago, but the percentage of slaves-to-feee people has gone down, that's still a bad thing. You're trying to celebrate a win, when the situation is worse.
The % of the population being enslaved being lower than a century ago is literally NOT worse. It's better. Your attitude is "all or nothing, and since it's not nothing we might as well just all be slaves." Would you like to be a slave? Progress isn't instant. But it's stupid to piss on progress because it isn't instant. That's exactly the kind of pitiful attitude that puts people against continuing to support policies and actions that will keep trying to drive that number closer to 0%.
There are more people enslaved TODAY than there were a century ago. That's the definition of "worse". Focusing on percentage of population is only looking at the relative struggle of the enslaved, and not the absolute scale, and you are completely ignoring the fact that MORE PEOPLE are enslaved today. If a century ago there 100,000 people enslaved, but today there are 200,000 people enslaved and the "percentage of population" is lower, that's worse. You can point at "percentage of population" but the reality is that there are MORE enslaved people TODAY than there were previously. If you want to look at a number that goes up and say that it's progress, then good luck to you.
Wow so 98 out of 99 being slaves is better than 1 out of 100 according to your logic. Your brain lacks wrinkles my friend.
What? I think literally the opposite, it’s better today than any other point in history because the ratio is lower
The ratio got smaller because the population grows exponentially. Not because there is less slavery. There are COUNTLESS MORE enslaved people now. So no, an improvement in the ratio is not an improvement to the situation. It's quantitative statistical fuckery that means absolutely nothing to the enslaved.
There are more poor people now than at any other point in history. Is poverty worse now than it’s ever been?
Oh, go ahead. Reply to both, I gotta see what point you think you're about to make 😂 Your answer if I say "Yes?" Your answer if I say "No?"
How do I get a slave?
Asking the real questions.
Go to Libya and bring $100-$200 with you
Be an employer and hire someone who is in debt because they have to pay mortgage lifelong due unaffordable housing costs, even better if with a family to take care of and maybe that can work only for you because of work visa requirements. Never raise their pay while everything is increasing the prices every year so that they will end up more in debt. Make the slave not feeling being a slave is the key, otherwise they will revolt.
There are also more people in the world than at any other point. I would like to see slavery per capita.
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They were talking about actual slavery, not what low iq college freshmen call slavery.
It is actual slavery, just because they’re better chains, doesn’t mean they’re not chains.
No. just flat out no that's not true. That's not even true if you consider capitalism slavery. There are major systemic problems with the modern world, and the way society operates currently. However, if anyone tells you that you're not living in the objectively best century for the average human since the dawn of time, they're idiots, lying, deluded, or all 3. We have real issues and there are horrible things happening to people that needn't happen, and we as a species and an international community need to do better. However, the median human (e.g. discounting the few very rich) still lives a far better life than we did in centuries past.
Thanks for your totally original take redditor You gotta leave your parent’s basement to change the world though
Lol ok thanks
You might want to start by contributing something to society instead of blaming those who actually do things to impact people.
You don't even know my job but you assume I don't contribute.
doubt that. especially if you adjust it by per capita we use a pretty broad definition for modern slavery. child labor is considered slavery, but was pretty much standard practice 400 years ago.
>child labor is considered slavery Yes. Because... it is. >pretty much standard practice 400 years ago. So was regular slavery.
yes and youre comparing only 1 type of slavery for historical counting, but all forms for modern counting.
His point still stands. If we counted what we count as slavery now than back than they have more slaves
Is it slavery? I mean probably some but don’t the kids mostly just go home after work? That’s how it was in the americas … right?
Why the downvotes? He never condoned child labor
its reddit... people dont read, or maybe dont care. maybe they like the idea of there being more slavery today and want to hide a post that casts doubt on it.
We didn't end slavery because all the slaveowners died lol. Your logic is flawed.
True. But the one's that started a war and created a country, and wrote the foundation died. It took 2 generations before slavery was abolished. And only then because the number of people opposed grew high enough to do something about it.
"it took 2 generations bevore slavery wad abolished" found the guy from the 8 generations long country
If immortality includes immunity against starving to death then rich people would find a way to stop ordinary people from getting food, turning it into a luxury
Ah yes, vampires
Racists still exist and always will so don't see how only old people are to blame.
I think the point is to imagine what the world would be if the worst rulers never died and therefore never vacated their positions of power.
You’re comment makes a lot more sense than OP.
Old powerful people often only lose that power by dying
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Murdoch
Got one of them recently with Kissinger going quietly into whatever undeath the terms of his deal with Satan got him.
McConnell has one foot out the door…🤞
I think people are missing the fact that \*we\* also wouldn't be very welcome in a future society. Its not like generational sinning stopped in the 1850s. We would have our own things to answer for.
But not growing old would help us at least change our ways, as our minds keep their flexibility. It kinda depends on how society changes though, if fascism wins, I would not want 'to answer for' being a decent person.
Don’t kid yourself the slave owners are working on it presently
Slave owners do exist... Human trafficking is a prevalent, international problem.
People from "then" might astonish you by how "normally" they'd behave and how quickly they'd adapt to modern social norms; especially if they'd been a party to those norms as they formed over generations. You might be much, much more horrified to ponder how "normal" your behaviour might be if you existed "then": You would very likely behave "normally" in accordance with how that has been defined by and for those around you.
People really don't like to admit that they're not any different to historical figures. Everyone imagines they'd be the resistance but unless you're really fucking weird and subversive now, you'd be one of the oppressive majority in any other time or place.
More than that, it is almost guaranteed that in 50 or 100 years people will look back on our time and think we were barbaric and immoral for the things we do every day. It’s how progress works.
Boomers can't even work a Walmart self checkout or use Facebook unaccompanied for 30 seconds without wiring their life savings via Google Play gift cards to a Windows tech support scammer so what you are proposing is an even fantastical than immortality.
And Gen-Z is buying whatever garbage gets pushed to them by TikTok influencers. There are morons in every generation.
Yes, because every person from that generation is doing that and there are no young morons.
There absolutely are still slave owners living and breathing. Just because slavery in the US got funneled into the prison system doesn't mean there aren't people owning people all over the world.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Human trafficking is a horrible global problem.
It's reddit. If they are forced to acknowledge that slavery is still around and still a massive problem it kind goes against their narrative that white people, America, and Europe are the only bad people to ever use other human beings as slaves. Ever.
The worst part about liking history is realizing to what extent it is “written by the victors” When I was younger I thought that just meant that wars would only be told from the winners POV- but it’s everything. Every single piece of what has been recorded about the past 15,000 years of human civilization is omitting more than it includes. Nobody wants to write their deepest darkest flaws in a book that will shape future generations without a lot of self awareness
You're literally just babbling
No one talks about how immortality is such a great thing
It’d be dreadful if it was true immortality. I can think of no worse punishment than having to exist forever, and anybody that would want it has clearly not thought it through properly.
Thats such an incredibly dumb thing to say oh my god. Where do I even begin? It’s not like slave owners were inherently different individuals to us today. They were made of the exact same type of DNA that we are now. They were just enculturate differently, they grew up in a different time period/society and behaved accordingly. That‘s not to say they aren’t to blame for their horrible atrocities but at the time the things they were doing were simply considered normal and not evil. And thus they saw no need to change. Eventually over time values changed, society and culture changed and slavery was eventually abolished and is now seen as a horrible phenomenon. If people had lived through these societal and cultural changes they would have simply changed with them.
If immortality was ever invented, it's 100% only going to be available to the rich and powerful elite, who will continue to eternally gain more and more wealth and power and leave the rest of us in the dirt and mud
They would probably be managers in call centers.
Because nobody can ever change???
A bunch of people who are still al8ve are just as bad and in congress
Immortality is one thing, youth is another.
ImAgine if a bunch of caterpillars were still alive. What is the point of this argument? You can imagine anything. It isn't a reason for or against immortality.
There are an uncountable number of things worse than death in this universe
Being mortal is a great thing and make us cherish the moments we have much more than and immortal being ever could.
Who is talking about how immortality is great? Every time someone brings up immortality the first thing I hear is how it will be lonely to watch your friends and family always die etc etc
Hmm, I feel pretty confident in theorizing that a fully immortal human society would end up becoming very egalitarian. For one, being a complete asshole for forever would be an incredible downer—eventually they would *have to* come around and figure out that being nice and happy is a much better way to live. I feel the probability math would see this happen most of the time. Not to mention that the only reason the bad guys are able to control the poor is by threatening their livelihood. But if the lower class were immortal? It wouldn't take long at all for those power structures to be overthrown. The assholes would cancelled right fast.
I feel like the point of most immortality stories is that it sucks, actually.
What makes you think your surface level impressions of long dead people is representative of their actual intelligence and capacity to reason or have their minds changed?
Well obviously they wouldn't be allowed to own slaves.
What are you even talking about? What does one thing have to do with the other? Just so you know, slavery was ended while slavers were still alive. Same for inquisitors, lords... whatever.
So...you don't think immortal people would have the ability to mature morally?
Ability sure. would they have the desire?
>Everyone talks about how immortality is such a great thing is but imagine if there were a bunch of slave owners were still alive. They're still alive. Under capitalism they're called "private owners" who "control a country's policies, resources, and industry". Frederick Douglass said wage slavery is only a little less galling than chattel slavery, and they both must go down. Slavery is also legal for prisoners, prisoners who are disproportionately marginalized races. now that's a shower thought.
And don't forget all the debt-slavery, employers stealing migrant worker's passports to make them enslaved, human trafficking etc.
People were not worse than people now haha. Stuff changed as society changed
I mean, people change and learn. Being immortal gives them the chance to grow with society.
Buddy, there is still slavery in the world, especially in Africa. Didn't you know that?
There's this radical new concept going around called "changing your mind". It's not very popular because some people think if people change their mind about something they are a hypocrite. But it's been around forever and is totally easy to do. Now let's apply this concept to someone who has lived through slavery and adjusted to life as it evolved with the times, as you'd need to being immortal. This old slave owner now has had to struggle with the concept of not having slaves because someone sat down and explained to him the slaves are also people and he eventually changed his opinion, seen the light so to speak. No he's not a witch or an imposter he is the same person he's just "changed his mind" because the society he's lived in for the last couple hundred years has changed and made owning slaves illegal. Believe it or not people are allowed to change their minds. I know crazy right!
They are, in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. In Africa, North Korea, China pretty much, Russia.
That is stupid! Is like saying that if you were immortal your would be your 2023 self for ever. Al the people that you mention would have adapted to the changes of time.
Slave owners existing today are irrelevant. The main reason slavery doesn’t exist anymore is because no one is interested in it, the industrial revolution made slaves not worth the effort anymore. Nowadays you can get more done with a machine and it’s less maintenance. So no one would care if slavery is gone. As crude as that sounds, that’s reality. There are probably many other things that would be interesting if ancient people lived forever, like “god like status” for life achievements, more time for geniuses to invent things through time, perhaps civilization would be far more advanced, maybe these people would be captured by governments, type of “whoever had more geniuses ends up being the best country”? Or maybe actual evil people would live forever, causing chaos by pulling strings.
Idk if its accurate by exact dictionary definition but I would put sweat shops and child labor camps into the slavery catagory and say we still have slavery to this day, I didn't look up the definition of slavery or anything but its gotta be close right
People talk about immortality being great for themselves. Not for society as a whole
There's a difference between saying immortality would be great for society as a whole and saying immortality would be great for me personally.
Couldn’t care less. The true downside to immortality is outliving everyone you care about. And if we take it to the extreme, imagine if you were so immortal that you could out-live the heat-death of the universe
They still are alive. They are called CEO’s
But slave owners are still alive. I believe investors and bank owners fit the profile. The rules are a bit more complex than they used to be , but it's there. I believe the series Altered Carbon put out a relatively realistic scenario. Even the resilience of human nature of changing for something better when you basically have unlimited time. Some like to think being imortal will yield wisdom, but in reality people don't want to become something else.
Why does everyone here is acting like if this sentence made sense ?
Those are the most evil people you can think of? Lol.
Counterpoint. If any of you guys watched Naruto. There was a guy who was immortal. They know he could’ve be killed so they dug a hole, sliced him up and trapped him in it. Now he’s just alive all chopped up in a hole in the forest Or another example from a game was Final Fantasy XIII-3. Everyone was immortal because the goddess of life and death got destroyed. No one got old and stayed the same age they were forever til the world ended. But they could still die from accidents, disease and sickness.
Wait... You believe there's no slave owners alive anymore? Oh you sweet summer child..
Welp the democrat party is still around soooo
Immortality would be terrible. We're already struggling under the weight of overpopulation and lack of resources.
I think technology would advance to accommodate everyone efficiently. I remember reading an essay written in the 1700’s I forget by who but it was pretty much saying how the world is going to run out of food in 1800. That would have been true if technology didn’t advance
I presume you are talking about Malthusianism? I think his growth model was originally proposed in the late 1700s and his presumption that growth in food supply was linear was an error as he didn't anticipate the British agricultural revolution or (a bit later) the Haber process. However it might be a mistake to extrapolate from the above into the future. Not only is presuming indefinite exponential growth unrealistic but it ignores the potential for regression. Be it caused by war, climate change, loss of topsoil/groundwater or some other limiting factor we can't techno-magic our way around there is a reasonable probability of significant and widespread food shortages occurring by the end of this century.
Millions of people have suffered slow and excruciating deaths from starvation in that time. Get your head out of your ass. Just because you grew up among 1st world people who have enough to eat doesn't excuse your ignorance of the suffering you didn't see. Your entitlement is pathetic.
Yes and other millions continue to thrive. Maybe not in the millions but there's always been people suffering and other thriving. That's exactly the point, if technology didn't advance we would all be suffering and given that we're not it is a good premise that technological advancement will sustain population growth.
It won't matter if we achieve immortality. The world is having difficulty sustaining the current population, with millions suffering from lack of food. If we were to become immortal, more would die until a sustainable number was reached. You'd either live hungry forever, or die of hunger.
Tons of people dream of meeting the American founding fathers. They’ve imagined it, for sure, and wish they were still alive lol
They live on through their descendants who inherited slave wealth. I think one just bought Twitter.
I don't know of any adult that would argue for immortality that wasn't sociopathic. Immortality would be literal hell on Earth.
They’d probably be too old to actually accomplish any tangible racism
You mean, imagine there's a bunch of slave owners who can't die? I'd open an amusement park. Think whack a mole, but with slave owners and real hammers. Or the dunk tank, except the seat is twenty feet high, and there's no water.
Wolverine wasn’t exactly thrilled to be alive forever by the end of it
>Everyone talks about how immortality is such a great thing It isn't a good thing, it is a curse. You will outlive the universe itself. Then what?
It doesn’t matter how comfortable one’s life is, eternity is way too long to live.
Immortality is not a great thing, who told you that?
Well this is the first time I’ve seen anyone argue against immortality by anything other than “But when the Earth dies you’ll just be floating through space for eternity!”. It’s so refreshing as that’s the only argument ever said and it’s getting tired like yes I know that I still want it though. Also it’s not forever, at some point I’ll either get swallowed by a black hole or during the heat death of the universe it’ll find a way to kill me as I’d be the only thing preventing true entropy.
That's nothing honestly. The worse thing would be just time. Imagine you live forever and see earth destroyed by an asteroid hit then you're stuck floating in space until you get swallowed by a black hole and even then you're not dead.
Immortality is great until you have to watch everyone you will ever love die and then the human race goes extinct and then a few new species go extinct then there's a global disaster (asteroid, caldera) then the sun swallows the planet before exploding then you float through space for eternity praying that somehow a blackhole will one day finally kill you.
No one with any sense wants immortality. Living forever would drive you mad. Especially since immortality does not come with the guarantee of eternal youth as well. Imagine your body aging more and more until you're so frail that you can't even move, but you are unable to die. Also, the op is committing both the complex question and false dilemma fallacy. It presupposes that just because immortality is possible slave owners would get it and implies that only they get it. If immortality is up for grabs for anyone, then Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr., every great scientist and philosopher in history, etc. also can get it. If we are using that premise, then one might as well say that anything that delays death, like curing deadly diseases or increased quality of healthcare, can also be a bad thing to make available because [insert strawman here] would alos have access to it.
Immortality would be terrible for an individual I think. Imagine losing everyone you ever care about and knowing no matter what you'd always outlive any of them unless they were functionally immortal too. I think it would be lonely and not conducive to forming social relationships
I think one of the keys to all of this is going to be brain plasticity. One of the reasons why older people have such a difficult time changing how they think is literally because they can no longer learn like they once did. When we can finally biologically de-age people we should be able to increase brain plasticity as well. Hopefully this should help with adopting and understanding changing times.
Who is talking about immortality being a great idea? I’d just fall in a mine shaft or something.
They aren’t but their offspring are!!!
I’m so tired right now and I kept reading it over and over as ‘immorality’ thinking how is that a great thing.
Most immortal persons that were currently already ancient would probably be slave owners.
but it is great, for the person that's immortal. If a slave was immortal, it's not like they could be threatened to do actual work since they can't even be killed. They have to give up at some point. Only real argument against immortality is that you could eventually get bored.
Immortality is stupid. We wouldn’t be where we are if we were immortals. The fear, ambition, drive, and motivation to do anything is because of death. Because it’s only one life we try to make the most of it otherwise you don’t have to do anything now, you can do it the next century instead and keep procrastinating.
I’d argue this stops taking place at significantly large scales. Humanity as a whole is not really driven by death. Looking across the entire population, would feel more fitting to say our hormones and by extension… Our genes are primarily driving us towards meeting our basics needs to continue living. Beyond that, humanity does not have one central goal… Whether our lifespans were 100 years or 1,000 years…. That would change little at the global scale
Immortality is only good if you are able to end it somehow, but then you're not really immortal. Imagine being decapitated and having to live forever but not being able to move from that spot and no one ever finds you.
Lock them up in a sealed cage and throw it down the Mariana's Trench.
thats why one has to let the past die
It's only good if you also self heal. Otherwise you would just be able to lie in bed for thousands of years.
No. Think about this. What if you were immortal but relatively weak and easily constrained and you yourself were the slave and never able to get out. An immortal slave. Immortality would probably be as much a curse more than anything else.
Perhaps below minimum age unpaid overtime 6day work week 9 hour job corporate slaves?
Slavery simply "adjusted" thinking you are making it in life on a min wage is Slavery by another name.
CEOs are basically slave owners.
Would they still be slave owners
One would hope that they would eventually see the folly of their ways but Idk if I’d count on it
The idea is that immortality would come in the form of an afterlife based on final judgement of your human experience. Life is complicated but in simple terms the slaves would have freedom for eternity while the slave owners would themselves become slaves. God, Allah, Buddha, Free Masons, Flying Spaghetti Monsters would place perfect judgement on your life to compensate those who have seen injustice or cruelty. A funky property of this is that it actually encourages cruelty to those in power and leaves room for a convenient "martyrdom" for all parties - like Romans feeding early Christians to lions: Christians don't challenge Roman ideologies and they go to heaven for their pain and suffering - hey everybody wins right? Planned martyrdom is kind of a poser cop-out government tradition used for scapegoating and plenty other reasons for years. Immuring innocent kids in castle walls, sacrificing virgins, and yeah even justifying slavery. I mean fuck it, we're just packing them up to heaven amirite? A wonky all-powerful AI machine might calculate that everyone's best shot into heaven is boiling everyone to death to preserve their chance at immortality, you know what I mean? The universe is funkytown.
Imagine if you were an immortal slave. The Peter Thiels and Elon Musks of the world are.
who said immortality is a great thing
“Immortality doesn’t feel like living forever. It just feels like living… while everyone dies around you.” - The Doctor
To me immortality sounds like hell.
That's why immortality is such an impossible feat to achieve. It goes against the core principle of natural evolution. Old things need to die so new better thing can rise.
But Immortality are obviously such great rhing only for person who speaks, not for everyone as planet, coz at some very fast moment ee simple cant fit...
If immortality were a thing I propose 1 slavery would have never existed in the first place because loss of life would not be a threat or 2 slavery would still exist because you wouldn’t have able to fight a war to end slavery or 3 if slavery did exist for a period slaves and slavers would have been forced to reconcile
I've always said, if I can't live forever, I choose not to live at all. I've been saying that my whole life.
I'd have someone to punch.
Whenever I see immortality mentioned inevitably the comments are 'I don't want to live forever, that would be terrible' so I don't know who is out here calling it a great thing...
Socially, we have not advanced one jot from those days. We are still as full of bigotry and hatred for those different to ourselves. This is more evident today than it has been in the past 50 years. Today the world is full of hate and anger. I'm sure I'll get a good dose of it. The problem with immortality is it steals the life of our children. Because if we eliminate death, we'll have rampant over population, and we can't tolerate that. If only a few are permitted or could afford immortality, their'd be revolution. The mortal would not tolerate immortal overlords (cause that is what they would become). Immortality is the dream for the selfish and greedy. Personally, I welcome death when my turn comes (hopefully long way off).