There Can Be Only None!
A natural fear of dying has lead history’s storytellers to create characters with immortality, or such extreme longevity that they can’t be considered mere mortals, anyway. Psychologically, it makes sense that these characters are common in literature and folklore around the world, but that’s pretty much the only logical thing about most immortals in fiction.
The end of life is a fact of life, but since it’s unlikely that people will ever stop telling stories about deathless wonders, the phenomenon ought to have at least a brush with science. Given the amount of research dollars spent studying longevity, you’d think more contemporary storytellers would tap that medical fountain of youth, but no. Most cases of literary immortality still come with the same old magical excuses they always have: His dad was a god; she’s an elf; this one’s a vampire; that one’s radioactive/an alien/from the future; or they just can’t die because they have unfinished business here on Earth. The persistence of nonsense is mind-boggling.
The science behind life spans can also boggle the mind, but in a good way. For all its fascinating complexity, there are a few key points to keep in mind:
-Size matters.
-Calories count.
-Gender is an issue.
-Pleiotropy (what’s good for the growing is bad for the gray).
Therefore, for believable immortality, we should compose more stories about megafauna who eat little relative to their size, among whose populations there are proportionally more female than male immortals, and for whom the debilitating effects of aging are mitigated by natural selection or medical intervention. If they’re anything like giant tortoises, they’ll be as perpetually dreary as they are loveably mad.
There’s more to it than that, of course. In general, bigger is better, but that only holds true until someone remembers that some microorganisms can survive in stasis for ages. And what about ‘super-organisms’? The idea of hive life may give us the heebie-jeebies, but when you think about it, all complex organisms are composed of unimpressive, disposable individuals. The big difference is that where other animals just have cells, bee hives have entire drones and aspen groves have whole trees. It only makes sense that species composed of super-organisms have a better shot at producing immortals than most other species.
Honeycomb © Julie Dillon (Used with permission)
The social lives of immortals are another problem that usually seems ignored or mishandled. In fiction, immortals are often warriors or rulers, and/or live in isolation. But if the natural world tells us anything about extreme longevity, it’s that individuals with very long lives tend to emerge in stable communities with cultures that take care of their members as a matter of course. That certainly seems to apply to humans, and we’re the longest-living mammals on Earth, even though we’re hardly the largest.
Then, of course, there are the consequences of immortality. For one, longevity seems to come at the price of fecundity. This implies that truly immortal individuals must be altogether sterile, which makes it a non-inheritable trait and therefore an evolutionary dead end and a threat to resource availability, even though it seems like an obvious advantage. Furthermore, ‘length of life’ and ‘quality of life’ aren’t necessarily synonymous. By nature, extremely long-lived organisms change very little over time, but if natural selection tells us anything, it’s that adaptation is key to survival.
In other words, believable characters can either live forever or reproduce, but not both, and true immortals must be terminally ‘un-hip’.
Actually, I always thought Robert Heinlein did a fairly good job with his breeding for longevity, therapies including changing blood, and later the use of growing clones and transferring consciousness into the clone.
Consciousness transference requires Cartesian mind-body dualism, something about Transhumanists that I’ve always found annoying.
There are a lot of humans with a hard time identifying themselves as their own bodies. I suppose we all experience this at times, but an enduring sense of disconnection from self worries me. But then, I’ve always treated my experiences of disconnection as an indicator that my head is being messed with in some way by another person, by a medicine, or by something like sleep deprivation or hunger. *shrug*
About the size correlation, humans live at least three times as long as most mammals of their size and smaller breeds of dog tend to live longer than large breeds (I had a dachshund that lived to be 18).
There are exceptions to that rule, of course. They usually involve human intervention, and we are a weird creature.
Dog people please correct me if I’m totally off-base, but don’t (some) large dogs die sooner because those breeds have a defect bred into them? They’re mutant dogs, in other words? Gigantic genes come with heart and other organ defects?
So it’s not so much that small dogs live longer, it’s that certain large breed dogs are dying abnormally young. (Great Danes die at seven-ten years, as I recall.)
Things like that seem to happen wherever humans meddle. It’s strange to me that we (broadly) haven’t learned to expect that.
Heh, heh. I named the second chapter of my book The Quantum Choice: You Can Have Either Sex or Immortality and discussed the cogent arguments you present in this post at greater length. I also addressed the tension between reproduction and longevity in a more recent article with the same title.
Only one film that I can recall treats the issue of immortality in a unique way: Aronofsky’s The Fountain. It’s an uneven film in love with its own complexity, but still interesting.
Regarding The Fountain? I love the history, but I’ve yet to enjoy a fictional application of it. I think that a lot of people are either unaware of the factual background, or just fall in love with the mystical bullshit and forget that the human story – the search! – was so much more interesting than the fountain itself. Which is a long way of saying that I didn’t partake of The Fountain because it triggers a pet peeve. Heh.
And I recalled that chapter of your book when I wrote this, but carelessly omitted a reference. Please don’t hold it against me?
Marion Zimmer Bradley addressed that issue a bit in her Darkover series. The Cherie are extremely long lived but had a complicated reproductive system and only rarely had any children. Eventually their race began to die out, though they could produce viable Cherie/human crossbreeds.
That’s a good example, but I find the solution disgruntling. But then I’m biased in favor of stories in which people find the solutions to their conflicts within themselves, ha.