Burying someone alive. Or trapping their feet in cement shoes and throwing them into the ocean.
Assuming that immortality only applies to humans, environmental destruction would be a big one.
People care more about pollution and climate change when they know they’ll be around to face the consequences.
Unauthorised pregnancy. If no one can die, every new birth is effectively stealing from the limited pool of resources. Too many births, everyone starves, no one can die to ease the burden on the limited resources. Endless suffering for all.
Abortion would probably be impossible too
I was gonna make a joke about ending the abortion debate, but then I went down a rabbit hole:
Abortions procedures would still be a thing, but the fetus wouldnt die. Its just an extremely premature birth. That means that intentional pregnancies could be “harvested” early, for the fetus to grow up outside the mothers body.
Lots to unpack.
They could shoot any unauthorized births a random direction out into space. Not like they care where they end up
Wait, what resources would be most valuable if death was off the table?
Edit: I’ll take a stab at it and say cats.
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UNLIMITED IMMORTAL CATS
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Seriously (or at least as serious as a hypothetical invinciblity/immortality scenario can be :D): food water and housing. You can live without most other things, but being cold, wet, starving and dehydrated will really make the eternity drag on :)
Its no death. Not no aging or sickness.
People are still going to fall apart as they age. So I wonder if there would be a hard cap where you basically have a farewell party and go into a euthanasia booth/coffin.
Unauthorized pregnancies would be criminal. No idea what that world would do with the child in that situation.
Euthanasia is still death though, so unless live people are just going to crawl into a box and willingly never come out? And if they do get out, are they going to be okay with having being starved in complete isolation?
And where are their bodies stored? Outside of few exceptions, most human bodies decay away within a hundred years, so the grave sites can be reused, but you cant do that if someone’s still in it?
If the world allows voluntary death, then it gets a bit easier to deal with though.
Well that’s just immortality. Even immortals can be killed in most myths.
The claim is no death. That means if you burn someone at the stake their body turns into a charred husk but they’re still alive and now they’re trapped in this state of unimaginable agony forever, unable to die but also totally helpless and in constant searing pain.
Chop the head off and stick him in a jar like futureama
Their face is still burned! You’d have to reduce them down to a brain in a vat. But then all they have is the memory of that searing pain.
See you can keep going with this and just grind the brain into a sausage and feed it to wild animals. Then it gets broken down into nutrients and excreted, then fertilizer into trees.
At what point does one die in this chain?
Separate comment, because I think it deserves its own discussion, but can there really be aging and illness? It might get a bit philosophical, but if all your cells stop regenerating and die off, eventually you’ll end up a bit of ooze that can’t interpret or perceive the world, so at that point you would be dead?
In my interpretation of the scenario, it would be like “in time”, everyone grows up to 18 (or some arbitrary age), and then you are stuck like that forever after?
How are you envisaging it?
Yaknow there’s a movie about everyone living forever and you basically pay with your lifespan.
Technology advances enough to cure all diseases and stop aging. I think age 23-28 is prime. Some people look way more grown up at 28 vs 18. Also you’re body is done growing and starts breaking down in the mid 30s.
So yeah I’m thinking people are immortal via science. So it’s sci-fi not fantasy.
In fantasy humans would ALWAYS have immortality. It’s not like a switch is flipped in 1990 and suddenly people stop dying and aging.
Our society and culture would be completely different if death wasn’t a thing. One of the reasons we have so many issues is religion. What religion would immortals have? What does war look like for immortals? How do you decide who wins a war when soldiers can’t die? Violence loses its meaning with no death or injuries.
We’d all become non-violent. Maybe war would be decided by board games like chess. We’d be more open to talking things out instead of just killing and taking from each other.
Another issue with humans is overpopulation. Again resources being scarce and countries fighting over resources wouldn’t be a thing in the way we have it today.
See how this goes down the rabbit hole?
Are you referring to “In Time”, or some other film? The Man From Earth is another interesting film about a singular immortal man.
There is heaps to unpack, it really is a complete game changer.
The other issue, is what about other animals. If they end up immortal as well, we’d be litterally drowning in any animals that breed rapidly, like rats, rabbits etc.
Yeah In Time (2011) was there my brain went with the no death thing.
I only saw the trailer, but my mind went to a future state where we solved aging, illness, disease and the like with technology / medicines.
So we change our current culture to conform to that. Including late stage capitalism and the owning class.
Verses everyone STARTING immortal. Its an even playing field since the starting lines are closer together. You don’t have generational wealth with people being born into wealth over and over at the same scale.
The head of the family that actually pulled themselves up from the bootstraps could still be alive and have the same core values of taking care of their workers. Instead of being dead and gone for 3 generations and enshittification takes root.
In time only solved ageing, everyone was still mortal, so you could still die from a car crash or being shot. And there definitely was a tiered classes system in place, with the rich having more “life”, and the poor literally living paycheck to paycheck.
I really liked it, should watch it again.
Yeah that’s my point.
If we had the tech from In Time but everyone would get infinate lifespan, but you can still die.
To the OPs title. Everyone has immortality and can’t die ever.
Well some might end up in the mines and others as the first proper space explorers who are just yeeted into space. Deep sea exploration without a submarine might also be on the table.
Its much harder to enslave immortal beings. How do you force someone to work in the mines?
Extortion? Torture? Just because they can’t kill you, doesn’t mean they can’t hurt you or your loved ones.
Right, but you either need to pay someone to do the torturing, or you have to do it to them yourself. If the former, how do you force that person to go along with it, instead of just rising up against you and taking your place? It only takes one guard to realise that with a bit of help from the invincible prisoners, they can successfully mutiny.
Invincibility (which is what I am asserting “no death” effectively is (open to interpretation)) effectively nullifies the threat of violence, which, when all else fails, is the only thing keeping things ordered.
Not putting your shopping carts back.
Unforgiveable implies that there can be no mistake about the negative side effects for even the dumbest among us before committing the act. Torture is about as intentionally cruel as it gets.
Some other suggestions here are frequently used under the umbrella of torture, for example, by the IDF.
While I don’t have any statistics, other than just my impression after reading news or talking to people:
There seem to be people unaware that what they are doing is a form of mental torture. There are (at least what it seems) a lot of toxic relationships, and there are instances where neither the victim nor the perpetrator realize how their actions affect themselves or the other part.
I am far from excusing anyone who behaves in a mentally torturous way and agree that they should be punished, but torture might not be as intentional in all situations.
IMO, we should properly categorize the different kinds of torture and the different severity, and perform punishment based on those categorizations. It makes sense, at least to me, to have a stronger punishment for IDF, than for a toxic mother somewhere.
A couple of things I have read as a comment on this post that I would consider torture:
- Rape (this should be classified as torture today)
- Burying people alive
- Throwing someone in a volcano (in a world where dying is an impossibility)
Some that I am more uncertain on:
- Environmental destruction (one could argue that this is indirect torture, as the end result could lead to people being starved, or harmed in other torturous ways)
Stealing from musk.
Permanent mutilation
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Burying people alive
Torture. The main thing about torture is to make sure they don’t die while suffering the pain.
I cant imagine what would be the most heinous torture in a world like this. Maybe casually, “accidentally”, stepping on the same person’s toe ever other day for like one or two million years.
This one gets more complicated the longer I think about it.
My first pass was to imagine humans just as we are aside from the ability to die. Many things about how humans are don’t make sense without death though. Pain, for example likely evolved to cause organisms to avoid stimuli that could lead to their death. Fear largely derives from the anticipation of pain. Would true immortals have either? I imagine the psychology of such creatures would be vastly different from our own.
There’s also the question of what form the immortality takes. If it’s possible to destroy someone’s physical body, but their soul can immediately manifest a new one, and pain doesn’t exist, then doing so is just an inconvenience. If bodies are impervious to any damage or alteration, a large category of crimes vanishes.
It would probably come down to some sort of long-term imposition on the freedom of others, but it’s really hard to guess what that would look like.
