A World Without Death

I'm kind of curious what people's attitudes would be towards war, conflict, disease, etc (the takers of human lives in other words) in a world where everyone has a weak form of Resurrective Immortality and Immortality Begins at Twenty.

To explain: People are capable of dying in this place whether from injury, disease, poison, etc. However, the death is not permanent. When a person dies, they will remain dead for a random amount of time. Some are dead for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, some for weeks. Others take months, years or even decades to "respawn" after death. It is also completely random. You can die once and come back within five minutes, or you can take fifty years to return to the land of the living the next time.

Being dead is like being unconscious—-there is no memory of being deceased, just the instant you took your last breath and then you "wake up" where you fell or where your body was moved...or if you were completely obliterated, wherever most of your remains ended up.

Furthermore, no one ages past a certain point; everyone stops aging in young adulthood. Those who look older than that were already at that age when the immortality phenomenon descended upon the world (i.e. if you were older than a young adult, you are "frozen" that way, while those born afterwards stop aging at their prime).

Does anyone have ideas as to how this would affect people's views on the world and living in it? Would death become something trivial that no one cares about, or would they still fear it due to the possibility of losing huge amounts of time?

Well, killing people, or threatening to kill them, might no longer work as a method of coercing people into doing what someone wants, so it could actually result in less violence.

@ De Marquis: Hmm,that is true. By default death would have inherently lesser meaning. Although I suppose with people being people, threatening others with a fate worse than death or continuous killing would take the place of more straightforward threats.

I assume that no new people are born in this world either, since death is not a factor in it and if so, then new lives can't be born either to maintain the balance or the world would be drowned in bodies.

It would eventually forget the concept of children, of babies, childbirth, birthdays, funerals, motherhood, fatherhood, puberty, the purpose of tombstones/cemeteries/coffins/funerals/cremations etc, pregnancy, pregnancy tests, toys, cribs, first times, childhood memories, new experiences, excitement, happiness, joy, surprises...

A world without death is just the most depressing place to live in, honestly.

You might as well be in Limbo.

@ Trainbarrel:

That's certainly a rather...bleak outlook, but certainly one that I can't find fault with other than that it's depressing. I did plan for births to continue onward at least to some degree, people just stop aging at young adulthood. But you are right, overpopulation would rapidly become a huge issue and the struggles resulting from that would only be worsened by immortality preventing the issue from "correcting itself".

...huh.

Interestingly the entire reason things are like this is because a powerful individual was shattered by the deaths of their children and vowed to defeat the very concept of death to prevent anyone else from suffering like this. So it's ironic that it would prevent new life, at least in theory.

I... don't think that I agree that it would be so bleak. There are plenty of joys in the world that aren't related to first times or children, and plenty that are reasonably repeatable, I would argue!

Not to mention that progress may yet continue, providing new things to experience.

However, I do agree that there's a question regarding births: are new people born in this scenario? If not, that may affect a number of psychological and social matters; if so, that may result in a bit of a population issue. [edit] I see that this was answered above by a

(Which might be alleviated, at least for a time, if someone can develop practical long-range spaceflight and start settling new planets. On the plus side, interstellar ships needn't be generation ships any more, even without faster-than-light travel.)

Another thought: what happens if someone's body ends up somewhere... inimical? What happens to someone who drowns in the deep ocean, or who suffocates in space, or who trips and falls into a volcano...?

Otherwise, without death... well, there would still be pain to put people off, but I would expect some degree of increase in risk-taking.

Maybe not as much as one might think, however: I'm not sure that people really think that much about death, their own if anything especially.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Dec 8th 2023 at 7:51:18 PM

And imagine, what I described was the nice view of a deathless world.

The nightmare view of it is basically "Torchwood: Miracle Day" which operates on "A World without Death" to its absolute logical extreme.

This is something one watch at their own peril.

I did and ended up traumatized from all of the Fridge Horror such a world presented.

So there is that.

@ Ars Thaumaturgis:

I'm not sure if this is a hypothetical or not, but I can actually answer this question. First of all, to put this in context, this is a medieval fantasy setting with the technology level (and unfortunately similar regard for human rights) as that time period.

To actually answer this question, what happens in that situation is that the unfortunate individual dies again and again, coming back to life only to suffer the same fate and expire once more unless they are removed from the cause of death. In regard to the volcano example, there is actually a situation where this is a torture method, lowering someone into lava and subjecting them to death again and again until they break and confess or give information. Or doing it to a loved one.

The other deterrent/fear of death I had in mind was the missing time aspect. As I mentioned, there is no set time period that you will be dead. You could die one day and only miss a few minutes, or you could die and seventy years could have gone by in the blink of an eye for you. You'd have missed massive changes in the world around you as well as great events in the lives of those close to you.

@ Trainbarrel:

Sorry .

Oh, Torchwood Miracle Day, I haven't thought of that in a long, long time. I watched most of Torchwood but never could bring myself to watch it past the second season since I knew dark things were coming. But I am very familiar with the horrors that went on in that event and I was actually trying to avoid that sort of Death Takes a Holiday scenario while still exploring the ups and downs of deathless world.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Dec 8th 2023 at 1:02:54 PM

Then you probably should consider pulling the childbirth-ratio down to zero once the immortality kicks in in order to avoid overpopulation-issues and worse stillborn immortals.

This one in particular was one of the worst parts of "Miracle Day" to me since it was only mentioned, but God did my brain do a too good job with filling in the gaps of what that meant after a while.

@ Trainbarrel:

Hmmm, I'll have to think about this a bit more. "Stillborn immortals" sounds like...a weird oxymoron or some kind of eldritch being. But yes, I'll try to avoid things like that in this world.

EDIT: Actually upon a bit of a Beat I just realized what that technically meant and can understand why one would be so disturbed by the concept.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Dec 8th 2023 at 1:26:42 PM

As I outlined above, I really don't agree; I think that a world without death—at least excepting the population problem—could be pretty enjoyable, myself.

Let's just say that my impression of a "deathless world" was not just set by "Miracle Day" or how "deathless world" is the one factor that every single version of Hell have in common with each other.

There is also a old fairy-tale about a man who managed to capture Death in a burlap-sack on his deathbed, cheered that he had "freed world from Death" but then realized what a bad idea it was when seeing all the elderly people suffer in misery, forever wishing for Death to collect and bring their souls to Heaven, wondering why it wouldn't show. Seeing all this, the man in his remorse opened the sack and let Death out, but for the crime of holding Death as a prisoner, ended up being the only true immortal in the world as Death refused to have anything to do with him anymore after that incident.

Leaving the old man to forever walk the earth, desperately trying to find Death again so it could free him as well at last.

This is a story that was told to me as a child after the loss of my first cat. I realize now that it was to teach me "why death is important" and find comfort in it existing. I realized that eventually but the idea of immortality would forever be seen as a Fate Worse than Death by me from that point forward.

FWIW Marvel had once depicted a Deathless world as well...

Except ti turned out to be the Cancerverse, the main threat of The Thanos Imperative that apparently had everyone subjected to massive Body Horror and the desire to endlessly consume to the point where they are trying to invade other universes. Make of that what you will.

(if that was brought up before I apologize, but to be more original this page reveales that there is a trope that could be germane to the thread)

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Dec 8th 2023 at 8:02:09 AM

Okay, but that doesn't mean that those stories are accurate—or that their specifics match those given here.

It's also a factor to be found in depictions of Heaven.

Hell is, I would argue, not depicted as horrible because the people there can't die, but because of the context in which they're not dying.

Note that in this case, the vast majority of people are apparently intended to stop ageing at a fairly youthful age, so the above should apply to only a very few people.

It's not something that wouldn't affect anyone, but I doubt that it would be an extremely common issue.

(And I daresay that there would be elderly people who were very happy to no longer be facing death!)

That is, this has been stated to be a setting in which Age Without Youth is not in effect.

I mean, that's fair enough—I just don't see it the same way as you.

Nope, I don't think that it's been raised (so to speak :P) in the thread before you! ^_^

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Dec 9th 2023 at 3:18:11 PM

Let's just leave it at that then.

...

Thinking about it, there is another thing.

Another problem with immortality, is the warped perception of time and memory resulting from it.

Ever felt that time moved faster the older you get?

That is because the brain gets a bigger perspective of time passing the more it passes.

A month before Christmas as a child felt way longer than it does as an adult due to the inexperience and yet, that is just ten years difference.

Imagine how time is perceived by an immortal at the same effect?

Eventually, years will feel like days, then hours, then minutes.

Decades, centuries and millennia alike will feel like a mere hour passing, with most of it forgotten in the process since the human brain was never designed to store that much memory to begin with. Meaning that a lot of it will be lost in the process.

Eventually, the faces, the names, the world around you becomes a dis where only today is clearly remembered, before it is forgotten in favor for tomorrow when the next day arrives.

If an immortal have been immortal for a thousand years, they won't remember 99.9% of all that time when asked about it during year 1000.

So asking them about historical events is a fool's errand. They won't remember it even if they actually where there to witness it at all.

So that is another hurdle an immortal person might have to face.

Because if they remembered everything without forgetting a single thing, then I don't think all of them would be able to handle it.

They would basically all be suffering from hyperthymesia in that case.

Some people might even go so far as to willingly enter their "death-coma" just to keep their most precious memories as fresh as possible, sleeping for centuries even and wake up once the method of their deaths has been recovered from, only to spend a day with their memory before sending themselves back into their comas just to keep the influx of new impressions and memories at a bare minimum.

Basically, sleeping away their eternity rather than doing anything with it, just to stay in the past.

...

So the main question regarding this would be:

"How much memory be handled in this setting?"

...

Update: I will admit though that immortals can find excitement and happiness in their endless lives, but as far as the examples I've seen, it's when they let go off the past and only live in the present that they do so, not letting themselves be burdened by "what has been" and freely living in "What is" instead.

Edited by Trainbarrel on Dec 9th 2023 at 5:21:55 PM

Fair!

Is it not more a result of ageing on the brain?

If I am correct in that, then I would expect perception of time to remain pretty much unchanged once the person in question stops ageing.

I... don't really buy such depictions of immortality myself. (Albeit that I buy even less depictions that insist that one would be mired in grief.)

To be honest, I don't see why it should be any different from, well, anyone who has suffered a loss or negative experience in their lives: one grieves, with time one heals, and one continues living.

Except time doesn't heal all wounds as there are people in the world who never let go off their losses or mistakes through their entire lives.

Mostly due to the mistaken believe that they are a crucial part of their identities and holds on to them despite the fact that letting them go would have been the healthier option.

An immortal would be no different in this regard of personal choice.

...

Perhaps, but those would seem to me to be more exceptions than the rule.

And, well, the more time you have the more wounds it may heal!

And either way, that would still seem to suggest that things are not all that different for an immortal than for a mortal—save, as suggested in the paragraph above, perhaps a bit better.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Dec 9th 2023 at 8:04:40 PM

I would assume that in a world of immortality, record keeping would be at least more relevant than it is now.

Wow, this thread really took off since the last time I was here. Thank you everyone for your discussions, debates and observations about the ways immortality would affect the world. It's really given me a lot to think about and even brought up ideas and issues that I hadn't really given much thought to when going about designing how this setting functions.