IMMORTALITY

One of my favorite things to talk about is immortality, specifically, why it's impossible. If you're a firm believer in it, I apologize, but I'm sort of in the mood.

The reason it's impossible is really very simple, yet it sounds a little complicated. Before you know it, you're wandering around in thermodynamics and stuff like that. So I'll try to minimize the complication by using a simple comparison.

Have you ever used one of those fireplace logs, the kind that are manufactured to burn for a certain number of hours (usually three or four) depending on their size? I'm going to assume that you have, or at least know about them, and ask you a very simple question. Would you expect one of them to burn for, say, six hours, when the package clearly says three? Of course you wouldn't. If the log is made to burn for three hours, that's what it's going to do. (If anything, it might burn for less.)

The comparison of our life spans with a fireplace log is an apt one, and very easy to understand. But instead of flaming for three or four hours, our lives are usually good for seventy or eighty years. And in the same way that you wouldn't expect a three-hour log to burn for six hours, you can't reasonably expect your life to burn longer than it is designed for.

And it is designed to burn for a finite number of years, whether we like it or not. If we had the genetic expertise, we could look at a sample of a person's DNA and, barring accidents or anything fluky, tell them how long their log was designed to burn. You're not going to get a hundred-year fire from a seventy-year log. It's just that simple.

Now, try to imagine an endless fire, because that's basically what you're talking about when you're speaking of immortality, a fire that is never quenched.

The sun, for example, is a pretty big fire, about 10-billion-years big (and already half gone). But as big as 10-billion might be, it is still not endless. The last time I checked, ten-billion was a finite number. It looks like this:

10,000,000,000.

If you've had any experience with making a fire you know it has to be fed. For a fire to burn endlessly it would have to be fed endlessly, which is pretty much impossible, because the "feeder" would himself have to be fed (so that he would have the energy that would enable him to feed the fire), also endlessly, and so on. The whole system would require one endlessness on top of another. In other words, it is basically unsustainable. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Immortality is impossible.

One of the things that gets me going on my immortality rant is this cryogenic business. You hear about it from time to time. Someone has his head frozen in the hope that science will someday figure out the secret to eternal life.

If I'm not mistaken I believe that L. Ron Hubbard had it done, which I find really hard to believe. The guy was a science-fiction writer. Don't you have to know at least a little about science to be one of those? I just can't imagine that he wrote novels without doing research, and in that research he surely, at some point, came across thermodynamic law, which essentially tells us that you only get out of something what you put in to it.

If you want to acquire something that never ends (immortality), you have to invest something that never ends. And somehow, I just don't see it happening.