Humans have long dreamed of eternal life, but even if science and technology make it possible, happiness is not guaranteed. Eternal life can lead to a variety of problems, including resource depletion, social inequality, and a loss of meaning in life, so it is difficult to achieve happiness through eternal life alone.
From Qin Shi Huang’s quest to find the elixir of life, to medieval people who indirectly sought immortality through religions that talked about reincarnation, to modern people who want to download and store their consciousness in supercomputers, the desire for eternal life has been a constant throughout history. The pursuit of eternal life, in other words, is the desire to avoid death. What is it about death that so many people want to avoid? Death is generally defined as “the complete cessation of all functions of an organism and its inability to return to its original form.
However, since entering the modern world, the average life expectancy of humans has increased dramatically due to the development of science and technology, and the optimistic view of human immortality has been gaining momentum. In particular, the research on telomeres and telomerase, which won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009, has shown that they are key factors in aging at the cellular level. Of course, aging as an individual human being seems to be a more complex process, but the vast amount of knowledge we’ve accumulated in just a century gives us reason to be optimistic about the success of the Gilgamesh project, which is to find a way to make humans immortal.
So, if humanity is immortalized, as everyone hopes, will we be any happier than we are now? I don’t think so.
Before we dive into the discussion, let’s start with a definition of happiness. Happiness is defined as “the feeling of sufficient satisfaction and joy in life. Or the state of being such.’ From this definition, we can see that the criteria for determining the state of happiness is very vague. To refine it, we can say that happiness is generally determined by the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations, as Yuval Harari says: a person is happy when the objective conditions, such as wealth or fame, are able to satisfy his or her subjective expectations.
If happiness were a concept that depended only on objective conditions, it would be easy to measure and predict, but this is not the case. We often make the mistake of taking our own subjective expectations into account when judging someone else’s happiness. While it’s impossible to truly measure happiness without this subjectivity, let’s assume that we can measure happiness on a scale that is as close as we can get to someone else’s perspective. To support the argument that eternal life will not bring happiness under these assumptions, let’s take a closer look at how a science-based eternal life would affect humanity and cause unhappiness.
First, we can argue that the length of life is not an absolute measure of happiness. From the time we appeared as a species to the present day, advances in science and technology have increased our life expectancy, especially in recent years, but there is no evidence that this increase in life expectancy has increased our happiness. Surveys using systematic scientific methods have shown that some tribes that are still in primitive tribal societies, where life expectancy has not changed much from the past, are happier than people living in modern societies where life expectancy is close to 80 years. Also, based on the happiness mentioned above, it is not an exaggeration to say that modern people, who have increased expectations of comfort and pleasure and decreased tolerance for discomfort and unpleasantness, suffer more than their ancestors.
Of course, the lack of correlation between length of life and happiness in the finite realm does not guarantee that happiness will not be achieved in the infinite realm of eternal life. However, we can think of eternal life as repeating many of the same behaviors and goals that we had in our finite lives. In that case, it is unlikely that we will gain new happiness just by being immortalized. As such, there is hardly any positive correlation between the length of life and happiness.
Furthermore, immortality for humans would actually diminish the meaning and impact of death in our current lives. According to Heidegger, one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the 20th century, human beings in the modern world are just there, like objects. He is an “unnatural” being in the sense that he is not a properly human being in the first place, moving from place to place with only shallow curiosity, living a life filled with emptiness and boredom. He paradoxically said that only by realizing that one day one will die and facing one’s own mortality can one find one’s original existence. In other words, it is by experiencing death in advance that humans can regain their original life or existence and live happily. In this sense, if human beings are able to enjoy eternal life, they will lose their awareness of the finitude of time and live as non-original beings and will not be able to live a happy life.
Of course, one could argue against this by using Buddhism’s position on happiness as an example. According to Buddhism, we are happy when we understand the impermanent nature of all emotions and stop craving them, thus freeing ourselves from suffering and reaching the state of liberation. In short, it seems to be the opposite of Heidegger’s argument that we become happy when we let go of our attachment to our present life, and that we become happy by improving our quality of life by recognizing the finitude of time. Therefore, from the Buddhist point of view, it can be argued that eternal life makes humanity happier. However, Buddhist craving is a desire for the world’s values, while Heidegger’s desire for a better quality of life is a desire for one’s own values. Therefore, the Buddhist position is insufficient to refute Heidegger’s argument. On the contrary, if Buddhists were to attain eternal life, they would be unhappy because they would not be able to stop craving for worldly values and thus would not reach the state of liberation.
And if humanity is immortalized with limited resources and the growth of the population is not controlled, it will cause great chaos and conflict. The general consensus of scholars is that petroleum, the source of energy that supports not only our daily lives but all of our activities, will soon be exhausted, and no effective substitute has yet been developed. In this situation, if humanity were suddenly immortalized, society would face problems such as overpopulation and resource allocation. These problems cannot be solved simply, and the probability of disrupting normal society is quite high. Even if the development of science and technology allows us to live forever and develop technologies that can replace the current main energy sources such as oil and nuclear power, natural resources such as rare earth metals cannot be replaced no matter how advanced the technology is. Since the human desire to enjoy a high quality of life is insatiable, we will undoubtedly have a huge competition for these scarce resources. This is likely to lead to conflicts and wars on a scale far beyond anything that has ever occurred, including nuclear and biological weapons, and ultimately to the tragic end of humanity’s destruction. The finite nature of resources is incompatible with eternal life, and if we were to achieve eternal life, we would have to give up the value of happiness.
The values of freedom and equality are essential in the modern world, where they have become fundamental to our subjective expectations. However, the pursuit of eternal life is very likely to result in conflicting opportunity costs with others. While it would be nice if it were a right that was equally available to everyone, the reality is that in a capitalist society, scientific and technological advances are often monopolized by a limited group of people. This is evidenced by the fact that people with more money are more likely to live a higher quality of life and not suffer from illness. Similarly, the right to eternal life is likely to be monopolized by a small group of people. This means that the majority of people will be unhappy because their subjective expectations are not met.
In conclusion, it is unlikely that humanity will be happy just by being able to have eternal life if it becomes available. Given the problems directly related to eternal life, as well as the many problems based on eternal life, eternal life for humanity will make humanity unhappier. If we want eternal life to make us happy, we must first have the technology and social structures to support it.
