Humans have been evolving for 70,000 years, and in the last 500 years, advances in science and technology have given us a glimpse of the possibility of eternal life. However, it is necessary to discuss whether eternal life will increase human happiness or cause unhappiness. Considering the social and environmental impacts of eternal life, it is likely that humanity will be unhappier in the long run.
Humans have been around for 70,000 years. In that 70,000 years, we’ve changed, and we’ve changed more in the last 500 years than we have in 70,000 years. In just a few hundred years, humans have experienced changes that overwhelm thousands of years of accumulated knowledge, leading to a rapid evolution of human civilization. Revolution after revolution occurred, resulting in the unification of the planet into a single ecological and historical sphere. Economies exploded, and today humanity enjoys wealth that would have once been the stuff of fairy tales. While economic development in the past few thousand years has fundamentally changed human life, post-modern economic growth has completely transformed the way we live. Advances in science and technology and the Industrial Revolution have given humans superhuman strength and boundless energy. In particular, science and technology have advanced so much that humans are now looking forward to what they have always hoped for: eternal life. Harari’s Homo sapiens and The Gilgamesh Project are examples of the materialization of this human desire for eternal life, and show how long humans have been longing for it.
While many scholars are interested in the process and outcomes of these developments, they are less interested in the relationship between these revolutions and happiness. Would we be happier than we have been for the past 70,000 years, especially if science and technology could make us immortal? This question has important implications for exploring the relationship between our essential human needs and modern civilization.
To answer this question, we must first define what happiness is. What is happiness? What can measure its magnitude? Political economists believe that political and economic factors affect happiness, psychologists believe that psychological factors affect happiness, and scientists believe that scientific factors affect happiness. If we consider that scientific factors affect happiness because humans are a type of organism, then at the most fundamental level, the amount of serotonin is the size of happiness, happiness. What we need to think about now is what other factors (economic, psychological, social, etc.) can change the amount of serotonin secretion. In other words, the direct factor of happiness is the amount of serotonin secretion, but if the amount of serotonin secretion can be changed by other factors, those factors can also be a measure of happiness.
Many researchers have found that economic level can affect happiness: up to a certain point, happiness increases as economic level increases, but after that point, economic level has little effect on happiness. In addition, even people with the same external conditions (economic conditions, social status, etc.) may have different levels of happiness, meaning that “subjective well-being” can be a measure of happiness for each individual. It is also said that some people are born happy and maintain a happiness index of 710, while others are depressed and maintain a happiness index of 35. In sum, there are so many factors that affect happiness, and even the same factor can have different magnitudes depending on who the individual is. In other words, it is impossible to determine the magnitude of happiness based on a few conditions alone.
In order to answer the question, “Will humanity be happier if eternal life is possible?”, we need to define the complex concept of happiness locally, i.e., not as the sum of the changes in the magnitude of individual happiness, but as a representative, and think about the happiness of the representative, and how often the representative represents humanity. We will also consider cases that are directly and indirectly affected by eternal life.
At the most basic level, we can categorize people into three groups: those who will be happier, those who will be unhappier, and those whose happiness will not change. So who are the people who will be happier? Before answering this question, let’s think about who will be unhappier. One possible example that doesn’t come to mind is people who derive happiness from their privileges (wealth, abilities, etc.) over others. These people might feel unhappy if everyone had the ability to live forever.
One possible scenario where happiness would not change much is for people whose happiness is not affected by the ability to have eternal life in the first place. For example, people who are happy to live because it has meaning in itself, and who believe that dying is the beginning of a new process, may not find eternal life to have a significant impact on their happiness.
Outside of these two categories of people (those who would be unhappier, and those whose happiness index would not change), eternal life would increase their happiness. For example, someone diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only six months to live would be very happy to hear that they could live forever. But what would the proportion of these three categories of people be as a percentage of the total population? My guess is that very few people would be unhappy because of eternal life. Think about it. From this perspective, due to the nature of happiness in the long run, the euphoria of eternal life itself will eventually wear off and return to one’s own happiness quotient. At that point, eternal life will no longer bring happiness to humanity.
So far, we have considered the direct effects of eternal life, but what about the indirect effects of eternal life on happiness? The first thing that comes to mind is the depletion of the Earth’s resources, i.e., the population will not decrease due to eternal life, but there will continue to be more people on the planet, which will reduce the amount of resources available per person. Unfortunately, selfish humans will be unhappy with the reduced amount of resources allocated to them (one of the characteristics of happiness is the amount of happiness that comes from the difference between a current state and a future state), and they will not comply with the reduced amount and will take resources from others. This could lead to a significant amount of chaos, which will reduce the happiness of a significant number of people. One might ask whether some people will gain as much happiness as those who lose, but given that the amount of unhappiness experienced by the person who is deprived of 1,000 won is generally greater than the amount of happiness gained by the person who takes 1,000 won, the amount of happiness of humanity as a whole will eventually decrease.
In addition to these resource issues, social inequality and overpopulation could lead to more conflict. Since the technology and resources needed to achieve eternal life would not be equally accessible to all people, existing inequalities would likely increase. If the technology that makes eternal life possible is monopolized by the upper class, the majority of people will feel even more deprived, which could contribute to overall social unrest.
To summarize, happiness is not easily measurable, so it is quite difficult to discuss whether eternal life will make humanity happier. As a result, we selected a few representatives to think about the magnitude of the change in happiness, and in the process, we considered the long-term change in happiness and considered the direct and indirect effects of eternal life. The results show that in the long run, the direct change in happiness from eternal life will converge to zero, and the indirect change in happiness will be negative (i.e. unhappy), so in the end, eternal life will not make humanity happier, but rather unhappier. Of course, the choice of representatives and the estimated change in happiness for each representative are not guaranteed. It could be greater or lesser. It’s not an objective, quantifiable measure, so it’s subject to error, but in general, we can say that eternal life will make humanity unhappier.
