What Happens If Humans Become Biologically Immortal?

(5 minute read)

One of the most fascinating ideas I have come across recently is something called longevity escape velocity. It sounds like a term from a science fiction novel, but it describes a surprisingly simple possibility. Imagine medical science reaches the point where, for every year that passes, it can add more than a year to your healthy lifespan.

You celebrate your sixty-fifth birthday and, during the next twelve months, advances in medicine effectively make you biologically younger by thirteen months. The following year they add another fourteen. The finish line keeps moving away faster than you can approach it. If that process continued indefinitely, old age might cease to be the inevitable ending it has always been.

Whether that happens next century, in fifty years, or not at all remains an open question. What makes the idea so interesting isn't just the science itself but the consequences.

Death has quietly shaped almost every institution humans have ever created. Families, careers, inheritance laws, governments, religions, retirement plans, and even our sense of urgency all exist because our time is limited.

We rarely notice this because it has always been true. It's like gravity. We don't spend much time thinking about it because it is simply part of the world. Yet if aging became optional rather than inevitable, many assumptions that have guided civilization for thousands of years would suddenly need to be rewritten.

Medicine is perhaps the easiest place to see the change. Most healthcare today is reactive. Something goes wrong and we try to fix it.

AI may eventually help reverse that model entirely. Instead of diagnosing cancer after a tumor appears, future systems might identify the first abnormal cells years before symptoms develop. Heart disease could be predicted before damage occurs. Organs might be repaired at the cellular level long before they begin to fail.

In that world, medicine would start to resemble maintenance rather than repair. We service our cars before they break down. Future generations may look back and wonder why we ever waited for people to become ill before intervening.

The economic consequences could be even more profound. Most people today think in decades. A young professional might invest for a retirement forty years in the future. A company might make plans stretching ten or twenty years ahead.

An immortal person could think very differently. Imagine planting a forest knowing you will personally see it mature. Imagine funding a scientific project that may not produce meaningful results for seventy years and being perfectly happy to wait. Imagine buying shares in a company with the expectation of holding them for a century. Patience itself might become one of the most valuable assets in society.

That naturally raises another question. What happens to inheritance?

Much of the world's wealth changes hands because people die. Homes pass to children. Businesses pass to heirs. Governments collect inheritance tax. Wealth is regularly redistributed between generations.

But if people routinely live for two hundred years, three hundred years, or longer, that process slows dramatically. A successful entrepreneur could continue controlling assets accumulated centuries earlier. Some economists have suggested that governments might eventually have to rethink inheritance tax entirely because inheritance itself could become relatively rare.

The richest people in the future may not be companies. They may simply be individuals who have had two centuries of compound growth working in their favor.

There is another practical problem that immortality enthusiasts don't always like talking about.

Housing.

Here in the UK, we already struggle to build enough homes. Depending on which figures you use, we are short of hundreds of thousands of houses. Yet the housing market quietly relies on something we rarely discuss. People eventually leave their homes. Some downsize. Some move into care. Some pass away. Properties return to the market and become available to younger families.

What happens if that process slows dramatically?

Imagine a couple buying a family home at thirty and still living there at two hundred and thirty. Their children might be a hundred and eighty years old before they inherit anything. Cities would have to expand upwards, outwards, or perhaps into entirely new environments. We might build floating cities, underground cities, or even orbital habitats. The challenge sounds daunting, but history suggests humans are remarkably good at solving problems once they become important enough.

Nobody in Victorian London imagined that billions of people would one day travel the world by aircraft, yet here we are. Jules Verne wrote “Around the World in Eighty Days.” Astronauts can circumnavigate in eighty minutes.

If longevity becomes reality, housing won't simply be a medical problem. It will become one of the largest engineering and planning challenges civilization has ever faced.

Fame becomes an equally strange question. Today, even the most celebrated figures eventually leave the stage. New actors replace old actors. New musicians emerge. New writers arrive. Death creates space for fresh voices.

What happens when the stars never disappear?

At first glance it sounds as though a handful of famous people might dominate culture forever, but I suspect human nature is more complicated than that. People become curious. Tastes change. Audiences constantly search for novelty. An immortal celebrity might enjoy several periods of fame separated by decades of obscurity.

Imagine Shakespeare taking a hundred-year break before releasing a new audiobook. Imagine Mozart experimenting with forms of music we haven't invented yet, or Puccini co-writing an album with Coldplay.. Fame may become less permanent and more cyclical, with people reinventing themselves again and again across centuries.

Whenever immortality comes up, somebody eventually asks whether people would become bored. It's a reasonable concern. After all, most of us have experienced a tedious afternoon that seemed to last forever.

Yet boredom often comes from limitation rather than abundance. Many people reach the later years of life with a list of things they never had time to do. Places they never visited. Skills they never learned. Dreams they postponed.

Given another hundred healthy years, a person could pursue several entirely different careers. They might spend fifty years as a surgeon, thirty years as an architect, twenty years writing novels, and then decide to study astronomy. The universe contains an astonishing amount of complexity. Running out of curiosity may prove far more difficult than running out of time.

The deepest changes, however, might occur in love and family. Throughout most of history, marriage lasted until death. The meaning of that promise changes dramatically when death becomes distant.

Would people remain together for centuries? Would relationships evolve into something more flexible? Would family trees become so vast that a gathering might contain hundreds of living descendants?

We often speak about generation gaps today. Imagine knowing your great-great-great-grandparents personally. Imagine being able to ask someone what life was really like three hundred years earlier because they had actually lived through it.

War might change as well. Young people have often fought wars because they have more future than past. But what happens when somebody has already lived for two hundred and fifty years and expects to live another three hundred and fifty?

Risk becomes extraordinarily expensive. A person with centuries ahead of them may be far less willing to gamble everything in a conflict. Perhaps societies become more peaceful because everyone has more to lose. Or perhaps they become more cautious and resistant to change. Human nature has a way of surprising us.

As I think about these possibilities, I find myself coming back to one simple idea.

Death has always acted as civilization’s reset button. Every generation gets its turn. New ideas eventually replace old ones because new people replace old ones. If that cycle slows dramatically, history itself begins to feel different.

The Moon landings stop being something that happened long ago and become a memory someone can tell you about over dinner. The invention of artificial intelligence becomes something your neighbor witnessed firsthand. The distance between history and lived experience starts to shrink.

Of course, nobody knows whether biological immortality will ever arrive. Predictions about the future have a habit of embarrassing those who make them. Yet AI-driven medicine, gene therapies, and longevity research are advancing far faster than most people realise. The possibility is no longer confined entirely to science fiction.

What I find most encouraging is that immortality may not even be the most important outcome. If these technologies merely allow people to remain healthy into their nineties, hundreds, or beyond, that would still represent one of the greatest improvements in human welfare ever achieved.

Millions of people could avoid diseases that currently cause enormous suffering. Grandparents might spend decades longer with their families. Scientists, engineers, artists, and writers could continue creating long after today's retirement age.

Perhaps the most exciting possibility is that longer lives might encourage longer thinking. We often make short-term decisions because our horizons are short. An individual expecting to live another two hundred years may care much more about forests planted today, scientific projects that take decades, or the long-term health of civilization itself. The future stops belonging to somebody else and starts belonging to you.

Terry Pratchett once observed that "inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened." I suspect many readers of this newsletter can relate to that feeling. Most of us do not feel old on the inside. We simply notice that time has passed much faster than expected.

George Bernard Shaw approached the same subject from a slightly different angle when he wrote, "You don't stop laughing when you grow old. You grow old when you stop laughing."

Perhaps that is the real lesson hidden inside all of this.

The goal isn't simply to live longer. The goal is to remain curious longer. To love longer. To learn longer. To laugh longer.

If science eventually gives us more healthy years, perhaps the greatest gift won't be immortality at all. It will be the opportunity to spend more time with the people we care about, explore more of the universe, learn more things, and become more than one version of ourselves during a single lifetime.

And if we somehow achieve longevity escape velocity, I suspect George Burns will still have the last laugh.

"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself."

Last week I encouraged you to sing Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

This week's anthem would be from Queen, "Who Wants to Live Forever?"

So here's the question I've been wondering about this week.

If you knew you were going to live for three hundred more years in good health, what would you do differently tomorrow?

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Before I go, I have one more small gift for you.

This month marks almost exactly one year since I became a published author. Twelve months ago, I had no idea whether anyone would read Return to the Galaxy.

Since then, thousands of readers have joined me on this journey, sent messages, left well over 5,000 reviews and ratings for the series on Amazon and Goodreads, (that’s more than 100 per week), shared recommendations, and helped turn a novice's dream into something wonderful.

For that, I want to say a totally heartfelt thank you.

Consider yourself hugged!

As part of the celebration, I've uploaded a previously unpublished short story called Love Hurts, set in the Return to the Galaxy universe. It follows Ryela, a survey officer who visits what seems like the perfect paradise world and discovers that sometimes the most dangerous thing in the galaxy isn't war.

You can download it free here:

Download Love Hurts on BookFunnel

Download Love Hurts on StoryOrigin

I should probably confess that although I said I was in an optimistic mood this week, I never actually promised that every story I wrote would be optimistic. Some of you may discover that Love Hurts earned its title honestly.

I hope you enjoy it, and thank you once again for making this first year as an author far more successful, enjoyable, and rewarding than I could ever have imagined possible.

Until next time,

BA Gillies
Author, Return to the Galaxy Series

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Book 8 is Live. The War Has Truly Begun

It's here. Battle for the Galaxy, Book 8 of the Return to the Galaxy series, is live right now.

For the first time, Earth forces face the Ranid directly. Admiral Ewan Scott is pushing beyond known space chasing an alliance that could decide the war, while back home, power is shifting fast and humanity is dividing before the enemy has even arrived.

The war has truly begun. And humanity may not survive its opening moves.

Read Battle for the Galaxy on Amazon UK

Read Battle for the Galaxy on Amazon US

Free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Thank you for all the support, reviews, and encouragement. It genuinely means everything.

Brian

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If you haven’t started the series yet, Book 1 is still available to buy for 99 cents or read for free on Kindle Unlimited:

Read Return to the Galaxy on Amazon UK

Read Return to the Galaxy on Amazon US

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