The top 3 biggest causes of death are in order: Heart disease, Cancer, and Lung disease. These and other diseases kill as many as 2.5 million people per year just in the United States.
What if we could cure these and all other biological diseases, along with the “disease” of old age, so that you would become biologically immortal? This is not such a far-fetched idea. With medical advances accelerating, some scientists are saying that this is very possible within the next 40 years.
And if you became biologically immortal, how long would you live before you died in an accident, homicide, suicide, or war?
Just for fun…Let’s look at that.
If you could not die from any biological sicknesses, like heart attacks, cancer or diabetes, then pretty much the only things that could kill you would be accidents, murder, suicide or war. Let’s look at how long you would live if this was the case.
I want to make you aware that most of the stats I will be talking about are for the United States, which is an advanced and mostly safe country. If you are living in most other countries, you would likely die sooner, except for the case of homicide, which is a bit lower on average in other countries.The stats I am using are used by American insurance companies to calculate life insurance rates.
So lets look at your chances of dying if you were biologically immortal:
In a flood – you would live to be almost 40,000,000 years old if the only thing that could kill you was a flood.
Lightening – You would live 12,000,000 years before you died of a lightening strike.
Dog bite – 9,000,000 years
Airplane crash – 770,000 years
Drowning in a pool – You’d live for 450,000 before you died of drowning in a pool
Fall from stairs – 140,000 years
Killed in a fire – 120,000 years
Killed by gun – 30,000 years
Killed in a War – 20,000 years
Murdered – 13,000 years
Now we are getting to some significant numbers.
Died in a Car accident – 9,000 years
Accidental poisoning – 7,500 years
And finally – Suicide – this is the event that is the biggest likely dangerto you – because after only 7,000 years, you would have a near certainty of dying by suicide, if nothing else.
By the way, if you bought a lottery ticket every day for all your life, it would be 800,000 before you won powerball. So, you have about the same chance of dying in an airplane crash as you do for winning the powerball lottery, and you would need to buy at least one ticket per day for 800,000 years. Perspective!
Anyway, back to our stats. Since you could die of any of the above ways, and since these events are independent of each other. If we add all these chances together, you would actually have a near 100% chance of dying within 1750 years.
So that is the answer, you would live about 1750 years before you died of something. And how are you most likely to die after living for so long? Chances are it would be most likely a car accident, poisoning, or suicide, since these are the biggest factors in lowering your lifespan.
So now the question is, “Is there any way to have true immortality, such that you could not die in an accident or any other way?” Well, there is a potential technology that could make this happen: It’s called “Digital Immortality”
What do I mean by this? This is the idea of downloading your brain to an advanced computer, such as quantum computer. It doesn’t exist yet, but it is not that far-fetched. With our current advances in computer technology, scientists estimate that this is also quite possible within the next 40 years.
It is not known whether your consciousness would also be transferred during this digital download of your brain. If your consciousness is not transferred in this digital download, then for all intents and purposes, you would be dead, because it’s possible that just your knowledge, and memories would be transferred.
But if your consciousness is your knowledge and memories, and presuming that your consciousness can indeed be transferred, you could not be physically harmed by accidents or gun shots, or in a war (unless it was a cyber war of some sort). But, then again, there is always the danger that some good-for-nothing evil hacker could erase your brain from all the servers, and delete any signs of your existence.
Those damn hackers! So Maybe death really is inevitable – but there is no doubt that we will be able to delay it for as long as possible.
