Author: Steve Kemple

For one thing, they don’t prepare you for continental drift. How could they? We aren’t equipped to think on a geological time scale. You live eighty, ninety years and the tectonic plates move what. Thirty feet? Try this on for size: “I remember the Himalayas.” Not “I remember when the Himalayas were yay high” or “I remember when the Himalayas were over here.” I remember the Himalayas.

Sure, you’ll outlive your friends and family. That’s what everyone seems to focus on. It makes sense, because love is the biggest thing human minds are equipped to comprehend, I’m convinced of that. Bigger than the missing Himalayas. You feel lonely. Always an outsider. But you find your way. It stays with you, loss, but it fades into the background. Lives pass like flashes in the dark. Your eyes adjust. You learn to love on a different scale.

Think of it this way. Are you the same person you were ten years ago? Twenty? Of course not. Think of someone you’ve known and loved for more than a few years. Are they the same person you first met? Yes and no. We’re all a ship of Theseus, shedding cells and rebuilding ourselves. We accept continuity, even if it’s fiction. You learn to accept continuity across time and individuals, is what I’m saying.

Language evolves. You’re reading this in early 21st century English, barely a blink from the English of Beowulf. (You can read that, right?). That’s just a thousand years. Imagine ten or a hundred thousand. Your patterns of thinking change, and your way of being.

Language is living technology. It evolves with use. All the futuristic stories focus on technology, but they take language for granted. Then again, a mirror takes its silvering for granted, so there’s that.

To say nothing of governments and civilizations. Geography is fluid (paging Mt. Everest!). Nations rise and fall. Tyranny is irrefutable and inevitable, a phase no less regrettable in any form. It’s a trickier problem to manage your status as an individual in the gaze of states calibrated to typical lifespans. But, you manage. The State is an idea that sticks around for a while, but it’s just one idea. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Whoever said that was on the right track.

Religions? I’ll leave that up to you. “Of that which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence.” Again, not my words. I do know I look up at the stars, and now you wouldn’t recognize the constellations. I remember Achilles and Medusa. Our stories are more enduring than our relation to the cosmos. Let that sink in.

Speaking of stars. Before you decide on this immortality thing, you’ll need a plan on what to do about the Sun. Sure, humans messed things up for a while. I’m talking about Earth’s climate. I won’t downplay that, and neither should you. But wait til the Sun expands. Now there’s a situation.

What do you do when your planet becomes uninhabitable? I don’t mean the royal you, I mean YOU, survivor of mass extinctions and the atmosphere boiling away. You, hovering over the lifeless and empty Earth. You, the thing that persists after everything solid melts into the vacuum of space. You, the thing that persists in the shiver of cosmic radiation for nameless eons as the stars wink out and Newton’s first law of motion reaches its final, terrible equilibrium, and a perfect calm spreads over the universe.

What then?

If I were you, I’d start planning now.