Films like Escape from Underworld and Super Century Spy Depict a serious scenario in an overpopulated future world where extreme measures have to be taken to control an overcrowded world and its scarce resources. Strict population control is not just a fantasy — until recently, China implemented a family planning policy because of the population boom of the 1970s.
Thus, when talking about immortality, one might argue that the increase in human life expectancy necessarily leads to population growth, but this is not the case, and population growth depends mainly on the birth rate, not on mortality.
A gathering in the context of population control in Escape from Underworld
In the film "My Selfie and Me," artist Ryan Gander explores the impact of technology on self-awareness. At an agency in Arizona that provides cryonics services, people need to pay six-figure payments to freeze their bodies after death. The agency's chief executive told Gander he would be celebrating his resurrection in the future.
Stills from the film "My Selfie and Me"
But what then? Let's take a look at how writers and filmmakers deal with the pros and cons of immortality.
Freezing is the most popular means of artificial hibernation in science fiction. Cryopreservation of the human body has been used by many stories to realize time travel into the future. It is also a common setting in spaceship stories such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien that are sub-light-
But the core idea of cryonics actually came older than you might think. Bacon, a philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method in the 16th and 17th centuries, was interested in how to preserve life. Aubrey's late 17th-century work, A Celebrity Biography, tells the story of Bacon's death: on a winter night, Bacon buys a chicken, kills it, and stuffs it with snow, hoping to preserve it. He was convinced that this was the key to preserving life, or at least organic matter. In the process, bacon contracted pneumonia and could not be treated.
Immortality is often seen as a curse in novels and films, and there are many examples of suffering souls struggling with their own immortal fate. But in any case, human culture maintains an irresistible and obsessive interest in the idea of eternal life.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > immortality at the wrong age can feel long</h1>
Immortality sounds great. But what if you happen to become immortal at a bad age? In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Swift explores this thought-provoking idea. On the islands of the Immortal Nation, the Strudbrug of Lugnag would be deprived of their legal rights when they were mentally and physically weak at the age of 80, but they would still live forever, old and helpless, depressed, and loveless. In Swift's words, "They are the saddest sight i've ever seen".
Illustration of Gulliver's Travels
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > long dark tea time</h1>
In Adams' 1978 series Of Guides to the Galaxy, the "Infinitely Extended Oh Bago," who had gained eternal life due to an unfortunate accident in the workplace, found himself doing almost nothing for an endless amount of time.
Adams writes, "But in the end, what he couldn't stand was Sunday afternoon, and that terrible burnout came at around 2:55 a.m." You know in your heart that the bath you can take in a day has been soaked in its entirety; no matter how long you keep an eye on a passage on the paper, you can't even try to read it, nor can you really use the revolutionary cutting technology it describes; and when you stare at the clock, the hands will move mercilessly to four o'clock, taking you into the long dark afternoon tea time of the soul. ”
Lockwood in 2001: A Space Odyssey
< h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" > forever friends? </h1>
One of the main disadvantages of eternal life is that all your friends will die and you will live alone in this world. But if you're lucky, there will be other immortals who will share the good times with you. In the cult film Highlanders (1986), the prophecy of "there can be only one" meant that Lambert, Connery, and the other wandering immortals would try to keep their heads cut off by the Kurgans' swords in the soundtrack to Queen's song "Who Wants To Live Forever?"
Lambert played McLeod in The Highlander
<h1 class= "pgc-h-center-line" > lose innocence</h1>
When Barry wrote Peter Pan in 1911, the phrase "all children will grow up except one" was seen as expressing a beautiful and melancholy fantasy. But the idea of a child who will never grow up isn't necessarily innocent, and recent re-creations have tended to interpret Peter Pan as a villain.
When peter is seen killing pirates in the book and in the play, it is easy to do this re-creation. In the book, Peter also kills the Lost Teenagers, either to streamline the ranks or because their grown-ups broke his rules.
All of these characters point out that eternal life is not as good as we think, and that our minds are not yet able to deal with the reality of eternal life. As director Kubrick tried through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, only the unfathomable work of higher intelligence can bring immortality into another realm.
Peter Pan as Jean Forbes-Robertson, 1927
Although these stories lack logic in the overall framework and are a little worse in shaping the environment, after all, they are old and have a strange angle, and the spiritual significance of the eternal story is very large, including the conception and speculation of future human beings, which are depicted a little meaningfully, and are generally very good.