My Luna's Opinion on the Quest for Immortality · 5:28am Sep 19th, 2015
The following is taken from Twelfth Equestriad Interview -- it's Luna's answer to the question of whether or not immortality for all Ponies is possible -- or desirable. The context is that this is 48 years after her Return, and 24 years after Celestia discarnated and vanished into another dimension fighting Equestria's foes, leaving Luna as sole Ruling Princess (so she gets to implement policies based on her beliefs).
"First," stated Luna, "it is of course possible for Ponies to live without definite end, both because any pattern can be endlessly remade, and because I was born over two thousand five hundred and fifty years ago and yet still live and breathe this studio air. "Second," she continued, "there are diverse ways to do it. Unfortunately, we do not know how to transform everypony into Alicorns. My Sister and I were born Alicorns, for reasons which do not apply to most Ponies; and Twilight and her Companions went through very rare and difficult Ascensions, which could not be readily duplicated and which I doubt most Ponies would survive. Celestia prepared the ground very well so that they did survive; I cannot claim her mastery of transformations, and have no wish to kill a group of admirable and worthy Ponies figuring out how she did it.
"However, there are several other paths we know to be possible and probably practical. We are researching them all. We have already managed to greatly extend Pony lives -- my Sister had in fact already accomplished this to some degree simply by improving sanitation and medical care in the centuries I spent in exile -- and we think that within a half-century we will hae doubled Pony lifespans; in a century, we will have achieved full biological immortality.
"Third, as to whether immortality be desirable ---" Luna peered intently into the camera. "I ask ye all, for the next day, would ye rather live or die? If you would rather live another day, woud ye not answer the same for a week of days? A month of weeks, a year of months? And so on, on to decades, centuries and millennia? Clearly, you do each desire the continuation of your own lives, increment by increment!
"Fourth -- the opposite of Life be Death -- and make no mistake on this: if ye do reject the extension of a Pony's life, where pratical, ye do condemn that Pony to an early and needless death. Ye well may deem this a tolerable fate for other Ponies, ones ye know not, ones that are to you mere numbers, competing with you for the goods of the world. Ye should mull on this: if ye deny immortality, that same doom of Death shall come to your friends, your families -- and your own selves.
"As to the problem of the multitudes, of a throng in which there is birth but little death -- yes, if we were all mere animalcules growing in laboratory dishes, we would be doomed to misery as we ate all the food and used up all the jar, and then perished amidst our own wastes, unable to fare any further. A sorry fate, to be sure.
"But we are not animalcules. We are Ponies! We have minds, and we can judge whether or not we can provide for our foals, and on this decide whether we shall conceive them. If our worlds be too small, we can find new ones. We need not be limited to just one Earth, or even just one Solar System, we can and shall make ourselves at home in the whole Universe. Our lives are a blessing, not a curse, upon the common weal!
"To be sure, we must not fear Death unduly. If we live our lives in terror of their ends, we can neither do our duties to our own selves and others," her face grew stern as she contemplated this, "nor enjoy that which is sweet in them," at this she looked upon Twilight, and her expression softened. "And this be true whether we live a decade, a century, a millennium ... or more."
She looked once again directly into the camera, her jaw resolute.
"I have led Ponies into battle. I have sometimes had no choice but to hazard their lives --" she frowned, "-- aye, and too often at long odds, for t'were the only road to victory, to the warding of our homes and foals. Sometimes Death must be risked, sometimes lives lost, to gain a greater good. This is sad, but true. And some of those lives lost were ones dear-beloved to mine own self." She was looking past the camera now, to battlefields forgotten by all others save military historians, upon corpses who had once been friends. Her ears drooped, eyes closed briefly, a moisture glistening under her lashes.
Then she opened her eyes and gazed directly into the camera.
"But never," she said, "never have I in sound mind and full knowledge simply thrown away those lives entrusted to me. Never would I march my Ponies into holocaust, for no better cause than that I felt I had of troops too many for ready provisioning!
"That is what t'would be were We -- knowing it both possible and practical for Ponies to live Undying -- to instead decree that they must die, beause we found it too weary a task to change our laws in such wise as to avoid sudden overpopulation. Did I do this, I would be the most bloody tyrant ever known, for I would thus condemn all my subjects to death! Has any ruler ever been so cruel?"
She smiled.
"Nor am I, Princess Luna Selena Nyx, that cruel. I reject Death, and choose Life -- for my subjects as for mine own self -- and would rather suffer the problems presented by messy, living Ponies, than be the keeper of a lich-field, be it the most tidy and pretty lich-field that ever was!"
As she said this she rose, and flared her wings, her expression defiance, and stamped her hooves, as if to challenge Death to personal combat.
Spontaneous applause erupted from the studio audience, startling Cutting Question with its explosive intensity. Ponies rose and stamped their hooves in response, shouting "Luna!" and "Life!" Luna clearly could have started an insurrection then and there, had not she in point of fact been the Ruling Princess.
Luna bowed to her audience and camera. The cheers grew deafening. Then she sat down, and smiled.
Any opinions on Luna's reasoning, or delivery?
I'm seeing shades of the speeches in The Great Alicorn Hunt, here.
I heard once the counter argument to sanctity of life was the dignity of life... but IMHO? There is LESS dignity in suicide (which is different from having yourself hooked up to an inane amount of life support).
3402679
I was inspired to write this speech to begin with by an exchange on one of Reality Check's blog posts.
I've been hearing the anti-immortality on the basis of limits to growth argument for a long time now, and it's stupid. It's stupid because it assumes that birth rates are uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and utterly independent of expected death rates. Even bacterial cultures can be smarter than that -- many use chemicals to communicate the existence of opportunities and problems to one another, and go dormant when there's no more room to grow. Sapient beings are (hopefully) smarter than bacteria!
It is also quite ahistorical. The evidence is very much that Humans (and presumably Ponies) make both cultural and personal attempts to estimate the degree of opportunity likely to exist for their offspring, and their own degree to provide for them; they then decide whether or not to have more offspring based on their perceptions of these factors. There is ample evidence that societies that bring down the death rate also experience reductions in birth rate.
It is true that there are population booms, but these usually happen in response to previous birth dearths, or because a culture has not caught up with the implications of its own technological progress. Yes, if we all got full biological immortality tomorrow, the first thing that would happen would be an increase in population, as older people stopped dying. But in the end, unless we opened new frontiers for settlement and exploitation, people would have less children.
Population growth is not, in itself, a problem. What is a problem is population growth beyond the capacity of the economy to grow along with its population, and this capacity can be limited either culturally (market controls which make it hard to start new businesses or provide more jobs) or by limited resources. However, cultures (and their dependent economies) can improve and new resources can be found, so the pie is not of eternally-fixed size.
It's a quick mention, but Luna is perfectly willing to (if necessary) limit births by law in order to prevent an insupportably-rapid increase of an immortal population. There are several ways of doing this, and Luna and Twilight have thought through several of the methods with their advantages, disadvantages, and relative moral issues. Both Luna and Twilight consider any tyranny in requiring permits to have foals minor compared to the extreme tyranny of demanding that existing Ponies keep dying on schedule. As Luna points out, the latter policy would be the moral equivalent of condemning everypony to death -- which would make her the worst tyrant in all history!
The Alicorn Consorts would, of course, much rather solve the problem by expanding Pony resources and settling new frontiers.
Personally, I imagine the Princesses seeing Alicornification becoming MUCH MORE common as a long term goal. With Twilight being proof that yes, it was possible.
It happening ALL AT ONCE, would just cause chaos.
What I hate about most stories on the subject is that they don't bother to upgrade the game difficulty.
3402708
Of course, Luna and Twilight are aiming for eternal healthy life, as much as possible. They know that this is quite possible, because that's what they're personally enjoying. (They can't turn everypony into Alicorns, but they know that the route of constant regeneration, which is what Cosmic Celestia originally designed the Alicorn genotype to have, is workable).
A Tithonis-like immortality, where one suffered eternal old age instead of enjoying eternal youth, might not be desirable. Or maybe it would be -- as long as one lived, the possibility that the technology to convert eternal old age into eternal youth might be developed would exist, and if one were truly immortal this would become a certainity unless one's civilization collapsed.
3402714
That's a long-term goal, yes. In the meantime, they want to extend Pony lifespans as much as possible, to eventual biological immortality (which is a less ambitious goal than becoming an Alicorn). Alicorns are in the Shadow Wars Storyverse also becoming more common -- but this is not happening fast enough to save any but a tiny minority of Ponies from death by old age.
By the time of the Poniternity, millennia later, biological immortality is seen as a baseline of Pony civilization, and it is now reinforced by extremely-accurate personality backups and duplications, to the point of preserving souls, talents and destinies. Crimson Quartz's dream has long ago been achieved, and surpassed.
(*nods*) Beneficial as any particular change might be, too-rapid change is a good way to collapse a culture. Equestria, as a fairly-liberal culture whose concepts of law and morality are based on philosophical principles rather than rigid customs, is a dynamically-stable culture, but even a culture such as Equestria has its limits of adaptability in any given period of time.
The Shadow Wars actually damage Equestrian culture -- but not fatally, and it largely recovers.
Indeed -- the challenges that threaten to swamp present-day Equestria will be small by the standards of future-Equestria, and those which would have been too much for non-Alicorns are easy for Alicorns.
The show actually gets this -- compare Tirek with Nightmare Moon.
3402712 My one hesitation about developing immortality is that it's not quite so fair to everyone who died before it could be developed. The central doctrine of my religion is the Resurrection of the Dead, after all, but I haven't seen that option in most technological approaches. Who knows, maybe consciousness-as-emergence means that the same continued consciousness will emerge in a reconstructed body, but it would be rather difficult to test unless we could apply some sort of marker... hmm, maybe reconstructing it to an earlier "template" and querying for information revealed to the volunteer after it was taken?
In the context of the Shadow Wars storyverse, maybe it would work with time travel and/or magic. I was rather upset when I learned that Scootaloo and
Best PonySweetie Belle do not survive to reach the development of immortality, although I will admit that my reaction is rooted in favoritismLuna isn't actually promising anything. Her speech is pure demagoguery. She says that ponies are wonderful and that she likes them very much. Naturally, that's going to play well to her pony audience. The non-pony audience probably expects that she'll dump in that tidy lich-field she mentioned; she clearly doesn't give a damn about their lifespans.
There's also no reason to cheer just yet. It's not as though biological immortality is ready to implement now, even she estimates it's still a century off. Her policies haven't fully been put to the test yet. We'll have to see if her little animalcules still applaud her when government permission to conceive becomes a reality. Right now, all they're excited about is that their sovereign has promised - for now at least - not to take a meat axe to them for getting too old. Nothing has changed from one side of the interview to the other nor is anything likely to change for quite some time.
It's a nice speech, but it's only a speech and doesn't accompany anything of significance.
I don't like how it kinda seems one-sided it sends a message that the perks goes to the pony and any other race gets the bum end of the deal. not to mention that it also appears that she purposely manufacturing so that ponies don't notice that it promise (But that just maybe paranoia talking.)
3402748
In any world where time travel is possible (and the Ponyverse is canonically such) the obvious solution at a sufficiently high tech level is to send a sensor back in time, scan people at the moment of their deaths, and then recreate their minds from the scans, putting those minds in healthy bodies. In my non-Pony fictional worlds, this is done by rather a lot of post-Singularity civilizations when they gain control of sufficient energy to create temporal portals.
I will point out that an imperfect but attainable good is better than a perfect but unattainable good, though. Even if it's forever impossible to bring back those who died before the development of immortality, the immortality would still be a good thing.
Also, immortality is relative. Even given personality backup technology, the vagaries of life in a somewhat-chaotic universe would eventually destroy everypone's backups faster than they could make new ones, during times of general war or other tremendous disasters. So everyone will die someday, whether that day come in a few decades, or many billions of years in the future.
3402760
It is a choice of evils, but that's how life works. General immortality would necessarily mean some sort of restrictions on reproduction, because otherwise one would suffer massive overpopulation. It's not as bad as limits-to-growth believers imagine, because one is NOT limited to "just one Earth" nor do sapient beings reproduce as uncontrollably as bacteria, but it is true that from time to time situations would exist in which one could not reproduce with as perfect a freedom as one could in a mortal population.
This is still better than DEATH. When facing a choice of evils, it is important to remember that the alternative isn't perfection.
3404708
Immortality technology would benefit everyone in the end, as Twilight hastens to add in the original story. In Luna and Twilight's (political rather than marital) partnership, Twilight takes Celestia's former role as the diplomat of the pair. Luna is charismatic, but she is not good at diplomacy. Luna throughout the Interview in Twelfth Equestriad Interview accidentally says things which might be considered provocative or elitist regarding other sapient races on Earth. This is in part because Cosmic Gravity chose to incarnate as a Pony, and Luna thinks of herself as Pony first and foremost.
3406381
Don't get me wrong: I'm totally on board with immortality. Yes, including the population control. But I'm also aware that other people aren't and Luna's going to have to face those people sooner or later.
We say lots of things at funerals. So-and-so is at peace now. He's gone to a better place. She's earned her rest. It's the natural order of things. The old make way for the young. His long struggle with his condition helped us learn something about ourselves. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. We say so many things to cover over the evil of death that we make it into a good. We kind of have to; the alternative is for every funeral to be a wellspring of anger and bitterness that a loved one has suffered the ultimate calamity and a fearful reminder that the same will befall us as well. That'd be miserable.
Luna's scheme - in a hundred years - is to overturn all that. That's going to be terribly threatening to everyone who's invested in those platitudes. There will be many who have spent years consoling themself with the idea that death is a part of the Greater Good so they don't have to feel that their parents' - or whoever's - death is a such a tragedy. It served a necessary purpose. Luna is threatening to take away a very important psychological crutch from a lot of ponies. She might as well tell them that there is no God.
And they're going to fight that. They don't need a rigorous logical argument to rally behind, just something that sounds plausible and resonates with what they "know" to be true. Their hearts will make the necessary leap of faith to bridge the gap. Arguments like, "She's going to get rid of children!" and "There won't be any place to live!" will be repeated and magnified - as they must be - until it is mortality that seems the lesser of two evils. People want what they want and make excuses for it even when they don't know why they want it.
As you've noted yourself, Luna is lacking in diplomacy. Someone more skilled wouldn't promise to end natural death even if such an act were within their means. They'd be aware of the crutch. They'd make note - as Luna did - that lives are becoming ever longer. And leave it there. Those who desire immortality could see it as such. Those who shun it could decline to do so (while still taking full advantage, of course).
3407703
You're insightful. I think you noticed that one of the themes I foreshadowed in Twelfth Equestriad Interview is that Luna is more than a little out of her depth in ruling Equestria alone, because diplomacy and politics aren't her forte -- she's more into technology and war. She'd be in a worse mess if she didn't have Twilight Sparkle at her side, but Twilight Sparkle herself tends to have an unrealistically-high opinion of Pony rationality. Yes, there's trouble down the road.
3408387
3407703
Would it be wrong then to consider the possibility of enacting social-engineering on a large scale? To reduce these irrational sentiments against biological immortality? To promote biological immortality as a golden dream that all sophonts on Earth should be entitled to?
The last thing Luna and Twilight would want are these ponies with fearful sentiments joining forces, gaining coalescence into a large scale ideological movement against immortality, perhaps with enough social and political influence that could block or at least delay its research and implementation.
In real-life, too many technologies that could had benefit mankind - such as genetic engineering of crops and stem cell research - got stalled in development and refinement because fearful, ignorant, irrational people got together in vast movements to stop it, even if the benefits and safety of such technologies had been shown to be far greater than the risks and costs.
Given the lengths these groups went in real-life to stop what they perceived to be fundamentally wrong and 'evil', it can be expected that the Shadowverse ponies who oppose biological immortality would likewise go similar lengths to stop biological immortality from being introduced, not caring for facts, consequences or the opinions of other ponies, and do everything in their power to deprive society even the choice of accepting or rejecting biological immortality.
I can't see anything wrong with nipping the problem in the bud before it could grow into a major headache by gradually making ponies comfortable with the idea of bio-immortality, while scrubbing away any of the old views on life and death from culture and social consciousness that could incite opposition to bio-immortality's introduction.
What do you think?
3416167
Not wrong, but unnecessary. They don't need to convince anybody of biological immortality. It's like money: you put on the table and people will invent whatever reason they need to in order to take it. All you need to do is undersell it a bit to put the suspicious parts of their brain to go to sleep long enough for the greedy parts to take over. Once they've actually undergone treatment, they'll perform all kinds of amazing mental gymnastics in order to justify it to themselves.
Then you wait until there's a critical mass of people who've gotten biological immortality. Once there is then you can announce it. Because it's too late and too widespread to stop. Even people haven't gotten it will have friends or relatives or bosses who have and will fear paying the social prices of condemning it. That will silence most potential detractors. There will always be a few, but the job will effectively be done.
3416618
Ah! Now THAT is pretty clever!
3416618
3416167
Immortality -- or really any sort of life extension technology -- is the sort of thing that naturally spreads barring some serious government opposition to its development (and becomes a black-market commodity if such opposition exists). The reason is exactly the one Luna adduced -- everypony wants to live just a bit longer at any given moment.
Suppose that the US government decided that antibiotics were evil and massively restricted their use to "socially-important purposes" (meaning, only politicians and their rich friends). There would develop a black market in antibiotics that would make the one in narcotics look tiny. (For that matter, restrictions on prescribing painkillers signficantly increases the black market in narcotics in real life -- a lot of people who buy illegal drugs do it to alleviate pain rather than to get high, and this has been happening since the government cracked down on medical opiate prescriptions starting in the 1980's or so).
The main purpose of antibiotics is to extend life by keeping one from dying of infections. In fact, the main purpose of medicine in general is to extend life by keeping one from dying of various causes. There might be doctors who would oppose immortality on moral grounds -- I wouldn't recommend going to them, for the obvious reason -- they might well decide that it was time for YOU to die!
3418365
Which might explain why so many people in the West are looking to Asian countries like China for stem cell therapies and research, where the rules are significantly less restrictive compared to the West due to differences in cultural and traditional values. (Arguably, it also demonstrate the ultimate futility of any opposition to stem cell research in the long run)
Naturally, people who oppose introducing immortality can become the government, especially in a liberal democracy. Thankfully, unless I forgot that Equestria is a constitutional monarchy or something, those who oppose immortality in Equestria would probably find it harder to make their agenda into national policy, especially when two well-respected immortal enlightened autocrats who are adamant on giving society access to biological immortality are expected to remain in power for a VERY long time.
Of course, they could still make it into national policy by turning popular opinion of the masses against immortality, thereby forcing Luna and Twilight to concede and call off their immortality program; this can happen if those who oppose biological immortality is allowed to coagulate into a powerful political/ideological movement. Hence my original suggestion to nip it in the bud through a comprehensive social engineering program, perhaps implemented via media and education, to de-sensitize ponies to the advent of biological immortality. Either that, or whatever other means deemed fit, like what Veylon suggested.
Whether people accept or reject bio-immortality should ultimately be a choice entitled to the individuals themselves. However, for that choice to be made, and for those who accept it to benefit from it, the choice had to be available first. The problem I have with any potential anti-bio-immortality movement is that they would likely seek to deny people from even having the choice, condemning people who would accept the choice of bio-immortality to die irreversible deaths that they do not want to face. This, from an utilitarian perspective, is an inexcusable, entirely avoidable outcome.
Of course, those who oppose bio-immortality would probably believe it is acceptable to sacrifice those lives for their cause, given that in their eyes, their deaths 'serves a greater purpose'. If that is the justification they pull, that makes them no different from what other fanatic or dogmatist throughout history had said to justify their atrocities and oppression of others in the name of whatever abstract principle they obsess over.
In any case, the thousands, millions, billions of lives who would be prolonged and saved from a needless early death, and the suffering associated with such untimely demise, is a far more pressing concern.
what do you do about the fact that when biological immortality becomes possible someone simply choosing not to live forever becomes the same as being suicidal. Suppose someone just decides they don't think they want to live forever? That they'd get bored living the same day over and over but just aren't curious enough to constantly reinvent themselves, for example
3422434
This is a major problem in fiction about immortality; I'm not sure that it would be a major problem in an actual society with immortality technology. Most people (and this includes Ponies) want to keep living, unless they are actually suicidal, and if they are actually suicidal they want to die faster than by natural causes. What's more, very few people are both imaginative enough to want to literally die of boredom, yet so unimaginative that they can't figure out how to alleviate their boredom by learning new things or seeking new experiences.
In fact it's always struck me as a "sour grapes" sort of concept. Remember, all the writers and readers are not living in a society in which immortality is currently possible, and yet they all want to keep living. "Oh well, immortality wouldn't be that good, because it just would be eternal boredom. In fact, I bet most of those immortals really want to die to end their boredom. So they don't have it far better than do we. (*sniff, sob*) Really, they don't!"
3423564 well, they don't WANT to die of boredom, that's part of the problem
I'll be honest, despite fear of being labelled. I'm one of the people I'm talking about and frankly outside of work I have a hard time thinking of things to fill my time, and I'd rather not end up a robot for eternity, existing to do my job and shut down.
3423745
Personally, I have no problem finding things to do. There's always something new to read and to write about what I've read, there are always new experiences to have. Since society changes around me and new art and literature are constantly produced by others, and science discovers new things and extends the limits of where we can go, this situation is unlikely to end any time soon. I'm only 50 years old: ask me if I'm bored when I'm 500 or 5000. I'd rather deal with boredom than with imminent death, thank you!
3423838 and that just shows that there are differences between people and some wouldn't like it
3423856
I'm guessing that if there were a significant number of people who actually wanted to stop living, it would be legal to allow them to do so, especially since there are obvious problems with punishing people for suicide. Even if there were personality backups, it seems perverse to restore dead people just to make them suffer some punishment for killing themselves, doesn't it?
3423934 but really it is legal in the way I'm talking about; which is taking no steps to end your life, but just letting it end whenever. People can put DNR on their drivers license, they can tell hospitals to not take extraordinary measures to save themselves
3423974
Yes, and I suppose it would be legal in the Equestrian future. And, hopefully, in ours. Though I find the mindset hard to grasp: life equals possibility.