Universal Ramblings

Today I wondered about what it would be like to live forever, and not be tied down by sterility. In the Highlander movie saga, our heroes usually couldn’t bear children. I realized that this makes a lot of sense. If you still have the urge to reproduce, and are fertile, you run the risk of dating your great, great, great grandchild in a few hundred years. That did not appeal to me.

Then I realized that’s where marriage comes In. If you can find a suitable partner who happens to be a mortal, marry them and make sure your relationship lasts forever, in fact as long as you both shall live. Even if that’s 100,000 years.

That way, if you produce offspring, you don’t necessarily need to keep track of bloodlines in order to avoid the risk of unwanted intermingling.

The show New Amsterdam was in my thoughts when I contemplated this issue, because the protagonist had obviously sired more than one child. So who’s to say he doesn’t have great grand children running around? It could become a very complicated situation if an immortal had many, many children. At least marriage offers a sort of solution.

And then, for those of us who die, what happens if in a thousand years you meet a soul in the afterlife who you find to be attractive? What if the soul is that of your deceased great, great (etc.) grandchild? I guess the rules are different for souls. Maybe there’s a sort of fusion that happens there, a combination of souls, as opposed to a creation of “offspring” souls. That seems to make more sense to me, although I’ll bet it’s far more complex.

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