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# how to waste an infinity
- URL: https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/how-to-waste-an-infinity/
- Published: 2026-09-04T16:30:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-04T16:30:26.000Z
- Description: Our tech oligarchs are on a quest to discover how to make humans immortal. What happens if against all odds, they succeed?
- Author: Greg Fish
- Tags: longform, oddities, life extension, immortality, singularitarians

If there is one thing all life has in common is its drive to endure. It sounds inspirational, right? But it's just a basic fact wrapped in a truism because if life didn't have the urge to keep going, it would've went extinct long ago. And one of the curses of humans being an intelligent enough creatures is to know that while life is tenacious and will continue in some form, somewhere, our individual lives are, as far as we can ascertain, will end at some point, and we do our best to cope with this very unpleasant fact.

One of the more common approaches is to hold on to the hope of an afterlife in which we are still aware in some way, shape, or form, still us, still extant. Another is to paint immortality as a blight. Vampires, wights, and other undead creatures are said to be living a cursed existence and see death as a release from a life of boredom, violence, constant loss and grief, or as mindless minions of greater forces. This is why when self-proclaimed [biohackers](https://youtu.be/yYtu6bMpt84) and [Singularitarians](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/techno-optimist-manifesto-criticism/) want to figure out a way to live forever, [the mainstream response is to ask why](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/bryan-johnson-biohacker-autoimmune-gastritis.html).

Now, the obvious joke here is that much like the functionally immortal jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii, which reverts to its childhood form when it's too old or too injured, to then age back into maturity, our tech broligarchs dreaming of living as eternal god-like machines, are also mostly assholes with appendages. But what if we pushed past that and asked what would happen if humanity got its wish and we could, in fact, live forever in one form or another barring horrific accidents? Is there a single positive to be found there?

Believe it or not, there might be an answer to this question in the grimdark universe of Warhammer 40K, as fans and players may have already guessed from the featured illustration. One of the main factions in the lore is a species of aliens who more or less achieved the Singularitarian dream and exist as immortal machines called the Necrons.

One of their oldest and most powerful figures, Trazyn The Infinite, is, just as his name implies, has been around since tyrannosaurs roamed the Earth. Over that span, he saw countless civilizations rise and fall, and spends his time preserving as much history as he can before the galaxy dies of old age. All our normal daily mortal concerns are of no consequence to him and the question of who governs what are irrelevant as he knows every empire will turn to dust, and he'll be there to catalog it and archive its remains with his army of dutiful machines.

Sure, the story does try to take the common warning route. After their ascension, the sickly aliens who became the Necrons largely lost their individuality and nearly all of them are now mindless automatons who refer to themselves as "this one" if they even speak at all. It's also heavily implied that the ones who kept their minds are regretting their decision and trying to restore their biological bodies, but quite a few of the noble Overlords, like Trazyn, are actually having a grand old time not dying and having their wits about them.

Another far less ominous idea comes from the [Bobiverse](https://www.simonandschuster.com/series/Bobiverse), a series of books about the digital replica of the mind of a computer scientist piloting a self-replicating space probe exploring the galaxy with no idea of what he's doing and learning how to be a far less villain-y Ultron on the job. And yes, his name is Bob. Well, his name specifically, as his replicas adopt new names to keep things from getting too weird because they do get weird enough as it is.

![bobiverse](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cf/67/cf67f109-8ed9-4b7e-8931-f24e9ccaf69c/content/images/2026/09/bobiverse_1200.webp)

The Bobs spend their centuries as baby immortals helping humans escape Earth that they've nuked into a new ice age thanks to a resurgence of colonialism and a vicious strain of religious fundamentalism that engulfs North America, discover, and befriend and fight alien species, and squabble amongst each other as they keep on running into ever bigger and more complex challenges. Unlike Trazyn, they're not passive observers, but take a very active role in what unfolds, and with infinite time and resources, achieve revolutionary breakthroughs impossible for a single human to accomplish.

So, what would happen to us if we figure out how to perform the same feats? Will we be Bobs or Trazyns? Are we going to dart around the galaxy with ear to ear grins, playing god with less advanced alien civilizations, inventing new bodies for ourselves, pushing for the rest of humanity to join us? Or will we quickly get tired of it all, fall into boredom, stagnation, and ennui, and spend millions of years in stasis just to watch other life rise, prosper, then inevitably be snuffed out, content to simply keep the status quo because, well, what can we do to change it?

You could rightfully argue that as newish eternals, the Bobs are still young, dumb, and full of... hope and unbound optimism. Yes, they've seen friends and loved ones die to the ravages of time and only one or two get digitally resurrected. But they won a war against a ravenous alien species, made amazing discoveries, and have so much left to learn, and do, and see, and Bob's original personality as a sci-fi nerd who loved space helps tremendously in this.

This does not apply to everyone in the Bobiverse. If you're not highly motivated to try a million new things, you'll look out at what seems like an infinity of boredom, stasis, and isolation, an eternity in solitary confinement where you can change how your cell looks on a whim. It seems both pointless and weird. So, highly motivated and very ambitious people like the aforementioned tech bros trying to turn Bob's fate into reality are going to seem like bizarre, anomalous weirdoes to those who are more content with the flow of life and see its end as an inescapable, natural certainty.

At the same time, there is nothing in biology that mandates that we die. This is, in fact, what makes it so hard to make humans immortal. If there was a death gene, we could just turn it off with CRISPR. If it was a simple matter of preventing all diseases, we could eventually live forever with enough vaccinations. But it seems that instead, life evolved with a number of cell destruction mechanisms and quirks which eventually team up to ensure that an organism dies. Replacing it with new versions allows for more useful mutations and complexity to evolve, so it kind of worked out for life as in a collective phenomenon at the expense of life, the individual experience.

In other words, we don't die because we have to. We die because our bodies just can't keep going at some point. Even if we're lucky enough not to suffer any major illness or injury, by 120 or so, we're so frail and burnt out, even the slightest shock to our system can be fatal. Incidentally, the oldest confirmed human, Jeanne Louise Calment, died just shy of 122 years and six months, and the oldest living person, Ethel Caterham, recently turned 117\. The rest of us unlucky chumps can expect to live into our early 80s at best, after which odds of survival begin to drop off exponentially.

Should we live well into our 800s, however, and all of a sudden, the idea that we don't have to care about a problem like global warming or forever chemicals since we'll die before we get the worst of it and future generations can solve it in our stead, sounds absurd. We would still be around to feel the worst of it. Our greed, selfishness, and myopia will bite us in the ass again, and again, and again. If we no longer build great societies because the old men refuse to plant trees in whose shade they'll never sit, maybe they'll change their minds if they will.

![necron tomb world](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cf/67/cf67f109-8ed9-4b7e-8931-f24e9ccaf69c/content/images/2026/09/tomb_world_1200.webp)

For the last four generations, those of us in the West existed in a culture in which our greed and hyper-individualism, sold as self-actualization, made us too selfish to think about a future beyond our more or less immediate concerns. Perhaps the only cure for that is to make future worries our direct problems. It going to be a lot tougher to say that you're fine with letting the world burn when you'll be burning right along with it, a target of righteous fury for letting it happen.

But that doesn't come without its downsides. Imagine the worst people in the world to hold power, have wealth, and project tremendous influence today. Now imagine that they're around forever, and that aside from an accident, murder, or a novel disease, you will never get to read their obituaries and breathe a sigh of relief that they're gone and their poison will fade. Every day until the end of time, you wake up to see them to sow misery and woe, and spew venom as they writhe from the narcissistic injury of the day.

Quite a few countries already have a problem with elderly people in power refusing to let go of their posts, which results in out of touch governments stagnating, or as is the case in the United States right now, falling into weaponized nostalgia which is driving a reactionary backlash to progress. Immortals are not necessarily going to be scholars and fans of novelty and discovery. They can very much abuse their powers to freeze entire societies in amber, dedicating millennia to fighting change they don't personally approve of with centuries of accumulated wealth and influence.

Evolution would also slow to a crawl unless we collectively decided that no matter how long our lives are, [we need to have as many children as possible](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/harder-better-faster-stronger/) and heavily invested in colonizing the solar system and beyond to ensure both space and resources to support upwards of hundreds of billions, if not trillions of us. Again, this would be [straight out of a Singularitarian fantasy](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/techno-optimist-manifesto-criticism/), but necessary [for new useful mutations to emerge](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/how-natural-selection-still-affects-humans/), which will need to be applied retroactively to those already alive with the latest version of CRISPR, almost like a firmware update.

At this point, we need to revisit the question of what the point of immortality is aside from simply persisting to the very end of reality if there even is such a thing and given enough time, [even protons themselves will decay](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/what-alcohol-can-tell-us-about-the-fate-of-the-universe/). Maybe we won't get bored quickly. Maybe we'll be brimming with energy and zeal since even travel to other stars without [wormholes](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/the-trouble-with-wormholes/) or [warp drives](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/realistic-viable-warp-drive-physics-harold-white/) will now be possible since we won't need to send multiple generations and lifetimes to do it. But over very literal eons, will the novelty inevitably fade while we drift through intergalactic voids?

As time and change slow to a crawl for the immortals but continue to zoom by for the mortal species around them, civilizations rising and falling, making the same mistakes along the way, at what point does it all become to feel routine, boring, even downright meaningless? How many times can you watch the same show with different actors? No wonder that after millions of years, the Necrons' only objective is to reclaim their worlds and watch the universe fade into nothing. What else is there for them to do?

And that seems to be the ultimate challenge of immortality, or just an extremely long life: to find joy in novelty, to make big plans, to look for challenges and try new ideas knowing that you can always try again if you fail. To be Bobs in a universe of Trazyns. Otherwise, if the only goal here is to live forever to make infinity money off parasitizing every financial move [of a population you demand grows into the quintillions](https://www.tiktok.com/@neutronfish/video/7548685556301958414), then immortality is, indeed, wasted on those who will never be able to truly appreciate it.