The Problem of Immortality: Einstein vs. Hitler

The problem with immortality is that bad people will live forever as well as good people. Death causes humanity to lose the best of our geniuses, but that may be worth the tradeoff of also losing the worst of our psychopaths. The good thing about death is that good people grow stronger when they're gone while bad people lose their power.

Consider Hitler, for example. His movement had no lasting power. But Einstein, who was alive at the same time and had similar fame, has grown stronger after his death—his ideas are just as relevant, if not more so. Physics students still learn relativity, whereas Nazism died with Hitler.

You might think, wouldn't it be great if Einstein was immortal. If he was still alive all this time, imagine what scientific advancements he could have made. But for Einstein to be immortal means Hitler could be immortal too. And no amount of good an immortal Einstein could do would outdo the bad someone like an immortal Hitler could do. An immortal Einstein is not worth the tax of an immortal Hitler.

Plus I don't think Einstein would have done all that much more than we have scientifically. In a way Einstein is immortal—or his ideas and way of thinking are. Other scientists carried his torch and continued his work. He influenced them to think about physics like he did.

Both Einstein and Hitler have cultural immortality, in that their ideas are remembered today. But at least with cultural immortality the living can choose which ideas from the past are worth preserving and which deserve to die like their originators. With biological immortality, however, bad people can keep their bad ideas alive forever.