What If You Lived 1000 Years?

What if you became immortal? You could never die, never age, never get sick... but everyone you love still would. What if you lived forever, and the first thousand years were only the beginning? A bus hits you. You stand up. From your twenty-second birthday, your body stops ageing, and every wound heals in seconds. Year ten, the neighbours start whispering. Year seventy, you learn the real price of living forever. And in year one thousand, a stranger on a bench tells you something nobody else could know. Chapters 00:00 A bus hits you 00:08 Day one: the cut that heals 00:28 The three rules 01:11 Week two: the quarry cliff 01:31 Why you stopped ageing 01:50 Year 10: "You haven't changed at all" 02:28 Year 25: a new name every 15 years 02:53 Year 30: "What are you?" 03:23 Year 40: Mum 03:43 Year 70: the one nobody warned you about 04:31 Year 100: older than anyone, ever 05:08 Year 200: Mia's grave 05:25 Year 300: buried for nine days 05:45 Year 400: the shark and the jellyfish 06:22 Year 500: thirty-three names 06:36 The day the Sun eats the Earth 07:03 What you finally understand 07:17 Year 1,000: the man on the bench 07:53 Is any of this real? The science in this story is real: Hayflick limit: normal human cells divide about 40–60 times, then stop (Leonard Hayflick, 1961). Jeanne Calment (France) lived 122 years and 164 days, the oldest verified human. Greenland sharks live at least 272 years; the biggest studied may have been about 400 (Nielsen et al., Science, 2016). Turritopsis dohrnii, the "immortal jellyfish", can turn back into a polyp when starving or hurt, but still gets eaten. The Sun brightens about 1% every 100 million years and becomes a red giant in roughly 5 billion years. Would you take immortality? A, B or C? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe to WhatNova for Part Two. #WhatIf #WhatNova #Immortality