I missed a day of blogging (again), so sue me. But, allow me to get philosophical for just a moment.

There's a lot of interesting notions in quantum physics, most interesting of which (and relevant to my muse) are that of quantum suicide and the multiverse theory. Quantum suicide is a thought experiment wherein a person is placed in a room with a death machine that has a 50/50 chance of killing the person every ten seconds. Tack on the multiverse theory, and both outcomes happen, birthing a new universe with each outcome. In the end, the person both dies lots of times and also never dies. Obviously, to the subject, they always experience the outcome where they live because death isn't something you can really experience.

Let's assume all of the above is true. That means only one thing.

Each and every one of us would be immortal... to our own point of view.

From an observation stand point, the mortality rate of the human race is 100%. The odds of living after a certain age become enormously small, but perhaps never actually zero. As long as there were even the most tiny chance that a person's heart would continue beating another second, they would continue down the string of universes in which they can continue to observe. In a way, their universe really does revolve around them.

Now, why haven't we seen a person 5000 years old? Because to the rest of us watching, the odds generally win. Every once and again a person will continue chugging long after the average age and push in into their "later" hundreds, but the odds that they'll die "any day now" keep going up until the rest of us observe them dying.

Is this something I believe? No, not really. But it's kind of fun to think about. Only time will tell if it's correct.

And I'll be the only one that will know the answer in my observable universe.