What if?
Questions to ask friends who like thought experiments
I have a couple of what-if questions I used to put to friends. They’re my version of a Cosmopolitan quiz, I suppose, so you can understand why I never edited a lifestyle magazine. See what you think.
The first: an alien spacecraft lands nearby when you’re out for a walk. There’s no one else around. The aliens make repairs and are then ready to set off on their exploration of the galaxy. They just stopped off at Earth for a few minutes and won’t be returning. ‘Come with us,’ they say.
The upside: you’ll get to visit strange new worlds and boldly go. The downside: there’s no way to tell anyone else, no opportunity to say goodbye. (This was originally before mobile phones, but just assume it’s a blackspot or the spaceship’s drive is disrupting the cellphone network.)
You’ve got to decide right now.
OK, I’ll come back to that one. Now — new question — suppose we could know what age you’re going to die. For the sake of argument let’s say that’s probably in your mid-eighties. How many years of life would you give up to remain physically the age you are now until you die?
I was originally putting that question to friends in their mid-thirties, when you do kind of still think you’re immortal, so most people might say they’d give up five or six years. Nowadays those same friends are in their mid-sixties, so the question is how arduous do you think twenty years of ageing is going to be and how much remaining life would forfeit to keep the level of fitness you’ve got right now?
That second one is just intended to get people thinking about quality of life versus lifespan. Nowadays it would come with a Disney+ trigger warning. But the first is a fun one to discuss (well, it is if you have friends like mine) and my favourite response came from an Aussie friend who said, ‘I’d go with the aliens as long as they could help me fake my death. Like if they could drop my clothes on the beach so it looked like I’d gone for a swim and got swept away.’
‘Why?’ We were all intrigued, not least his wife who was sitting next to him.
‘I wouldn’t like my family to know I’d abandoned them. As long as they believed I’d died they wouldn’t think it was my fault.’
Morally that opens several more cans of speculation than I ever expected, but it’s less murky than the typical responses to that old one about the button that will bestow a million dollars but also kill a stranger on the far side of the world. Not that I’d ever ask that (the answers are likely to be neither entertaining nor thought-provoking) but I wonder if inflation has changed it since the 1990s…
Both easy questions for me. I would not go with the aliens; everything I value highly is on Earth. I would not trade any years of life (unless I'm allowed a fractional answer) either now or when I was in my 30s, because statistically it's a fair bet that I'd lose more than I'd gain.
My instinctive answer to the aliens was exactly the same as your Aussie friend's.
As for the years of life, that's a good one. Twenty years of becoming increasingly decrepit, or fewer years of being mostly healthy, albeit showing signs of wear? I'd happily take fifteen at this level. Ten, maybe not.