Can they die from disease? Can they only die by being beheaded?

@JLeslie That is already in the question.

Impossible to say. If a person did normal things (traveling, driving, being with people, etc.) then they are more likely to get into an accident or catch an illness or something like that.

If the person were hermitaceous and stayed at home, didn’t see others, and essentially was self-contained, the chances of any of the above (accident, illness, homicide) are vastly reduced.

So you need to put some parameters around your question.

@ragingloli Is it? Duncan MacLeod was over 400 years old I think.

Sorry, I swear this new drug I take is making me stupid. If they can die from disease it depends where this immortal is born and raised. Some parts of the world still has some crappy childhood diseases floating around. It’s really hard to say.

In America, you can get randomly shot, at any age.
Regardless of lifestyle.

I mean ot could hypothetical happen anywhere, but the OP mentioned statistics.

Car crash. Murder. Cancer. Cardiovascular disease.
These are the usual suspects.
I hear dying while trying to take selfies, is well represented in ways to die.
Famine would still be a variable. I would think that if people lived longer, resources would be THE number one issue.
Lots of “immortals” would die fighting over dry land, and the last potable water.

It’s a contradiction in terms. If you die, you were not immortal.

^^ Exactly! By the very definition of immortal, they won’t die.

My thinking is along the lines of @janbb and @smudges. Perhaps it means something else in German, but in English, immortal means undying. I’m struggling with this question.

Without all the semantic and precise definition issues, I am assuming that @ragingloli means to ask what the death percentage would be without causes being from aging-related concerns.

”Of the roughly 150,000 people who die each day across the globe, about two-thirds die from age-related causes.”
From this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing#:~:text=Ageing%20is%20among%20the%20greatest%20known%20risk%20factors%20for%20most%20human%20diseases.%20Of%20the%20roughly%20150%2C000%20people%20who%20die%20each%20day%20across%20the%20globe%2C%20about%20two-thirds—100%2C000%20per%20day—die%20from%20age-related%20causes.%20In%20industrialized%20nations%2C%20the%20proportion%20is%20higher%2C%20reaching%2090%25.

This leads me to think that perhaps only one-third of the population would die from other causes, except the rate would likely be much higher, as the battle for resources would be much fiercer. Birth rates would be pretty low, too, so violent death rates might be even higher, as each community would fight even harder to preserve resources and viable survivability of their young.

There would likely be global conflicts of such magnitude, over and over again, that would cause the population to be reduced dramatically, and start over each time.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle cover this type of scenario quite well in The Mote In God’s Eye.

Kind of a silly question. If you are immortal and you are removing accident, homicide, and illness as ways to die, you are left with that person could live forever. How long before they get tired of living is the only variable. Suicide was not mentioned.

I think it’s a trick/joke question.

Geez, I got caught up in the concept and didn’t answer the Q as asked. Sorry.

According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition immortal /ĭ-môr′tl/ is an adjective meaning Not subject to death. “immortal deities; the immortal soul.” Never to be forgotten; everlasting. “immortal words.” Of or relating to immortality.

My understanding has always been that if you’re immortal, your body can regenerate from any & ALL diseases, situations, or physical impairments. It’s impossible to die from anything!!! This would rule out vampires because they have a personal weakness or two so they aren’t truly immortal.

Some of you didn’t read the details.

” Immortality in this case being defined as unable to age or to die from old age.”

I read them. They make absolutely no sense.

Its been 26,524 plus years for me. But I am not the average immortal as I am in a time loop. I’ve died many times like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day movie.

In popular culture a Lich will start to degrade after 5,000–6000 years old.

@canidmajor So the question is based on redefining a word. smh

I read them too but that’s not what immortal means. Loli is a big boy – or girl – and can take the pushback.

Well, I stand reprimanded.

I am not redefining anything
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality

666 years old. I hear it’s a bad age.

From what I read on that very long page, I stand by my statement.

@ragingloli Wikipedia is not usually the place I go for definitions of words.

The meaning of ‘immortal’ is forever which means someone who is immortal will never die.

However although an immortal will not die from disease I have to assume the could be killed from, an accident such as burned to a crisp in a fire or murdered and dissected. I can’t imagine an immortal being cut up into small pieces and those pieces being strewn all over and then they manage to get themselves back together again so the immortal can continue living.

@Hawaii_Jake Neither is the dictionary. Contrary to popular belief, a dictionary does not define the meaning of words, it only lists a limited number of meanings based on the common usage of them. Meanings of words are defined by their use, and the Wikipedia article linked to lists some of the various uses of the word “immortality”.
I am pretty confident that you have previously used the word “decimate” with a meaning other than “to reduce by 1/10th”.

Dictionary
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more
dec·i·mate
/ˈdesəˌmāt/
verb
1.
kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of.
“the project would decimate the fragile wetland wilderness”
2.
HISTORICAL
kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.
“the man who is to determine whether it be necessary to decimate a large body of mutineers”

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Next?

you are just proving my point.

Loli, there are 2 definitions. One is for what’s in use today. The other is archaic. @canidmajor actually asked a question about that some months ago. I actually don’t remember if the question was about it, but I remember it was discussed in the thread. It is not used any more to mean to reduce by a tenth.

I am a proponent of allowing language to evolve, but the word immortal has not evolved in common usage to mean anything near what you used it as in the OP.

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Next?

Yes it has. If it did not, all the different meanings listed in that wikipedia page, which are being used right now, would not exist.
Your and the dictionary’s ignorance of them is not a factor.

Not in common usage.

I’m really not worried about it, though.

Aloha.

I didn’t see on the wikipedia page – which was overly long and I’ll admit I just skimmed it – where it said that being immortal equals any possibility of dying.

I think the Wiki article describes the different types of “immortality” pretty well. I have seen all these concepts represented as immortality in a number of contexts over my lifetime.

From the wording I assumed @ragingloli was referring to biological immortality, the idea of a body that never ages, and thus has no age-related damage; rather than technological immortality, the uploading of consciousness into a virtually indestructible artifacted vessel; or a religious immortality, usually involving a “soul” or equivalent.

Reducing the word to a basic dictionary definition is too limiting in this situation. The concept is mutable.

It’s obvious @ragingloli is referring to biological immortality, in which senescence ceases to be a cause of death.

I asked chatgpt this question, since I’m stupid and need a large language model AI to tell me things.

The formula it used was: Life Expectancy = 1 / Death Rate

Taking 2021 data from the CDC and homicide rates in the US (no idea if it’s accurate) it gave a death rate of 74.21 per 100,000.

The resulting life expectancy was 1,346 years, which it was at pains to inform me that this was only a rough estimate.

The answer might be infinite if an immortal human were to avoid these situations.

It changes some from time to time. It is a bit less than 76.6 for males, 81.6 for females.

^^ Read the question…it said immortal.