World Hopping and Immortality

[Stonebender]

So what's the deal with world hoppers and their apparent immortality (or at least the ability to live a really long time)?  I mean, Joe blow average guy characters are showing up as world hoppers (Baon, Demoux).  Is there any information as to how someone becomes a world hopper?  Are they getting help from someone we haven't met yet?  I guess we can make that assumption for people that are members of the 17th shard.  I don't know, it just seems like world hopping should be something rare, but apparently it's no big deal.  And how does age play in to it?  Khriss is thousands of years old, and yet when we first meet her there isn't anything special about her.

[Niteshado he/him]

I cant find it on WoB but i have found it on Reddit, he answers a question:

So you mentioned earlier that a lot of the characters who are in multiple books are functionally immortal. But some of them when we saw them in actual just books, before they started jumping between worlds, they were not functionally immortal at that time. So can we then take that to mean that they somehow became functionally immortal?

Brandon Sanderson

You can take to mean that.

Question

Correctly?

Brandon Sanderson

You can correctly. Now here's the distinction. Some of them are not. Some of them are using tricks of...um..uh...no....relativistic time travel to move forward in the future. Some of them are not aging and others are just aging really slowly. And those are three separate things among characters you have actually seen. I will give you hints as you read the books.

 

the Google Doc for that is here, and link to the Reddit

 

WoB: 

Quote

Questioner (paraphrased)

Demoux is the only worldhopper we've seen that inherently ages. Is there something about worldhopping that makes someone not age?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

There are ways around that. It is not intrinsic to the process. You would need to do something special.

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EDIT: Im still searching WoB for relevant posts 

Edited April 5, 2018 by Niteshado

[RShara she/her]

A lot of world hoppers are using some sort of time dialation effect to skip over stretches of time.  We don't know how this works or where it happens, though.

Full cosmere spoilers

Spoiler

Iceblade44

So White Sand [than Elantris] is earlier... Then how the heck old is Kriss then? Will we ever get an answer as to why every worldhopper is flipin immortal?

Brandon Sanderson

There is some time-dialation going on. I'll explain it eventually; we're almost to the point where I can start talking about that. Suffice it to say that there's a mix of both actual slowing of the aging process and relative time going on, depending on the individual. Very few are actually immortal.

Faera

Implying that some are actually immortal?

Brandon Sanderson

Depends on which definition of immortal you mean.

Doesn't age, but can be killed by conventional means. (You've seen some of these in the cosmere, but I'll leave you to discuss who.)

Heals from wounds, but still ages. (Knights Radiant with Stormlight are like this.)

Reborn when killed. (The Heralds.)

Doesn't age and can heal, but dependent upon magic to stay this way, and so have distinct weakness to be exploited. (The Lord Ruler, among others.)

Hive beings who are constantly losing individual members, but maintaining a persistent personality spread across all of them, immortal in that as long as too much of the hive isn't wiped out, the personality can persist. (The sleepless.)

Bits of sapient magic, eternal and endless, though the personality can be "destroyed" in specific ways. (Seons. Spren. Nightblood. Cognitive Shadows, like a certain character from Scadrial.)

Shards (Really just a supercharged version of the previous category.)

And then, of course, there's Hoid. I'm not going to say which category, if any, he's in.

Some of these blend together--the Heralds, for example, are technically a variety of cognitive shadow. I'm not saying each of these categories above are distinct, intended to be the end-all definitions. They're off the cuff groupings I made to explain a point: immortality is a theme of the cosmere works--which, at their core, are experiments on what happens when men are given the power of deity.

Shagomir

Heals from wounds, but still ages.

Would Bloodmaker Ferrings exist in this category as well? If not, what about someone compounding Gold?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, you are correct.

Shagomir

As a Bloodmaker ages what keeps them from healing the damage and carrying on as a very old, but very healthy person? Do they come to a point where they can't store enough health to stave off the aches, pains, diseases, and other things that come with old age?

This makes sense for traditional Feruchemy as it is end-neutral, so storing health becomes a zero sum game - eventually, you're going to get sick and you're not going to be able to overcome it with your natural healing ability no matter how much you manipulate it with a goldmind.

...Unless you've got a supply of Identity-less goldminds lying around. Would a Bloodmaker with a sufficient source of identity-less goldminds (or the ability to compound, thus bypassing the end-neutral part of Feruchemy) eventually just die from being too old?

Brandon Sanderson

Basically, yes. They can heal their body to match their spiritual ideal, but some things (like some genetic diseases, and age-related illnesses) are seen as part of the ideal. Depends on several factors.

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