• Question: Is there a chance that we could become immortals in the future?

    Asked by anon-187760 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 8 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      If you look far enough in the future, I don’t see why not. I learned fairly recently that the causes of death have changed a lot over the last 100 years: people used to die of treatable infections, while now heart disease and cancer are much more common, because people live long enough to get them. Medical research is making progress all the time.

      To become truly immortal you would have to outlast the Sun turning into a bigger star (a red dwarf) 5 billion years in the future. That’s a different challenge to getting rid of all diseases – you either have to colonise another planet or upload your consciousness into a machine.

      Further ahead, you would have to survive until the end of the universe. We think the universe will expand forever, and all the suns will eventually stop giving out heat. That’s also tricky to survive!

    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      Stewart answered this very well.

      In the future we may be able to stop ageing, cure all disease or grow new bodies and transfer our minds into them! We have no idea what the future will bring in terms of technology and research. Even 100 years ago the idea of the computers and technology we have now would have been beyond imagination.

      If we did become immortal though there would be new problems to solve. Colonising other planets, galaxies, how we would treat other life forms, what we would do when our Sun died, how we would cope with living forever and more that we probably can’t even think of!

    • Photo: Marton Olbei

      Marton Olbei answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      There was a really similar question recently, if you allow me I’d like to share a similar answer I gave to that one.

      In the very far future (and I mean _very_ far future) we might get to a point where we as a species will accumulate traits that lengthen our lifespan, but I think it’s unlikely we’ll ever become truly immortal (as in, we don’t die of old age).

      The problem is most things don’t die of old age. Because of this, the average lifespan of an organism is mostly determined by its pathogens (bacteria, viruses) and predators (lions).

      To cite from the link below: ” Aging is a feature of life that exists because selection is weak and ineffective at maintaining survival, reproduction, and somatic repair at old age. […] The evolution of lifespan is therefore a balance between selective factors that extend the reproductive period and components of intrinsic mortality that shorten it.”

      This is a really fascinating topic. I recommend you reading this if you are interested, it has multiple theories as to why this is happening:
      https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151

      As for artificially lengthening our life, we are still in the very early stages of this kind of research, but it’s promising. In 2016 one of the Nobel prizes was given for the discovery of autophagy – it’s a process in your cells that removes all unnecessary junk, and as it turns out, it has a lot to do with how long we live.

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