-
Asked by anon-187768 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 8 Nov 2018.
Question: Which scientific way to become immortal.
- Keywords:
-
Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 8 Nov 2018:
Not my field, but I thought it would be fun to answer.
You just have to not die. 100 years ago very few people got cancer, because they would die of other things. Now, people live long enough for cancer to be more common. If we cure cancer, probably something else would kill us, and then we would have to solve that. So it will be a while until people are immortal (except for accidents etc).
The other option is to take your consciousness out of your brain and put it into a big computer or something. The question is, would that still be you? How would you know?
-
Kathryn Coldham answered on 8 Nov 2018:
Excellent question, but we don’t yet know. Although the oldest person to have lived was called Jeanne Calment who lived to the age of 122! So maybe she had some tips for an extra-long life.
-
Laura Kent answered on 8 Nov 2018:
Its not immortal but some people believe we can extend human life span using cryogenic freezing although there is no evidence that the freezing will be successfully reversed!
-
Marton Olbei answered on 8 Nov 2018:
This is a really good question! Stewart touched on some really good points, I want to expand on it a little bit. This is a big question in evolutionary biology.
There are many explanations, I am going to summarise them very briefly. I am by no means an expert in this specific topic, but had classes on this during uni, and have always found them really interesting.
There are some organisms that are kind of immortal – some trees can live for thousands of years, there is this incredible jellyfish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii) that can just revert back to a larval stage and start again. So how come we aren’t immortal?
Some ground rules: when we say immortal, we mean that we live forever (don’t age) but we aren’t safe from death in any other way (e.g. lions).
– One explanation is, that mutations accumulate as we age. If our species stops reproducing at 30, and there are mutations that arise after 40 years, then selection isn’t going to remove it from the population, as our specimen has theoretically already reproduced at 30.
– There is another explanation (antagonistic pleiotropy), that’s basically about evolutionary trade-offs. As an example: young men have high testosterone levels, that grants them increased fitness, but makes the susceptible to certain kinds of cancer later on.
The problem is most things don’t die of old age. This is important to keep in mind. 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:
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151 -
Miriam Hogg answered on 9 Nov 2018:
Martin and the others have given some great answers on this. We are biologically limited at the moment as we have no evolutionary reason to be immortal. But maybe technology can help us here.
There are some people working on nanotechnology (very tiny robots) that will live in our bodies and help our body kill diseases, bacteria, cancer and maybe change our genes from the inside to help us love for longer or forever!
There are also some people hoping that we can move our consciousness into a computer which would make us immortal.
A lot of the ideas to make us immortal are more like science fiction at the moment but there is a lot of research happening so who knows what will happen in the next 100 years
Comments