Eternal Life, Will It Be Available?
First let me say I don’t think anyone would want to live forever if they just kept getting weaker and in more pain, which is usually the way aging works. One thing to consider is whether one believes in life after death or not. If they don’t they are more apt to want to live forever than someone who does believe. Those who don’t believe in the afterlife will feel there only chance to exist is by extending their lifespan. There are millions of people who have had after life experiences and are completely convinced that there is an afterlife. I guess that is neither here or there right now. One thing to consider is how far someone would go to live forever and what type of life might be available in the future and would we consider it life. Not all life extension thought about takes place with extending the life span of our bodies.
Lately there has been talk of extending someone’s life by putting their consciousness into a future computer memory bank and letting it control a computer. I don’t think I would like to be around for that. I don’t believe this is the preservation of life even if the machine might think it was. How do you feel about this? I remember a science fiction show which had to do with this exact same thing. A very sickly man who was on the verge of dying had his conscious mind uploaded to a computer before he died. The computer then thought it was him, but as time went by it was obvious the computer lacked many of the human emotions and had no conscience. The computer was merely a shadow of someone who was already dead. I think this would probably be true in real life. It reminds me of the transporter in Star Trek. How did they know the person who came out the other end was the same person after being reassembled? They may have thought they were the same, but they might have been recreated every time they transported but no one knew it.
No I don’t think having a machine which remembers every part of a dead person’s personality and thinks it is them really is them. That leaves at least two more ways in which life might be extended. The first is by some sort of apparatus or apparatuses and the second is by genetically engineering our own bodies. Let’s talk about having our lives extended by creating devices we would either put into our bodies or use on a regular basis. The first thing which comes to mind are nanobots. Some scientists think nanobots are going to be the savior of the human race. Nanobots are microscopic machines which could enter our body and destroy diseases like cancer. They are robots and would be programmed, but like any computer, tiny or not, they certainly do have certain risks. If for some reason something goes wrong with the programming they are within our bodies and could do a lot of damage. Just imagine one or more nanobots which was programmed to destroy cancer cells which goes berserk and because of some event garbles its programming and decided to destroy healthy cells, you could be eaten alive by these tiny machines.
There are those who believe the only way to go is with gene manipulation. This scares many, because so much could be done which is unethical. So why do scientists believe altering our genes is the way to extend our lives? It is obvious to everyone that younger people are not only far healthier, but they perform much better in just about every way. Their genes are younger and what is known as gene expression is much better. As our genes age there is a point where we start to go downhill. Here is what some scientists say, they claim we are finding out consumption of toxic foods and chemicals induces the expression of disease-promoting genes and reduces the expression of health-promoting genes. We still do not know everything about aging, but we are finding out more all the time. One scientist stated, “Aging is not just due to local wear and tear, for example, in flies and worms, it has been shown to be a process controlled in significant part by the brain. Scientists like to use a certain type of worm for the study of aging and by changing the gene expression of only a few genes they have increased the lifespan of the worm by an incredible factor of ten.
There is a jelly fish, the Turritopsis Nutricula which grows into a jellyfish from a polyp and reaches maturity, as it ages further it begins to age backwards until it finally reaches the polyp stage then begins aging into a jellyfish again. It is believed this Jellyfish is immortal and will continue to do this unless it is eaten or has some sort of deadly accident or disease. Many people find it hard to grasp the fact that not everything on this planet dies of old age, just most everything. Many believe lobsters are immortal. They don’t seem to age, they just get bigger. There have been huge lobsters caught like one in Maine in 1926 which weighed 51.5 pounds. No one knew how old it was. Planarians are immortal worms. They never age and have incredible regenerative abilities. These worms are able to replace their aged or damaged tissues and cells. They can even regrow their brains over again.
There has been some success in controlling aging in animals which are higher up on the evolutionary scale. Scientists at Harvard have been able to reverse aging in mice. Reversing aging is one of the primary goals of science, but as so many other things it seems to me it will never see the light of day, except for the very rich and/or the very powerful. Think of things this way, how will the earth be able to support a population where no one dies and it just keeps increasing. In no time the human race would destroy itself. Scientists know this, the government knows it and so does the rich and powerful. While some of these people will not deny themselves the use of a way to prolong their lives, they will never let the general public get it.
