Can immortality be achieved?
No matter how advanced technology gets, it might be impossible for our bodies to go on forever. Some researchers believe there's a limit on how long it's physically possible to live: perhaps 125 years. But what if we don't need our bodies at all?
By preventing cells from reaching senescence one can achieve biological immortality; telomeres, a "cap" at the end of DNA, are thought to be the cause of cell aging. Every time a cell divides the telomere becomes a bit shorter; when it is finally worn down, the cell is unable to split and dies.
- Live On Through Your Children. ...
- Live On Through Your Works. ...
- Reconstruction Through Reproduction of Variables. ...
- Preserving Your Brain to Be Put in Another Body in the Future. ...
- Complete Mind (Brain) Transfer to Digital Form.
A biologically immortal living being can still die from means other than senescence, such as through injury, poison, disease, predation, lack of available resources, or changes to environment.
Technically, if the universe ends like scientists think it will, no one will ever be immortal. But that's not stopping companies from going all in with anti-aging products and technologies that can keep us alive for much, much longer.
Mahavatar Babaji (30 November 203 BCE), an Indian Kriya Yoga guru who is believed to have manifested 5,000 years ago in India and is still presently alive in his physical body. He is reputed to live in India or at the Himalaya mountain.
And some datasets, the authors report, “put no limit on the human life span.” These analyses “suggest that the human life span lies well beyond any individual lifetime yet observed or that could be observed in the absence of major medical advances.”
The first and most important rule of anti-aging medicine is “don't die”! The second rule is “don't get sick.” The third rule is “don't get old.” Every day you stay healthy and alive is another day medical science comes closer to finding the ultimate cure to aging.
To date, there's only one species that has been called 'biologically immortal': the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii. These small, transparent animals hang out in oceans around the world and can turn back time by reverting to an earlier stage of their life cycle.
Humans' life expectancy (average) is 70-85 years. However, the oldest verified person (Jeanne Clement, 1875-1997) lived up to 122 years. As a person ages, the telomeres (chromosome ends) tend to become shorter in every consecutive cycle of replication. Also, bones start getting weaker by reducing in size and density.
Why can't humans live forever?
During respiration, nitrogen and oxygen are converted into highly reactive molecules that initiate a series of biochemical changes that lead to your death. The generation of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species is an inevitable consequence of life.