That's because humans need cells to do things other than just divide and make new cells. For example, our red blood cells transport oxygen around the body.
As the cells age, so do we. We can't simply discard our old cells like hydra do, because we need them. For example, the neurons in the brain transmit information. However, his gut feeling is that humans will never achieve such biological immortality. And so I think that people survive through their legacy. The oldest-living human on record is Jeanne Calment from France, who died at the age of in , according to Guinness World Records. In a study published in the journal Nature Communications , researchers reported that humans may be able to live up to a maximum of between and years, after which, the researchers anticipate a complete loss of resilience — the body's ability to recover from things like illness or injury.
To live beyond this limit, humans would need to stop cells from aging and prevent disease. Related: What's the oldest living thing alive today? Humans may be able to live beyond their biological limits with future technological advancements involving nanotechnology. This is the manipulation of materials on a nanoscale, less than nanometers one-billionth of a meter or billionths of an inch.
Machines this small could travel in the blood and possibly prevent aging by repairing the damage cells experience over time. Nanotech could also cure certain diseases, including some types of cancer, by removing cancerous cells from the body, according to the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Preventing the human body from aging still isn't enough to achieve immortality; just ask the hydra. Even though hydra don't show signs of aging, the creatures still die. Humans don't have many predators to contend with, but we are prone to fatal accidents and vulnerable to extreme environmental events, such as those intensified by climate change. We'll need a sturdier vessel than our current bodies to ensure our survival long into the future.
Technology may provide the solution for this, too. As technology advances, futurists anticipate two defining milestones. So while perhaps someone like Jack Ma can look forward to immortality if he simply lives another 30 years, you and I are going to have to wait a lot longer.
Most people would pay any sum to prevent their own death or the death of a loved one, even if it meant going into tremendous debt and essentially becoming a debt slave. And if people will pay the money, what incentive do you think immortality companies will have to lower prices?
Until the technology is cheap enough to be truly universal, prices will stay high, shareholders will stay happy, and the rest of us will scrimp and struggle to keep ourselves and our families alive. No more doctor visits? Photo: Pixabay. But there are a litany of reasons why long-term medical immortality would actually be kind of a nightmare. First and foremost: our brain capacity is limited.
This is why the older you get, the harder it gets to remember details of things that happened when you were young. Your perception of time would likely also become extremely warped, as the older you get, the more quickly time seems to pass.
In the world of medical immortality, that is much less true, and every death is a sudden, unexpected shock that seems all the more unfair because had you not been hit by that truck, you could have lived another years. Then of course there are all of the social problems: overcrowding, limited resources, the total pointlessness of the prison system, the elimination of retirement, and the stagnation of social, economic, and political systems as the old never die off to be replaced by the younger.
Death is a powerful force that has been motivating human behavior forever. Taking it out of the equation will change everything about human life, and only a fool would assume that all of those changes would be for the better. Readers of this blog may be particularly enamoured with the concept of digital immortality — the idea that we will become immortal not by conquering disease and ageing, but rather by uploading our brains into the cloud.
This actually resolves a lot of the problems associated with medical immortality. And your digital self could theoretically be inserted into any kind of simulation you wanted.
If you wanted to literally live for eternity as a God, that could theoretically be arranged so long as there are some friendly robots at your server farm who can maintain the power and such. But I think we have a fifty-fifty chance of doing it within about 15 years from the point where we get results with the mice. So 25 years from now.
What do you think about the idea that with so much life at stake, people would be less willing to take risks? I used to be more pessimistic about this than I am now. Five or six years ago I wrote a book in which I predicted that driving would be outlawed because it would be too dangerous to other people, but now I think that what's actually going to happen is that we'll just throw money at the problem.
Rather than simply avoiding activities that are risky, we'll make them less risky through technology. For example, it's perfectly possible already to build cars that are much safer than those which most people currently drive, and it's also possible to build cars that are safer for pedestrians--with auto sensors and auto braking to stop from hitting a kid running out in the road and things like that.
It's just a matter of priorities. When there isn't that many years of life to lose, the priority isn't there to spend the money. It's all a matter of weighing out the probabilities. Once the technology is available, nearly everyone is going to want it. Of course, there's going to be a minority of people who think it's better to live more naturally in some way or other. We have parallels like that in society today, like the Amish for example.
Death will still be a part of life when we haven't got aging anymore. If you mean that some people would say that aging is a part of life--well, that's certainly true, but a couple hundred years ago tuberculosis was a part of life, and we didn't have much hesitation in making that no longer a part of life when we found out how. What do you say to critics who think that this money could be better spent towards curing diseases like cancer? This is a very important point. Because we're going be in a situation where we can extend lifespans indefinitely, this argument doesn't work.
If it were a case of simply having a prospect of extending our healthy lives by 20 or 30 years, then one could legitimately argue that this would be money more ethically spent on extending the lifespan of people who have a below average lifespan. But when we're talking about extending lifespans indefinitely, I don't think that really works.
The other thing to bear in mind, is that it's not an either or thing. The reasons why people in Africa for example, have a low life expectancy is not just because of medical care, but also because of political problems.
What kind of life will the immortal or nearly-immortal lead? Will they have to be on a special diet, or have constant organ transplants? Like any technology, when it first starts off, it will be a bit shaky, a bit risky, it will be very laborious and expensive and so on, but there will be enormous market pressures that will result in progressive refinement and improvement to the technology so that it not only becomes more effective, it becomes more convenient and so on.
This will be an example of that. In a very general sort of sense, one could probably think in terms of having to go in for a refresh every 10 years or so. Exactly what would be involved in that will change over the years. It might start off as lets say a month in the hospital, and 10 years down the road, that will turn into a day in the hospital. A good parallel is vaccines. For example, when we take a holiday in Africa or Southeast Asia or whatever, we get a shot to make sure that we don't get malaria.
And that's all we have to do, and when we get there we can eat Mc Donald's as much as one likes. Yes, that's right. A lot of these things, even in the early stages will amount to vaccines and drugs.
Though of course, there will also be a lot of gene therapy and stem cell therapy and much more high tech stuff. I think it's very important to have this two-prong approach. The idea here is that we don't really know what's going to work, but we have a fair idea of approaches that have a good probability of working.
If you look at past technological achievements, some of them succeeded by just throwing serious effort and serious resources at the problem, and people were pretty sure of what they had to do to make the thing work. The Manhattan Project is a fine example of that. Everyone basically knew how to build the atomic bomb, it was just a question of working out the kinks.
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