Immortality, Completely Irrational?

Recently, I read an article from the Scientific American about how people are living longer and longer and the process of death. Now the title may be fairly misleading, but the possibility to vastly extend the length of our lives is a very real thing. This fascinates me and I hope it will fascinate you too.

As scientists are discovering that humans are continuing to live longer and longer, they are also discovering that there may not be a limit as to how long we can live. As medicine is becoming more advanced, children are living into adulthood, adults are becoming seniors and our population as a whole, today, is older than ever before. Of course, death in inevitable and there is no way around it, but some of our cells continue to live on in the closest form of immortality humans can achieve; our reproductive cells live on through future generations of our children. Organisms are, ideally, trying to achieve survival but sometimes, in periods of excess nutrients, we tend to focus our efforts onto growth and reproduction instead of repair and self-maintenance. Scientists have experimented with mice, fruit flies, and other animals with high metabolisms giving one group of the animal a plentiful amount of food and the other just enough food to get by. It has been shown that the group with scarce food lived longer because it was able to use the nutrients it received for self-maintenance and repair because it couldn’t afford to misuse nutrients. This is not a practical method for longer living in humans because our metabolic processes are too slow. Aging occurs because of the breakdown of individual molecules, cells, and organs and scientists are trying to figure out if there are ways to prolong the function of many of these bodily features. Even when scientists find a way to help our lives lengthen, the end is still going to come and each of us will find our owns ways to deal with it.

This article was very interesting and could have a positive effect on people everywhere. If it is discovered that people will be able to live for longer many people will invest in whatever it takes for that to be achieved. The danger in living longer is that we don’t know how stable we will be at 150 by method of pills to keep our cells alive. This could also benefit the world because, hypothetically, if some great people were to live longer, they could continue to help the world for longer than they naturally would. Although longer living could possibly be nice, I believe that studies in disease prevention and cure are more beneficial. By eliminating diseases that cause suffering the world would be a better place than if people just continued to live longer and are still able to accumulate cancer, Alzheimer’s and numerous other age related diseases.