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Asked by anon-323285 on 25 Mar 2022.
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Victoria Fawcett answered on 25 Mar 2022:
Great question! I don’t think we currently have that kind of technology/medicine.
A bigger question is, if it were available would you want to live forever? Could be a bit lonely, unless everyone lives forever but in that case we would become too overpopulated very quickly!
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Daisy Shearer answered on 27 Mar 2022:
As far as I’m aware, you can’t (yet) but medical science is improving at an incredible rate so who knows what might be possible in the future! I’m not sure living forever is something I’d want though, personally. Curing disease and alleviating pain and suffering yes, but stopping natural ageing and peaceful death seems a little ethically strange to me. You’ve given me lots to think about!
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Luke Humphrey answered on 28 Mar 2022:
Hi paca451the, great question.
Theoretically, there is no biological requirement for aging, or dieing of old age. When we age, our bodies get weaker, and eventually even minor health issues can be fatal – but some animals don’t age, such as lobsters.
The mechanisms of aging are still being studied. Some people want to understand how people age, in order to create a cure. Maybe this is something you’d be interested in getting involved in?
Of course, even if we cured aging, people could still die of injury and disease so it’s impossible for anyone to live forever, but we could theoretically live for hundreds or thousands of years if we cured aging and got lucky on avoiding accidents.
There are other concepts such as creating computers sophisticated enough to emulate the processes of your brain, which would be a bit like living forever, however we are a very long way from such technology. Even the most modern supercomputer has nowhere close to the computational power of the human brain.
If we did cure aging, the social and economic implications would be huge. As a society, we are struggling to treat the younger generation fairly as the planet becomes overpopulated. From a certain point of view, people aren’t dieing fast enough!
I often wonder if we evolved to age not as some random fluke but because it is a survival advantage in nature. Overpopulation is one of the major reasons that animal species go extinct, as they drain their resources too quickly and starve. As long as we live long enough to survive, reproduce, and teach our children then our job from an evolutionary point of view is compete, and so aging provides a way for animals to reproduce sustainably without growing to such a huge population that they make themselves extinct.
If we did cure aging, we would have to be very careful to avoid this fate.
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