• Question: Do you think that humans will ever be able to indefinitely prolong life and if so how and when?

    Asked by richieshea to Adam, Chris, Eleanor, Jessamyn, Sinead on 15 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Christian Wirtz

      Christian Wirtz answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Hi Richie,

      I do not think we will ever be able to indefinitely prolong life. We will be able to get rid of many diseases, hopefully beat hunger and many other sufferings and all get to old age but at some point our bodies will fail us as our natural life comes to an end. The human body is not meant to last forever and eventually your heart muscles will tire or your cells will start replicating incorrectly.

      I don’t think I would want to be able to live forever! At some point my way of thinking would be obsolete, my knowledge useless and I would become someone who observes the world from the outside, muttering about how the 2000s were a better time than the 2200s, rather than be part of it. If you live to be 500 years old, a 50-year marriage would seem to be like a summer romance and the 20 years spent raising children like a long-forgotten afternoon.

      So I don’t think there will be such a thing as indefinite life and if there was, I wouldn’t choose it.

    • Photo: Eleanor Holmes

      Eleanor Holmes answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Hi Richie,

      I agree with Chris, an infinite life-span would be too long. I’m 24 and I already feel like a year goes by quicker than it did when I was 16. Imagine what a year would feel like when I’m 500 and a year is just 0.2% of my life!

      I think if this were to happen, either through advances in medicine or a gene mutation that gives us all much longer lives, life as we know it would be very very different. Childhood would probably be extended as our brains would have to develop differently to deal with the much longer time spans.

      Either we would, as Chris supposes, do things at the same pace as we do now and end up living 10 different lives in the space of 500 years, raising children, having careers, collecting marriages. Or we would do the same things but at a much slower pace. Only hitting puberty at age 100. Getting married at 250 and raising your kids for 150 years. Celebrating your 300th anniversary at work with a party that lasts a fortnight. Trees live for an incredibly long time, but they don’t get very much done.

      I don’t think we will ever have infinite lifespans. Perhaps longer than we do now. In a thousand years I could see us pushing 150 as an upper limit. But beyond that and we wouldn’t be recognisable to ourselves anymore.

    • Photo: Adam Murphy

      Adam Murphy answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to, and like Chris and Eleanor I don’t know if it would be a good idea to live forever!

      But there is a way we might be able to!

      There are these things that are called telomeres. They’re strings of DNA (which decide what you are, black hair, blue eyes) that cap the end of your chromosomes (which have the entire book of you, your DNA). When your cells replicate, the telomeres get shorter and shorter. A lot of scientists think this is why we age at all. If we can stop them shortening, maybe we can stop aging.

      But this is a long, long way off.

    • Photo: Sinead Cullen

      Sinead Cullen answered on 16 Nov 2013:

      Hi Richie,

      There are certain things that we have in out bodies called chromsomes. Our chromosomes are the reason we are they people we are today, why i have blue eyes and you might have blue eyes too, or brown or green eyes. On the end of our chromsomes we have something called a telomerase. This is sort of like the plastic the bit at the top of your shoe lace that stops in unraveling. When our chromosomes replicate, cell division occurs. Each time our cells divide this cap or telomerase gets shorter, so if there was a way to stop the telomerase getting shorter this would stop aging and potentially make us live forever.

      But I could only imagine the profound effects it would have on the rest of our bodies of this was achieved.It could bring about some diseases or disorders that we never even imagined.

      I certainly wouldn’t like to live forever it was possible anyway. Your experiences and memories wouldn’t be the same. You wouldn’t remember your teenage years as the best of your life because you would have so many years to try remember you would forgot a lot of really cool things we get to do in this life!

      Hope this helps 🙂

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