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Asked by Julius Caesar to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 13 Nov 2014.
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Arthur Dyer answered on 13 Nov 2014:
Yes there is but i’m not sure that anybody would want to live forever as you’re body would just end up getting completely knackered and we already have issues with dealing with the population living longer and longer.
Pretty much every biology lab in the world has some immortal things in it though thanks to an awesome woman named Henrietta Lacks. She had a tumour that sadly killed her but before she died a piece of her cancer was cut out was the first cell line that we could grow in a lab (the cells are called HeLa after her).
These cells are immortal and there are millions of tubes of a little bit of her in every continent and she’s still growing well today!
Also there’s quite a few animals that are immortal, scientists are pretty certain that lobsters are immortal sue to a special protein on the ends of their DNA called telomerase which gets chopped off a little every time a cell splits and when it runs out a cell dies, lobsters have much more of this than most other animals.
Also, jellyfish are immortal (well some jellyfish!) as they can keep making new cells or going back to an infant state then starting again which is an awesome trick.
Some scientists are looking into using the lessons learnt from these animals to make us do the same.
If we lived forever though the earth would get pretty full pretty quickly and we would run out of food and water and space very fast !
Do you think it would be a good thing to keep everyone alive forever or do you think we’d need to keep everyone young too?
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Clare Harding answered on 13 Nov 2014:
I think the best way for humans to become immortal would be to be able to copy our brains into a computer. This is impossible just now but it might become possible one day!
Then we wouldn’t have to worry about our bodies decaying or maybe we could even just grow a new one!
But I wouldn’t want to live forever, I would definitely get bored!
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Daniel Parsons answered on 14 Nov 2014:
Some scientists think that the recent advances nano-biotechnology is the key to immortality…as this will allow us to replace many of our vital organs and essentially reprogramme our bodies to halt and then, reverse, ageing.
Eventually I am sure there will be a way to become immortal therefore….but it would be rather grim??! What do you think!??
Comments
Julius Caesar commented on :
But if you copied your mind into a computer program it wouldnt be you, it would be a copy of you… Wouldn’t it?
Arthur commented on :
It depends what you consider “you” are… if you think your body is who you are then yes it won’t be the same but if you think that your memories and reactions and that your body just contains that then douploading yourself into a computer makes sense
Daniel commented on :
I agree, not sure if it really would be ‘you’ – having my mind uploaded to hard drive and then downloaded back to a robot-hybrid being is a bit grim – think I’ll vote with my feet and go in a box thanks!