Ways That We Will Avoid Death

Doesn’t death hack you off sometimes? What point has it got? It must be a joke, surely? We all know that it happens and unless you believe in something it does and that’s it. But what is death? Well I suppose the easy answer is that it’s when you die.  I think I  may get some complaints if I leave it like that! Well, there is no easy answer as not everything is known about the ageing process and death. What is known is that as time goes by a lot more cells die than are produced. This leaves us with fewer cells. Therefore we have less capability to repair wear and tear on the body and the immune system degrades. This means that we become more liable to infections and can’t hunt out and destroy mutant cells that could cause cancerous tumours. This obviously isn’t very good and older people tend to succumb to conditions that they could have fought off if they were younger.

Grim Reaper

Though cell death is the basis for understanding the aging process, it is not the only factor. The aging process is incredibly complicated, and it’s often difficult to distinguish between changes that are the result of time marching on and those that come with common medical conditions. 

One theory for aging says that your biological clock is ticking from the day you are born. This is in your DNA (the cells genetic material) and is basically a blueprint for your life. Just as a blueprint can be modified for a building I reckon the one in your DNA could as well. Free radicals exist inside your body and destroy or alter DNA. They also disrupt many other cell functions. Free radicals may kill cells as a result of their marauding, or they may give rise to mutant cells that can lead to chronic conditions including cancer and heart disease. Fortunately, the body maintains a sophisticated defense system against free radicals but, as you might have guessed, our defenses wane with time, and cell damage ensues.

So how could we go about becoming immortal? In this world of ours we haven’t really done much at all except life-support machines and better medical care which really is in the dark ages at the moment. But that isn’t really immortality and reducing ageing . Immortality and prolonging our life is no use, I think, if we are just a lump of meat being kept alive by a few machines.

  The longer a person lives at the moment though the more chance there is of finding a prolonging treatment and extending our lives until another prolonging treatment comes along and so on until hopefully something like immortality occurs. This has been done in a way by cryogenic storing peoples bodies when they die. Alcor is one Such Place and has a load of information on the subject. I am not sure I would trust this procedure as don’t you forget that you have to be stored somewhere after you have been frozen into an ice cube. Let’s just hope they don’t forget where they put you!

At the moment you can also improve your lifestyle which will keep your body fit and healthy and hopefully increase your lifespan. Try here. An organisation, called the Methuselah Foundation  has been set up to find cures for age-related diseases and prevention of ageing in any way it can while keeping a person as a person.

Death Face

But why not forget our human bodies and making them last longer and longer? What makes up who we are? Why not transfer what we are into something else that will last a lot longer? Computers, robots and cyborgs jump to mind.  Transhumanism, among other things supports the use of science and technology to improve a humans mental and physical state. That means that one of the things they are looking for is any way to improve a  human lifespan including computers, androids and cryogenics. Some interesting frequently asked questions from a transhumanist site.

Uploading yourself to a computer is not as far off as you may think. As computers and technology improve, the uses that we can put them to get bigger and bigger and this is happening quicker and quicker. There are many problems involved with uploading yourself. If you upload yourself in the year 2010 and then die in 2015 you will immediately become the person in 2010 therefore losing the time between 2010 and and 2015. To overcome this sort of problem you would need to keep constantly backing up your brain. You would still lose a little part of your life, but depending on how disciplined you were with the backup it could be a very small part. This obviously would be a very small price to pay to continue living.

Whether on uploading there would be something missing is a matter really to be found out in practice. If our brain is completely like a computer then uploading is not a problem as it is just a copy. But if there is something unique to humans like a soul then this may be missing with the upload version.

There also could be two versions of yourself running at the same time, one in your own body and one that has been uploaded. That would be a bit odd as you could have a chat with yourself. Now whether that is a good or bad thing I will leave that to you. Going a little bit further a copy could be made of you and transmitted somewhere . The original (you) would be deleted but you would be the new copy. Teleportation!   If you fancy getting into this side of immortality then you might like The Singularity is Near

In about twenty years away (so some people think) nanotechnology will produce nanobots. Inside our bodies and brains, nanobots will provide radical life extension by destroying pathogens and cancer cells, repairing DNA errors, destroying toxins and debris, and otherwise reversing the aging processes (they may even make the dinner). Nanobots, if you are guessing,  are computer-based robots small enough to travel in our bloodstream.

Evolve To Computer

I expect that Nanobots will be able to repair complete bodies eventually so that we will be totally immortal from things like car crashes, broken bones and that sort of thing as well as getting rid of ageing inside our body. if you want to learn more about medical nanotechnology then this might help.

One way that we could live forever is that a nice green friendly alien called Steve could offer to cure our disease called death with a quick injection. That could happen this afternoon over a cup of tea or it may never happen but it would be nice wouldn’t it?

So, the best way to become immortal is to be very careful at the moment eating and doing the right things, looking both ways when you cross the road, and then hopefully you will live long enough to see technology takeover the struggle. This could be just around the corner or it could be round several corners but one day I believe people will live for ever. For further reading try Ben Bova’s new book- The Immortality Factor

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