• Question: Can we live for ever?

    Asked by Coco to Neil, Martin, Leonie, Lauren, Ciorsdaidh, Alan on 5 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Ciorsdaidh Watts

      Ciorsdaidh Watts answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      Not at the moment. Ageing is a natural process which occurs in all living organisms, so no 1000 year birthday celebrations yet.

    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      That would be awesome, but I don’t think we’ll ever be able to do this.

      Maybe (far, far!) in the future we’ll be able to transfer our conciseness to some sort of artificial data storage and live forever that way, but in terms of the cells in our body, this won’t work. At the very ends of your DNA are some loose ends called telomeres. Every time our cells divide, they get a little bit shorter, and there have been studies suggesting that the length of our telomeres is related to ageing (they can be shorted under stress too). Maybe if you could stop telomere shortening, it would be one step forward to immortality, but there’s still how you get the rest of your body to keep going too!

    • Photo: Lauren Webster

      Lauren Webster answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      It would be awesome but would you want to age?? Unfortunately we cannot live forever although I would love to tell you yes. As we get older so does our DNA and as Neil said, we cannot fix what has been lost…yet

    • Photo: Alan McCue

      Alan McCue answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      I think i’d only want to live forever if we could stop the aging process :-).

    • Photo: Martin McCoustra

      Martin McCoustra answered on 16 Mar 2018:

      There’s an interesting philosophical side to this question… as Stephen Hawking like Einstein, Maxwell and Newton before him will live in the minds of those who follow and in the records of their achievements (which may last longer than our memory).

      As a bit of a Sci-Fi nerd… who says we need or might want to live forever in a biological cage. Why not move our software from a biological “wet-ware” to suitable “hard-ware” in the computer sense? There is a lot of excitement and worry about artificial intelligence. Perhaps once such computer systems are developed though they could provide a substrate for our software too!

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