Question: Can we live for ever?

Thomas Barrett answered on 19 Mar 2015:

Well our lifespan has more than doubled on average since Medieval Britain. This is mainly due to advances in medicine and quality of living, so better diet and sanitation (toilets and sewers etc.)

We are also looking at how and why our cells age. Things like the immortal jellyfish (yes it is immortal! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii ) can basically turn themselves back into a child and grow all over again. As our understanding of this, how our diet affects how we age and all sorts of things improve we will see people living longer. If we could solve how the jellyfish do it and apply it to humans then yes we could live forever (provided disease and other injury don’t get us). But this raises problems of whether we should tamper with human genetics.

We could in theory clone ourselves as well. We have shown cloning is possible (dolly the sheep) but we have never done it to humans as it raises ethical questions.

Some people also believe it may be possible to basically upload our brain to a computer so even if your physical body died you’d live on in a computer. This has similar ethical questions as cloning. Do these people who have been uploaded count as people anymore or machines? If you are a clone or a uploaded person are you still the same person?

So yes I think we will be able to get people to live for quite a long time, but immortality may be quite a bit harder and even if it was possible people may try to ban it.

Fun fact: Scientists already think that the first person to live till 200 is alive today! It could even be you! 🙂