Seems to be working for some...
Posted on 05/02/2022 6:47:08 AM PDT by Fitzy_888
EXCERPT:
A physicist trained at Caltech and Cambridge, he sees immortality as a mathematical challenge. To solve it requires first asking why we age. “The canonical answer,” Fink explained, “is that aging is inevitable and a fundamental condition of life.” Every organism degrades over time and eventually breaks down. End of story.
“But the story’s much weirder than we think,” Fink said. In a recent paper, he used math to demonstrate that “aging can be favored by natural selection.” That’s a shocking insight: It means that the first forms of life, which started billions of years ago, likely didn’t die.
Death emerged during the course of evolution because it conferred an advantage. In short, species that died fared better than those that didn’t.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
But, what if you didn’t believe that and you had billions of dollars? Once you have billions of dollars and could buy a hundred of anything including jet airplanes? Once you can afford anything you want you look to buy what’s not for sale. What would the most valuable thing be? Clearly, longer life.
We’re all going to die from our last disease
Seems to be working for some...
who will make the bon bons?
Staying alive for 1000 years is sure to get old.
The best one was Against the Fall of Night, about a future city in which people were billions of years old.
The sun was red and dying, and Earth had pretty much dried up. Most everyone lived in a single city, Diaspar. Civilization had long since become stagnant. No one ever ventured outside the city.
The youngest person, Alvin, was 7,000 years old. His birth was famous, because no one had been born in a while. He was still considered a boy.
Naturally, Alvin becomes restless and curious, and ventures out of Diaspar ...
We are not human beings having spiritual experiences; we are spiritual beings having human experiences. The wish to live forever is like the wish to stay in school forever. The purpose of human mortality and education is to prepare us for better things.
Warning: If you have a religious world view, don’t bother reading what follows.
Article: “It means that the first forms of life, which started billions of years ago, likely didn’t die.”
This depends on what one defines as the “first forms of life”. At some point relatively deathless elements combined into molecules and compounds, then highly complex molecules, etc. Some of those adjacent to energy sources like steam vents, replicated themselves and began to approach what we call “life”. As complexity reaches a certain point, like the old plate spinning acts on the Ed Sullivan Show, the probability that things will go “wrong” exceeds the probability of going perfectly, so complex molecule replication crashes at the individual and/or mass level. So the pattern that survives requires replication of lots of copies that survive long enough to produce before their complexity leads inevitably to a crash; the individual “organisms” die, but the pattern lives on. Changing environments, such as temperature changes or moving too far from the steam vent because of successful replication, produces crashes as well as mutations. The physicist’s idea here might be an interesting way to explain some things, and perhaps those much smarter than I can derive some practical applications. Entropy pretty well guarantees mortality, but I guess we can still try for extending our boundaries.
We could’ve lived forever if it weren’t for Eve and the snake. But thank God for our salvation through Jesus. Born twice, die once.
_________________________-
Salvation through the Virgin Mary, who bore Jesus. Mary’s YES to God brought life.
Eve’s YES to the “snake” brought death.
“Salvation through the Virgin Mary, “
OMG...
There would be NO evolutionary advantage to living forever. The world would be occupied by organisms that remained unchanged since they started to live.
There would be NO reproductive mechanism, since an organism that lives forever has no reason and no need to produce offspring.
So there would be no way for new organisms to come into existence, and the original “immortal” organisms would be the only ones on Earth.
He’s wrong.
Not aging, or not dying of old age, wouldn’t mean your immortal. There’s still physical accidents, predation, weather, drought, flood, volcanos, asteroids…Mother Nature has other ways to take you out.
I’m not saying I believe that, I’m saying that’s what is meant in the article.
‘Time Enough for Love’
- Robert Heinlein
Not quite related to the topic, but the Compost seems to think that the comment section is more valuable than the article itself.
They’ll let you read the article for “free”, but you have to sign in to read the comments.
“You can use math to demonstrate anything non-intuitive.”
Yep. For math to be useful it has to be grounded in reality.
Using math you can calculate how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin.
It did. Read the article.
“Aging” IS natural selection. Those who age, have a much greater chance of dying. The recent “pandemic” bore that out. The old (and diseased) were several times more likely to die than the young and healthy.
The writer of the article equates “immortality” with “anti-aging,” the latter which is making those choices (selections) that keep them healthy and fit — to survive. That is the critical mistake non-critical thinkers make — thinking that simply living as long as possible is sufficient — rather than the quality of life (health) that makes a longer life more probable (survival).
They have it backwards — and if they program that into the cells and organisms, that will not guarantee immortality — but as we are already witnessing, simply longer lives in deterioration, dysfunction and agony — as the photos of Soros and Gates illustrate. However, Bezos seems to have taken the right track and transformed himself into a much healthier specimen than he ever was before — as illustrated in his recent photos.
As Darwin observed, better selection is what ultimately survives.
Cofefvee anyone?
“God created us to live forever in His paradise if we only accept His free gift of Grace.”
But why is accepting that gift of grace so important to him? Sounds rather petty, after all we’re all his children whom he says he loves, no?
Why doesn’t he dispense with grace and just let us all enter his paradise, after all we’re all his creation? He could easily do that if he wanted, couldn’t he?
“When my To Be Used by Date is achieved, according to The Lord, show’s over.
I have nothing to prove by hanging on beyond the bitter end.”
But what if humans with their God given brains were to come up with a “cure” to aging, what would you do?
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