[Discussion] Man living without a heart. Has no pulse.

[Jazzy Stardust]

Pretty impressive, I bet in the time he survived without a heart he was hoping he was immortal.

 

[The Dreamer]

It makes you as close to immortal as you can get. No one really wants to be immortal, people want to have the choice of dying eventually. I sure would like to live a few centuries more so this machine or pacemaker is welcomed.

We have 2 very different ideas of immortality then.

 

[Yubel]

We have 2 very different ideas of immortality then.

Immortality is the definition of being unable to die, an objective definition. I get what you're saying about this thing not giving you true immortality but it will give you a heck of a long life which from our perspective might aswell be immortality.

 

[Cruciatus]

Dude's too damn annoying to derive information from.

 

[Aim64C]

Immortality is the definition of being unable to die, an objective definition. I get what you're saying about this thing not giving you true immortality but it will give you a heck of a long life which from our perspective might aswell be immortality.

Not exactly.

Adult cell lines will eventually give out. Part of the reason the skin wrinkles and sags as people age is that proteins are no longer being manufactured in the quantity necessary to support proper cell division within the skin - cells that fail to divide properly die and lead to a net effect of disordering of the tissues.

The genetics of animal cells dictates that there is a sort of "half life" to adult cells. At some point, too few will be dividing properly to support healthy tissues. Kidneys are some of the first to fail since it's one of the more intricate and delicate organs. Then you'll get ulcers and the breakdown of intestinal linings even if Dialysis were to prolong your life even further.

As the body ages, the likelihood that surviving cells will become cancerous also increases - or, rather, the cancerous cells that emerge through a process of telomerase naturally will be able to overwhelm the body's natural defense against them. Tumors will rapidly out-divide functional tissues.

Eyesight by this time will have degraded considerably and some variety of neurological issue can prompt various forms of dementia - the insulating linings on the neurons fails to be produced properly and various mechanisms within the neurons fail to be maintained effectively - which leads to a general break-down of the brain's ability to function.

The skeletal structure, also, suffers from a similar set of failures. Osteoporosis is not just a calcium deficiency, but much like the skin - a condition where bone cells fail to divide properly and die - leaving voids that must be filled by healthy cells that are becoming increasingly rare.

No matter how many machines you hook up to a body to keep it running - the last of our skin cells would die in a petri dish - or our body be replaced by a giant tumor.

The only solution to immortality would be one that allows for our cells to replicate successfully for a perpetual period of time. The problem is that doing this almost invariably leads to tumor growth in multi-cellular organisms. Mice known to have long telomeres bred for laboratory experiments to have long lives are more likely to develop tumors even as a control group over any given duration of time.

This implies that the shorter telmoeres were necessary for multi-celled organisms to avoid cancer - although it is also possible that this is only part of the picture as many of our biological "clocks" (puberty and growth cycles) are bases around the idea that some proteins encased in short telomeres will eventually cease to be produced properly (and thus, if they function as inhibitors - they can be thought of as a sort of time-delay switch).

Active telomerase could potentially prevent healthy aging and development to maturity - at least in children. Once adulthood is reached - it may be theoretically possible to use some form of retrovirus to insert telomerase activation and then deal with the eventuality of cancer - eventually a type would develop somewhere that we don't have the capability to remove safely - but that could take an average of a couple hundred years for any given individual.

Of course, estimates are that the rate of cancer would increase, considerably, under active telomerase - so putting up with tumor removal on the average of every two years may not be worth it at least without some kind of means to improve the body's ability to respond to cancerous developments by orders of magnitude.

 

[Yubel]

Not exactly.

Adult cell lines will eventually give out. Part of the reason the skin wrinkles and sags as people age is that proteins are no longer being manufactured in the quantity necessary to support proper cell division within the skin - cells that fail to divide properly die and lead to a net effect of disordering of the tissues.

The genetics of animal cells dictates that there is a sort of "half life" to adult cells. At some point, too few will be dividing properly to support healthy tissues. Kidneys are some of the first to fail since it's one of the more intricate and delicate organs. Then you'll get ulcers and the breakdown of intestinal linings even if Dialysis were to prolong your life even further.

As the body ages, the likelihood that surviving cells will become cancerous also increases - or, rather, the cancerous cells that emerge through a process of telomerase naturally will be able to overwhelm the body's natural defense against them. Tumors will rapidly out-divide functional tissues.

Eyesight by this time will have degraded considerably and some variety of neurological issue can prompt various forms of dementia - the insulating linings on the neurons fails to be produced properly and various mechanisms within the neurons fail to be maintained effectively - which leads to a general break-down of the brain's ability to function.

The skeletal structure, also, suffers from a similar set of failures. Osteoporosis is not just a calcium deficiency, but much like the skin - a condition where bone cells fail to divide properly and die - leaving voids that must be filled by healthy cells that are becoming increasingly rare.

No matter how many machines you hook up to a body to keep it running - the last of our skin cells would die in a petri dish - or our body be replaced by a giant tumor.

The only solution to immortality would be one that allows for our cells to replicate successfully for a perpetual period of time. The problem is that doing this almost invariably leads to tumor growth in multi-cellular organisms. Mice known to have long telomeres bred for laboratory experiments to have long lives are more likely to develop tumors even as a control group over any given duration of time.

This implies that the shorter telmoeres were necessary for multi-celled organisms to avoid cancer - although it is also possible that this is only part of the picture as many of our biological "clocks" (puberty and growth cycles) are bases around the idea that some proteins encased in short telomeres will eventually cease to be produced properly (and thus, if they function as inhibitors - they can be thought of as a sort of time-delay switch).

Active telomerase could potentially prevent healthy aging and development to maturity - at least in children. Once adulthood is reached - it may be theoretically possible to use some form of retrovirus to insert telomerase activation and then deal with the eventuality of cancer - eventually a type would develop somewhere that we don't have the capability to remove safely - but that could take an average of a couple hundred years for any given individual.

Of course, estimates are that the rate of cancer would increase, considerably, under active telomerase - so putting up with tumor removal on the average of every two years may not be worth it at least without some kind of means to improve the body's ability to respond to cancerous developments by orders of magnitude.

Well thought-out response, I'm impressed. I don't think there is anything that can give us immortality but in the future we might find a way to significantly increase our lifespan and slow the aging process.