Immortality?

Extinction through our own doing is a more likely scenario.

[Shawthing]

The Hayflick limit on human cell replication means, as we currently are,( genetically) death due to the failure of function of the body is inevitable.

[Matt-EUC]

Originally Posted by Shawthing

The Hayflick limit on human cell replication means, as we currently are,( genetically) death due to the failure of function of the body is inevitable.

This is a hypothetical scenario, don't you go ruining it with facts and realism!

[ophic]

Originally Posted by Matt-EUC

That strikes me as probably not true. The heart is a muscle and generally, the more you use your muscles, the stronger they get.

Doesn't always apply to the heart. It never gets to rest. The problems with high blood pressure are mainly that it has to work harder. It can pack up early. Sometimes it can grow (like muscles do when working hard) and that in itself is a problem as it doesn't have a lot of room and there's a lot of plumbing in there.

[Shawthing]

Originally Posted by Matt-EUC

This is a hypothetical scenario, don't you go ruining it with facts and realism!

I did say 'as we currently are' !

Likelyhood is that at some point there will be a big step in longevity when someone eventually geneticaly modifies two humans with Ocean Quahog or Turitopsis Dohrnii genes.

[Red Herring]

All good things have to come to an end, why should life be any different? All we can do is influence how and when that happens.

Me, I'm going to go aged 105 having been knocked off my classic 2015 Ducati by my 25 year old lovers jealous boyfriend.....

As has been mentioned, "Life expectancy" is a funny statistic to calculate because there are so many factors. Do you include infant mortality, which is minute in comparison to even 70 years ago? Life expectancy plummeted in the late 1910's for the population as a whole, but was unchanged for women or men over 35 or under 12.

I understand that Life expectancy at 12 years old for non manual labourers (thus removing infant mortality and industrial accidents/effects of being a coal miner) is by and large unchanged for several hundred years. Living to 80 or even 100 years old was not that uncommon amongst the wealthier middle classes and upper class in Victorian England, where they had access to similar nutrition, warmth and probably better exercise to that enjoyed by the majority today. Really we are getting better at removing the causes of early death rather than extending life beyond what it was 200-300 years ago.

[Matt-EUC]

But maybe getting old is a cause of early death? There could be something about us that makes us get old and decrepit that can be altered.

Ever seen the film "In Time" with Justin Timberlake?