Immortality

Ever since humans first walked the face of the planet, the question of immortality has always riveted our thoughts. Back when I was a child, I used to think in all innocence that everyone & everything around me would continue just as they were forever. But not long after, the grim reality of the matter was revealed to me... It turned out that almost everything and everyone had a finite life span and would eventually perish some day. Although this saddened me I began to think... What is immortality exactly???

I guess, to most people it simply means living on forever. But is this really possible? Our body is an amazing biotic machine whose cells are constantly dying and multiplying at the rate of billions every day, but the process falters as we age until a certain point is reached where the new cells produced aren’t able to adequately replenish the old ones being lost and our slow descent into the grave begins.

With the advent of medical science, better standards of living and healthier nutrition, biological aging can be postponed. New calorie restriction mimetic drugs have been proven to increase life of rodents by 50%, a result which has been replicated in apes. New technologies like 3D printing and advances made in stem cell research are gradually making it possible to replace almost any organ in the body! But all said and done, our hopes are still hovering in the range of about 200 years, which is not even remotely close to immortality, is it?

It is time we changed our perspective to look for another definition of immortality... Our conscience & self-awareness are seated in our brains; so what if we could at least preserve our minds instead of our entire body? Sort of like transferring data to a new hard drive every time the old one starts malfunctioning... Albeit an insanely large hard drive as the storage capacity of the human brain is estimated by neuroscientists to be anywhere in the range starting from a few terabytes to about 2.5 petabytes! Even if the technology for making such a transfer existed, its cost would probably be such as could not be afforded by the average joe...

So, as things stand, the only other way I can think of someone becoming immortal is by the virtue of the work someone does and the legacy he or she leaves behind. Just like E=mc2 will always be synonymous with Einstein, we should all try to live our lives in a way that will leave a permanent constructive mark in this existential web which we all are a part of. So, until we can become truly immortal someday like certain species of jellyfish or hydra, I’d like to conclude with a famous quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: “When you seize to make a contribution, you begin to die.”