Every few years a reporter does his/hers almost unavoidable interview of someone who's probably lived too long. It's always entertaining, I will admit, but it's never anything valuable... not really.
Please don't misinterpret me here. I'm not wishing anything negative to someone who's really up there in age, I'm just saying there's no information that can get extracted about this very fact.
They ask any of these ladies or men, about to hit 110 about how she made did it, how she managed to live over a century, and the answers are as varied as you might imagine.
And this is the point I'm making. People who hit these years don't really know why they did. They might suspect something, they might think they owe it to drinking lot's of milk or sleeping very little (this one is out there too). But in truth is that it's a mystery to them as well.
There's still plenty of enigmas to go around. As a matter of fact, there's even studies being conducted today, to where they've been able to isolate the gene that makes a flatworm get old, the one who is in charge of decaying the DNA so to speak of the animal. As you might imagine, they don't seem to age, live a lot longer, but there is where we hit the brick wall... THEY STILL DIE!
Is our longest obsession, our most obvious motivator to come up with religions, cults, traditions, arts, you name it. The fact that we are just specks of time, blinks of events, who usually become forgotten just a few generations later, has truly driven us mad.
Can we defeat death? Is this even something we should strive for? I think we can, and I think we will, and, to top the sandwich I think we should. Not because I think our physical self is of any long term value per say, but because plenty of valuable ideas are lost due to our mortal limitations.
I don't see us defeating death with pills or diets however. I think it's simply going to happen when we figure out consciousness and we upload our intelligence to some sort of artificial system.
There are plenty of sci-fi authors who've developed these ideas, so I'm not coming up with crazy things out of the blue, but I think it's a sound route we are already headed on.
Oh yes... Why I started writting this today. They are still going to show up on our feeds, on our walls, etc. Friends of friends will tell you about Pepe who lived to 118 years old and ate only fish from a particular river, and you will love it.
Our monkey brains trying to draw patterns can't resist these stories...
MenO
