Man's Desire for Eternal Life

There is one fact that we cannot change. We all gonna die. We got off to a rough start, but death is the price we have to pay for living. Humanity is well aware of this fact, but we cannot say that it is at peace with this thought. Therefore, on the one hand, he is doing everything he can to delay death as much as possible. When we look at history, it is obvious that we have been able to increase the average life expectancy to a very good level. Still, there are legends and stories that call for eternal life. We're talking about immortality. From living forever...

So is it possible, can a human be immortal?

The biggest obstacle on the road to immortality is aging. While this may seem overwhelming, some animals in nature seem to have solved this problem. It's not biologically impossible. As with hydras. These tiny freshwater polyps are essentially the most primitive creatures among multicellular animals. Their main interesting feature is that they don't age. Hydras consist of stem cells that produce new cells by constantly dividing as the cells age, and thanks to the constant flow of new cells, they can stay young by renewing themselves completely. They even have amazing regeneration abilities.

No matter how many parts you divide the hydras into, new hydras are formed from each part. In other words, we can say that hydras are immortal under normal conditions. But here it should not be forgotten; Hydras are creatures with an average length of 10 millimeters and no organs. For humans, this is impossible. Our body is too complex for that. Humans also have stem cells. These cells can be regenerated. It even has the ability to regenerate organs such as the liver, but our entire body is not made up of these cells like hydras. Because the human body also needs cells that do other things than just divide and produce new cells. For example, red blood cells, take on the task of carrying oxygen in our body. We have a large number of cells assigned to different tasks. While carrying out these duties, our cells lose their ability to divide and, in a sense, age. We grow old with them. Of course, like hydras, we do not have a chance to get rid of these aged and tired cells. Because we need them until our last moment.

For example, neurons in our brains provide the flow of information. It is not in our interest to renew them. Because in this case we don't remember anything. That would mean our extinction from an evolutionary point of view. But of course, we can use this feature found in nature to make our cells age healthier. We can enable our cells to carry out their functions for a longer period of time and with a superior performance. Still, this type of biological immortality is impossible for us.

Nanotechnology

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the oldest person to have ever lived is a Frenchman named John Kamen, who died in 1997 at the age of 122. According to a 2021 study in the journal Nature Communications, humans can live to a maximum age of 120 to 150 years. We can also think of this as the final threshold at which the human body can be healed from any disease. After this age, we completely lose this feature. In order to go beyond this, it is necessary to stop the aging of cells and to be completely protected from diseases. One of the promising areas for this is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is a field that deals with the arrangement, manipulation and use of particles smaller than 100 nanometers. By making robots of this size, areas of cell damage in the human body can be repaired with blood flow. Many studies on this are currently in progress. Of course, these tiny robots could even revolutionize the treatment of certain diseases, such as cancer, according to a study at the University of Melbourne. For this, they can clean the cancerous cells in the area of ​​damage. Still, even slowing down or even stopping the aging of the human body is not enough for immortality. 

Hydras do not age and have an incredible regeneration ability. But they still die. They are eaten by other living things, they are very sensitive to environmental changes, they perish in serious changes and die when their pond freezes.

Solution

Under normal conditions, there are no creatures that prey on us. However, our bodies are not resistant to accidents, environmental influences, and more. Therefore, we can safely say that immortality is not possible.

So would you like to be immortal and why, of course?