Time is incessantly changing us. When we are young many of
us feel immortal but as we get older we become more and more aware of how time
is leading us towards the exit door; time will run out for us. “But why does
time have to run out, why can’t we just go on forever?” enquires Kaku. The
great gods who have been envisioned in our form by almost every culture are
immortal; we have always dreamed of acquiring immortality for ourselves. A fundamental aspect of the way that we exist
today, however, is that we will only exist for a short time. We know that
others have existed before us and hope still more will follow. We live much
longer than many other creatures and most animals seem to have a set,
programmed lifespans. But, it appears,
that not even our species is immortal. We have not been around for that long in
the greater scheme of things and we have witnessed the extinctions of many
great species. We suspect that the human
race itself will one day cease to exist, as will our beloved Earth. The longest living organism known to man is
the great basin bristlcone pine tree, over 5000 years old; about the age of written
human history. The oldest humans alive barely make it over 100. Humans have
always looked up at the stars with aspirations to explore beyond. But we now
know that anything we could get to within our current human lifespan would be inhospitable.
It seems quite clear that our solar system has no other hospitable environments
for human life beyond Earth, unless we can figure out how to terraform Mars. The
nearest stars that may have hospitable environments for our kind of life are
more than a thousand light years away. One solution to this problem is that
generation after generation of people live, procreate and die in space whilst pioneering
towards where we might discover something. Another is to live longer.
At the Buck Institute for Aging in San Francisco California, Gordon Lithgo has extended the
lives of worms that normally only live around twenty days to over 100 days by
manipulating their genes. At Cambridge, theoretical scientist Aubrey de Grey, at the Sens Research Foundation, believes that we could beat the aging process
even reversing it, making old age a much less common cause of death, possibly
allowing humans to live for thousands of years. Obviously there is more than living for a very
long time to exploring the universe beyond Earth but having more time could
definitely help. I imagine that Parliament Funkadelic’s Starchild, who
travelled the universe delivery holy funk, must have had to live for thousands
of years to get from place to place.
