{"id":119,"date":"2008-07-10T01:33:34","date_gmt":"2008-07-10T05:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/?p=119"},"modified":"2008-07-10T01:33:34","modified_gmt":"2008-07-10T05:33:34","slug":"on-the-problem-of-being-immortal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/2008\/07\/10\/on-the-problem-of-being-immortal\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Problem of Being Immortal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"body\"><em><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">And in the end it&#8217;s not the years in your life that count. It&#8217;s the life in your years.<\/span><\/em><\/span><em><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\">\u00a0-Abraham Lincoln<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p>We humans are near the cusp of a break thru on human evolution and longevity and we shouldn&#8217;t do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0Let&#8217;s work with some numbers (thou false, they illustrate the point).\u00a0 Take for instance a normal cell. every time it divides it loses a piece of itself, so in effect, it has lost a limited life, say 300. Then it would be replaced, but even that has a limited number of replacements.\u00a0 But a cancer cell does not have that limiter, meaning, cell life is a matter of chemistry and biology and so a long life of many cells is really possible. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Now, there are obvious problems with a really long life (or near immortality.)<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0 Reproduction.\u00a0 Why do it? After all, the race goes down instead of every 100 years, down every 200, or 300. \u00a0 Evolution of the human race would come to a general crawl as we learn to fix the many &#8220;shifts&#8221; in genetic code.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Other problems that come to mind<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Murder becomes more of a\u00a0 heinous crime, because you now stop someone from living potential centuries.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Their is the obvious overpopulation and overuse of resources by the living humans. Where will we put them all?\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>How about who gets the &#8220;drug?&#8221; who can afford it? will the rich be the only ones living the good life? Give it to people in america but not in India? What about people living on a small island in the pacific? Now it gets dicy.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are yet so many things to live for thou. The march of technology, living to see a woman president of the USA, or the first man on Mars, but, there is alway something to look forward to, and the past is just as always spots in the retold record.\u00a0 I can find dozens of reason to live, but,\u00a0unfortunately,\u00a0Life is worth living because we die.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And in the end it&#8217;s not the years in your life that count. It&#8217;s the life in your years.\u00a0-Abraham Lincoln We humans are near the cusp of a break thru on human evolution and longevity and we shouldn&#8217;t do it.\u00a0 \u00a0Let&#8217;s work with some numbers (thou false, they illustrate the point).\u00a0 Take for instance a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4],"tags":[361,360,358,359],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-truthiness","tag-biology","tag-cells","tag-immortality","tag-life"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thestormypresent.com\/ocean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}