Well maybe not eternal, but a heck of a lot longer than the average life span now, if you listen to what science is saying. Scientists all over the world are excited, because they have been able to extend the life space of certain creatures like worms, that have a life span of a week or two to eight times that. They reason that if they can extend the life span of a creature like that, or certain types of yeast bacteria, or even mice, then they should be able to do the same for humans that have similar genes. Hey wait a second, has anyone out there ever thought that maybe the eight or sixteen weeks that they get is it? I mean maybe they can only give us another few weeks. Maybe that is the maximum that life can be extended right now and it only seems that they are offering life spans eight times as long, because the worms and bacteria have such short lives? Right now one in ten thousand people in industrialized countries reaches 100 years of age. Listening to these guys, the average age could be about 600 years with one in ten thousand reaching 800 years of age. One has to wonder, won't this increase the chances of dying from disease tremendously? Unless we can eliminate things like heart disease and such, it may not make any difference if life can be extended.

Eternal youth has always been the goal of people. No one wants to die, but that is the natural way of things. Unfortunately if people were to live to those long ages, it would upset the balance of life on the Earth. Just think of how many people would be on the planet now, if they lived an average of 600 years. There wouldn't be enough work for more than about 5% of them, causing tremendous social unrest and poverty on a scale that is unimagined. Wars would be continuous, as countries fight over scarce resources for their burgeoning populations. Ironically extremely long life spans could wipe out life on earth. The only thing that we could do to try and save ourselves is ship people off to colonize other planets. That way they would not only have work, but they would relieve the population pressure on this planet. Currently the oldest person that we have records of lived in France and died in 1997, she was 122 years old. One problem that science has, is that it may be unethical to test life extension drugs on humans. This is especially true if they turn out to be dangerous and there is a chance of a fatality. It is sort of like seeking permission to test lipstick on humans when you know that it could make their lips fall off. If this was a result of the experiment the FDA would discontinue them. This will not stop secret testing however. There are a few people out there that have the resources to fund something like this in secret and you better believe that they all want to live for hundreds of years. Scientists agree that just extending life is not practical, after all, no one wants to live in a vegetatove state. The goal has to be to extend life in a healthy manner, which make this project even harder.

Scientists just keep finding out things about aging. Did you know that your brain begins to shrink slightly after about 20 years of age? So what makes us age anyway? As we age, the ends of our chromosomes start to decay. They are the carriers of our genes. It is like an unraveling. Scientists believe that if they can sort of knit the ends back together then we increase our life span. Picture a braided rope. I am sure many of you have seen one that begins to unbraid. The end begins to look like many narrower ropes that were wound around each other and sometimes even these unwind. Our chromosomes are something like that. Scientists have found that there is a protein called telomerase that can cap these loose ends. In order to do this extra copies of genes would need to be engineered into human bodies. The idea is to cap the loose ends before they reach the point where they can not divide anymore and they die. So where do we find this telomerase? That is the big problem, it is found in of all things, cancer cells. Now scientists have to worry that if they introduce this protein into someone's body, they will get cancer. They have to figure out some way to guarantee that this won't happen. If telomerase can theoretically slow down aging, then this leads us to believe that if you have none at all, you will age faster, but that is not true One thing that scientists have found out is that loss of telomerase does not cause us to age, so there has to be something else that stops us from rapid aging and this something else might be what is missing from people that have diseases that cause rapid aging.

Even though scientists have found that telomeres is found in cancer, not everyone with cancer has this protein. The mystery just gets deeper and deeper. Every time a chromosome is copied and passed on, it gets shorter. The ends are not copied. It has been estimated that the limit for our chromosomes to divide is about 50. Some scientists believe that it is a certain gene that decides your life span and to this end Belgian researchers are working to try and find it. This gene is believed to be the one that controls the length of our chromosomes. The process of aging, while not completely understood, is becoming clearer every day. Every human has 23 pairs of chromosomes and men and women share 22 of them. Babies get one sex chromosome from each parent and the combination they receive determines their gender. This is because women have 2 X chromosomes and men have 1 X and 1 Y. Some scientists are now saying that some specific process in our bodies is turning genes and chromosomes on and off. There seems to be many different theories in this area.

There are a lot of ideas out there about what causes aging. Oxidation is often discussed by people. There are many different vitamins and minerals on the market that supposedly help us fight oxidation. While many people take them, there is no scientific proof that I know of, that they extend life even one second. The principle behind them seems to make sense, but there is so much more to aging than just oxidation, that it just might turn out that oxidation plays a very small part or everyone might be wrong and it might turn out that it plays no part at all. Perhaps the answer to aging will turn out to be something so simple that scientists will be kicking themselves for years to come, for not discovering this sooner. It also might just turn out that all this computer power we are developing might be able to be used to solve the problem. We just might be able to develop a computer someday that will be able to completely analyze every function of our bodies along with monitoring all the cells, genes, chromosomes and such. This is not as far fetched as we once thought it was.

Finally, what will be the social effects of a population with an extremely long life span? As I mentioned above, it would be a disaster, unless several things were changed. The first thing is government will either have to limit the births or send people routinely off world to other places to prevent over crowding and social unrest. We are in the midst of a robotic and computer revolution that has eliminated jobs, not created more. It is now possible for only a couple of people to supervise and maintain a completely robotic car building facility. A huge peanut butter plant in this country has only 12 employees per shift to watch the machines. What this means is that there are not enough jobs for the present population, let alone one that will increase at such a tremendous rate. Long life, contrary to popular belief, may not even be desirable. It might turn out that people don't want to leave their families and have to go to other worlds, in exchange for long life. So I guess we will just have to wait and seen how this thing is going to work out. Will scientists discover that elusive fountain of youth someday, maybe it is possible after all?