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The prospect of increasing human lifespans with new technologies and its impact on sustainability is poorly studied<\/p>\n
getty<\/p>\n
During the military parade celebrations in Beijing on September 3, 2025, China\u2019s President Xi Jinping and Russia\u2019s president Vladimir Putin were overheard talking about the prospects of organ transplants and biotechnology as a means of prolonging life.<\/a> The quest for \u201ceternal life\u201d has been a preoccupation of science fiction plots and James Bond capers and particularly fascinated autocracy. In the film Die Another Day, the villain is a North Korean colonel named Zao <\/a>who undergoes gene therapy in Cuba to gain immortality. Incidentally, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un also took center-stage in the ceremonies this week! Beyond the malevolent use for prolonging autocracy, such genetic manipulations may indeed help us understand the structural causes of aging and whether there is opportunity for their reversal.<\/p>\n Aging in essence is a process by which the body loses information. DNA and genetics present the body with a sort of \u201cdigital\u201d form of information; the body must read that information at the molecular level through an analogue process of transcription, which biologist David Sinclair refers to as the epigenome.<\/a> The prefix \u201cepi\u201d refers to environmental factors that can lead to particular genes being activated or not, for better or for worse: hence, nature\u2013 nurture complementarity is perennially relevant (approximately one- third nature and two- thirds nurture dependence). The Nobel Prize- winning discoveries of John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka<\/a> found that mature cells could be reprogrammed to become \u201cpluripotent,\u201d whereby they could essentially go back to an earlier stem state. This revolutionary insight indicated that we could turn back the cellular clock in what was previously believed to be an irreversible process.<\/p>\n Why is the life expectancy of mice 3 to 4 years while whales can live as long as Immortality may be in the offing for all practical purposes through computational means as well. Human beings, in essence, \u201clive\u201d through their memories and their personalities. If those neural attributes of what we call our \u201cmind\u201d can be \u201cuploaded\u201d into a digital form that could then be manifest in either a physical or virtual persona, we could have mortality without the same degree of resource constraints that a biological form would entail. This is also referred to as whole brain emulation (WBE).<\/a> Such an approach has been championed by futurist Ray Kurzweil, currently a “visionist” at Google, as well as by Israeli- Swiss neuroscientist Henry Markram who started the Blue Brain Project in 2005 and which this year became the Open Brain Institute<\/a>. This project aims to develop detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mouse brain, ultimately leading to similar options for human brains. Using data to generate neural order of this kind would require enormous amounts of energy which is yet to be accounted for.<\/p>\n Already within the past 100 years, humanity has been able to double life expectancy<\/a> through the wonders of modern medicine. Much of this statistic has to do with reducing infant mortality but there is little doubt that we have now vanquished many diseases and unlocked the secrets of the ageing process itself. The environmental movement in the mid-twentieth century was preoccupied with population growth due to high fertility rates, and this was considered a threat resource security for the planet by ecologists like Paul Ehrlich. <\/a> At present we are less concerned with population growth itself due to rapid decline in fertility rates but an increase in longevity and indeed the prospect of physical or even virtual immortality remains a conundrum for sustainability science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The prospect of increasing human lifespans with new technologies and its impact on sustainability is poorly studied getty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[7736,64,63,84820,51923,84822,1300,5278,84821,40846,10485,25347,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-120011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-ageing","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-autocrats","12":"tag-bioethics","13":"tag-cryogenics","14":"tag-death","15":"tag-gene-therapy","16":"tag-immortality","17":"tag-life-expectancy","18":"tag-longevity","19":"tag-population-growth","20":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
200 years? What underlying structural reasons account for such divergences? The
dominant hypotheses in this regard relate to sexual reproductive years as being the
key determinant in evolutionary outcomes of how long organisms may live. Since
rodents can reproduce within a few months of birth, the evolutionary investment in
perpetuating longer life expectancy is not warranted. Human beings reach sexual maturity after 12\u2013 15 years, and females are able to reproduce for a few decades; hence our life expectancy has emerged accordingly. An additional factor which plays into
life expectancy is how long a species has been around to overcome some aspects of<\/a>
\u201cevolutionary neglect\u201d and still increase life expectancy. <\/a>Humans have only been
around for a few hundred thousand years, while whales have been around for at least
30 million years.<\/p>\n