• Question: Will it be ever possible to live forever?

    Asked by xx.CAITLIN.xx to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 21 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Sinna.
    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 21 Jun 2015:

      Although we are quite far away from being able to make people live forever, I think it is possible that science will be able to make people live forever. The question is ‘would you want to live forever if you just became more old and frail and you weren’t in good health?’

      People are trying to find out how to help people to remain as healthy as possible as they age. This is probably better because I would like to remain healthy for longer.

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 21 Jun 2015:

      I agree with Jonny – I think it may be possible to live forever (well, at least a few thousand years 🙂 ) at some point, but it’s tough to tell whether you would want to if you could. Apart from better medicine, there is also the possibility that if we understand how thoughts and memories are built in the brain, we can build the same structures e.g. in computers. Which might mean that even if your body dies, you can preserve your thoughts more or less forever. All of that is a hugely long way off though, so we have some time to figure out if we want those types of technology or not. 🙂

    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 24 Jun 2015:

      I doubt it -we’d have to entirely stop the body’s decay, which seems unlikely. Most of the advances in life expectancy in recent years have come from curing diseases, rather than preventing the effects of aging. I’m not sure if we’ll be able to get that much further without a major breakthrough in some sort of anti-aging science.

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