Didn't Juan Ponce de León try to find the mythical Fountain of Youth in the 1500s? Isn't this the same search (freezing huh?) but using science to try and stave off the inevitable? What these folks don't consider in their analysis, is that aging is in our cells at the deepest and most fundamental level. Leaving the aging bit aside, if I …
Didn't Juan Ponce de León try to find the mythical Fountain of Youth in the 1500s? Isn't this the same search (freezing huh?) but using science to try and stave off the inevitable? What these folks don't consider in their analysis, is that aging is in our cells at the deepest and most fundamental level. Leaving the aging bit aside, if I was frozen for 200 years, someone knocked the frost off me, figured out how to turn my -130 f degree frozen blood, heart, liver, gut and brain into something working again, would I want to live in that world?
That's the question addressed in whimsical fashion in Woody Allen's amusing 1973 film "Sleeper", in which Allen is the owner of a health food store in New York City who is frozen in 1973 after an operation goes wrong and defrosted 200 years later by rebels who hope that with no official identity he will be useful to their plans to overthrow the police state that the U.S. has become. Of course the film is filled with the usual Woody Allen quips. At one point, Luna (Diane Keaton) asks him "What's it like to be dead for 200 years?", and Allen replies "It's like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills."
As to whether it might be possible in the not too distant future to actually slow down, stop, or even reverse the aging process, I think that many of the same people who believe as you do "that aging is in our cells at the deepest and most fundamental level" are also the same people that are terrified of the possibility that they might be wrong, and that those who do take advantage of this technology to live, if not forever, then significantly longer than the current human lifespan, will find pleasant and constructive ways to spend their additional time on earth.
Like Queen’s song “39”. Astronauts take off. Gone 100 Earth years but only a couple for them since they traveled near Speed of Light. Came home, wives, siblings, grandchildren all long dead. Very sad. “All your letters in the sand cannot heal me like your hand, for my life’s still ahead, pity me.”
Didn't Juan Ponce de León try to find the mythical Fountain of Youth in the 1500s? Isn't this the same search (freezing huh?) but using science to try and stave off the inevitable? What these folks don't consider in their analysis, is that aging is in our cells at the deepest and most fundamental level. Leaving the aging bit aside, if I was frozen for 200 years, someone knocked the frost off me, figured out how to turn my -130 f degree frozen blood, heart, liver, gut and brain into something working again, would I want to live in that world?
That's the question addressed in whimsical fashion in Woody Allen's amusing 1973 film "Sleeper", in which Allen is the owner of a health food store in New York City who is frozen in 1973 after an operation goes wrong and defrosted 200 years later by rebels who hope that with no official identity he will be useful to their plans to overthrow the police state that the U.S. has become. Of course the film is filled with the usual Woody Allen quips. At one point, Luna (Diane Keaton) asks him "What's it like to be dead for 200 years?", and Allen replies "It's like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills."
As to whether it might be possible in the not too distant future to actually slow down, stop, or even reverse the aging process, I think that many of the same people who believe as you do "that aging is in our cells at the deepest and most fundamental level" are also the same people that are terrified of the possibility that they might be wrong, and that those who do take advantage of this technology to live, if not forever, then significantly longer than the current human lifespan, will find pleasant and constructive ways to spend their additional time on earth.
Like Queen’s song “39”. Astronauts take off. Gone 100 Earth years but only a couple for them since they traveled near Speed of Light. Came home, wives, siblings, grandchildren all long dead. Very sad. “All your letters in the sand cannot heal me like your hand, for my life’s still ahead, pity me.”