| json_metadata | "{"app":"Musing","appTags":["life","health","aceh"],"appCategory":"life","appTitle":"Humanity can defeat death?","appBody":"<p>Not currently. But it is conceivable that it will be possible to stop and reverse aging in the future. It would be a hugely complicated engineering challenge to stop aging but in principle it's just that, an engineering challenge.</p>\n<p>Different species have typical life spans that vary a great deal. Large animals tend to have long life spans that correspond to the length of time it takes from a newborn or a newly hatched individual to reach adulthood. The typical human lifespan is about 70-90 years. Some of the longest living animal species include bowhead whales who can live 200 years. African elephants live about as long as humans. There are clam species that can life up to 500 years and some eels and fish can live twice as long as humans,</p>\n<p>If you look at things from an evolutionary perspective, lifespan seems to be programmed rather than a result of decay and accumulation of errors in the organism at cellular and higher levels that are very hard and costly to correct. Perhaps lifespan, too, is an adaptation that has helped the DNA of the species to proliferate. Remember, evolution does not \"care\" about individuals but DNA. Humans have a relatively long life span because humans have long childhood. Menopause causes women to stop being able to reproduce decades before they die. This is most likely because children are so needy for so long that they need a young mother and also because grandmothers are very beneficial for the survival and well-being of children.</p>\n<p>The accumulation of errors in DNA and the epigenetic mechanisms that control gene expression happens with aging. DNA molecules have what is called telomeres at there end that act as counters counting the times the cell has divided. Very simply put when the cell has reached a certain limit it stops dividing. The cell division limit is to help prevent cancer which is the result of DNA damage. Some of the visible effects of aging are caused by decreasing cell division. Cell division is needed to repair tissue damage. To prolong the human life span is an engineering challenge that involves many different components that need to work together seamlessly. But it think it can and will be done given sufficient time.</p>","appDepth":2,"appParentPermlink":"f35s8al9x","appParentAuthor":"kamilason","musingAppId":"aU2p3C3a8N","musingAppVersion":"1.1","musingPostType":"answer"}" |
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