DYING will be ‘optional’ within just 27 years and the ageing process will be ‘reversible’ .
Immortality is a real and scientific possibility that could come much earlier than originally thought.
Humans will only die in accidents, never of natural causes or illness, by around the year 2045 .
Hence its ‘crucial’ that old age starts to be classified as an ‘illness’ so that publicly-funded research into its ‘cure’ can extend.
Nanotechnology is key, among other new genetic manipulation techniques.
The process will involve turning ‘bad’ genes into healthy ones, eliminating dead cells from the body, repairing damaged cells, treatments with stem cells and ‘printing’ vital organs in 3D.
So you can ‘chose not to die’ and in 30 years’ time, you will be ‘younger than you are today’.
Ageing is the result of DNA ‘tails’, known as ‘telomeres’, in chromosomes — of which every cell except red blood and sex cells has 23 pairs — becoming shorter, and reversing ageing involves lengthening the telomeres.
Telomeres become damaged and shortened with the passage of time, a process that speeds up in the event of toxins entering the body — smoking, alcohol and air pollution are among elements that reduce the length of telomeres, thus accelerating ageing.
Within 10 years, illnesses such as cancer will be curable, and major international corporations such as Google will be ‘entering the field of medicine’ because they are ‘beginning to realise that curing ageing is possible’. Google has begun a project called Calico to capture death .
Microsoft has reportedly already announced the setting up of a cryopreservation centre in which a scientist is researching the possibility of cancer being completely curable within a decade.
Although ‘people generally do not know about it’, it was discovered in 1951 how cancer cells are immortal: when Henrietta Lacks died from cervical cancer, surgeons removed the tumour and kept it — and it is still ‘alive’ today.
Immortality will not necessarily mean the planet becomes overcrowded, there is still plenty of room for more people on Earth, and these days, people do not have anywhere near as many children as they did in past decades and centuries; plus, ‘it will be possible to live in space by then’.
“Japan and the Koreas, if they continue with their current trend of hardly having any children, will become extinct — within two centuries, there’ll be no Japanese or Korean people on the planet,”
“But thanks to these new techniques, there will indeed be Japanese and Korean people, because they’ll live forever and remain young.”
The cost of anti-ageing treatment will be similar to that of the latest SmartPhones.
“At first, it’ll be expensive, but with a competitive market the price will gradually fall because it’ll be something that benefits everyone,”
“Technology, when it’s new, is poor and extremely expensive, but it eventually becomes democratic and mainstream and becomes cheaper.”