Quote:
Originally posted by juju
Well, what I was thinking is: What if we do find and defeat the cause of aging? Considering all the other things we've accomplished, it seems, abeit remotely, possible to me. There are even scientists working on that right now.
Given that thought, I thought it would be cool that all of the stuff we imagined might happen in a completly fictional scenario could still happen in reality.
The memory thing is a good point, I suppose, but I really don't see why you think there's an upper storage limit. Given that we have no idea how it's stored, how can you infer this? I'm not sure I understand your connection with forgetfulness.
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As far as my understanding goes, and it may be flawed, the cause of the degradation in aging is due to errors in the duplication of DNA. It's a bit like what happens when a document is copied, and then the copy is copied, and so on... the quality erodes away until what is left is a blobby mess. Of course the process of quality loss is much slower in DNA replicatoin, but every time an error occurs replication, the new cells are less perfect.
So, if that theory is accurate, then all we must do to extend our lifesan is to improve the body's DNA replication process. To
stop aging, we must
perfect the body's DNA replication process. This would be exceedingly difficult, and is not even close to being on the horizon, but not impossible. Shit, we don't even have the flying cars we were promised yet.
There are other secondary causes of aging, for instance the body produces most of it's disease-fighting T-cells very early in life, so the immune system fights new invaders less effectively as one ages. Also, we spend or lves introducing toxins into our bodies, which cause eroding damage. But these secondary issues are nowhere near as hard to solve as the DNA replication issue. Eternal youth, though not immortality, is a distant but real possibility.
I presume that there is an upper limit to memory based on the fact that there is limited real estate in the human skull, and a science indicates that memory is a chemical and/or hardware mechanism. Now if you believe in spirituality then you might surmise that the physical body is not a limitation, but that's a discussion for another thread. My understanding is that long-term memory is WORM storage (Write Once Read Many), like a a CD with an open session. Then there's short-term memory, which is like RAM (Random Access Memory) which is quick but limited, so old and/or less useful information is removed as needed.
Alzheimer's Disease is basically when one loses the ability to store information reliably in long-term memory. Patients don't typically forget what they already knew, but learning new information is near impossible. This is why I conclude that there is a limit to human memory capacity, and once reached, one must rely wholly on short-term memory, which is a huge handicap to a normal way of life.
Or maybe I'm wrong, it happens frequently.