51–60 of 67 posts
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Until one day, there is a fire and all his computers with memories are burned beyond repair. And that too on the day of a reboot...
Luckily, he was storing everything in "the cloud!", so it's all ok.
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Seems like immortality without memory is useless, so really that's the question.
Write stuff down! BAM, problem solved. (Seriously speaking, consider the sci-fi short story possibilities of an individual who had to reboot every 80 years or so, but who had had access to a computer and competent legal/investment advice for roughly the same timescale as the present-day Catholic Church has been in operation. Age 0 through 24 is essentially one long data dump, but he's gotten pretty good at constructi…
What about Hydra? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Hydra
Yeah, I think there are a few animals like that. So while it's not likely the only "immortal" animal, this jellyfish does definitely seem to have a unique kind of immortality.
It just happens that most creatures we have close contact with - i.e. Mammals, do.
What is unusual about this Jellyfish is not it's lack of ageing, but it's ability to return to "childhood" at times of stress and then become an adult once again, later.
It's a weird and fascinating concept for us Mammals. Although I am pretty sure I wouldn't want to repeat my teenage years over and over.
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Do they not get cancer?
There's still background radiation. That the telomere doesn't shorten basically means the DNA doesn't "age"; cells don't become more likely to mutate after X duplications begin to damage the code, like ours do.
This form of immortality displeases me. I'd rather not turn back into a fetus for the sake of immortality.
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Keeping a journal probably wouldn't help. Take the case of Clive Wearing, who developed anterograde amnesia after a bout of encephalitis. He can conduct an orchestra, but he can't remember what he did 10 minutes before. He keeps a journal. It's a timestamped log of him saying that he's "finally awake" over and over. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing In addition to robbing you of your past, amnesia makes the…
But unless I missed something, amnesia doesn't have anything to do with the subject. In this case you don't forget what you did 10 minutes ago; you forget what you did 80 years ago (which I suppose most people do anyway).
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There's still background radiation. That the telomere doesn't shorten basically means the DNA doesn't "age"; cells don't become more likely to mutate after X duplications begin to damage the code, like ours do.
Is telomere shortening the sole cause of DNA replication errors? (Besides radiation, which damages the DNA directly?)
But, sometimes these mechanisms fail and a cell survives with mutated DNA. If the right genes are mutated, then it grows uncontrolled and you've got cancer.
In order to get immortality, these repair mechanisms would have to be as robust after 1000 years as they are after 20 years. In humans, the repair mechanisms tend to degrade as you age, which is why, the theory goes, people are more likely to get cancer as they get older. It's not that there are more errors then, but that they're not corrected as well.
Like most living systems, Jellyfishes are self organizing systems. But the difference is that a jellyfish is quite minimalistic in structure and their neural system is simple too. And most certainly, it lacks emotions of any kind. That is what amazes me about jellyfishes: a very, very simple system genetically programmed to for reproduction lacking any "purpose". And, now they say it can even go back to its proto sta…