How To Live Forever

Many people contemplate the thought of living forever, they yearn to cement their existence beyond the fleshy vessel that carries them through their humanoid life. They hope that some how there will be this miracle and all our memories will be transfered into a computer and life will continue indefinitely in a virtual realm. Others believe that medical science coupled with nanotechnology will lead to advances in cellular repair, maintenance and genesis. For the the 21st century human who wants to live forever, I do feel that many of these advances are possible but will not happen until the latter half of this millenia. Whether they will in turn lead to immortality is an entirely different matter.

Take a step back from all the hype for a moment and take a closer look at life and death, depending on your perspective the lines can very quickly begin to blur. Think about it for a moment, what is life? Now, what is death? More than likely you will have conjured up some sort of biological theory, that includes reproduction, organisation, metabolism, locomotion, etc and death is when these functions breakdown in such an entity. Let's take a simple organism for example, made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a few other trace elements, organised in a certain way, it can reproduce, metabolise, and move. Boil it up, break it down and collect all the subcomponents, now it is dead, it no longer does any of the things that are the characteristics of life. Let's take another example, a large collection of gases, hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon and a few others cluster together to form a star, they burn (respiration of sorts: metabolism) fuel to produce energy that holds the star together, it moves through space, it is organised, spherical and layered with a nuclear core, and eventually it blows up and makes other stars and planets (reproduction). Are stars alive, it is debatable, the definitions of life and death are not absolute. So if we are not even sure what is living and what is dead how can we actually live forever?

Let's move back to a typical biotic uni-cellular organism, made up of those few elements, take all those elements and mix them in a jar do you get the organism, if you shake it forever they will eventually assemble into that organism. So is life really more about structure, not necessarily organisation but order, is life just a material that defies entropy and is death just a state of entropy. If this is the case, in a universe that strives towards entropy is it really possible to defy this and hold onto the order that embodies life? An affirmative answer to this question and a practical application of this is really the answer to how to live forever. So forget all the gym memberships, super-computers that scan brains, robotics and nanotechnology, really it comes down to one thing can you hold yourself together forever while the universe endeavors to tear you apart, this is the key to immortality.