SWITCHING ON OUR IMMORTALITY GENES …
(…we should live so long?)

We’re apparently not just reaching out for the stars these days, but are now on the threshold of switching on our “immortality” genes besides.

That’s right, molecular biology researchers from places such as Harvard, MIT, Penn, Johns Hopkins, and Berkeley medical research centers seem to have figured out how to do it. We won’t go into all the technical details here, but essentially, they’ve figured out how to maintain the end caps of something called –Telemerase – which protects our DNA, while it keeps replicating dead or dying cells. In short, that’s the equivalent of hitting a “pause button” if you will…to our aging process …by as much as up to 70%! Which means regardless of your current chronological age, it’s like turning back the clock to the way you were 20-30 years earlier…and keeping you at that level from then on.

This is not science fiction. They’re actually at the point of conducting human clinical trials to develop and obtain FDA approval for some sort of injection therapy that will do just that.

Frankly, we’re not so sure this is a good idea on a number of levels, our main concern about it being how that might affect our population density. We’re already nearing seven billion of us human critters here on Planet Earth…and it’s now an open question if that isn’t at or near the limits of sustainability for it. So what happens if we earthlings suddenly not only live much longer than we do now, but actually manage to extend our life spans to well beyond the 150 to 200 year mark, still strongly active, and still reproductively potent? Could our Earth habitat support such Methusalah-like numbers?

One of the likeliest outcomes from such a crowded situation is that, much like other creatures isolated into small environments and habitats have shown, we humans would physically revert to smaller almost pygmy-like size. That is, instead of a plus/minus six foot height and matching weight, we would evolve back into three-four foot height beings with a corresponding decrease in weight…as an adaptation to having less food resources available because of such a crowd of numbers.

Of course, in that event it could also be an advantage, because then our future astronauts and planet-colonizers not only being longer-lived but also smaller and lighter, would allow us to have larger passenger payloads of these per space craft, and because of such longer life spans, make long inter-planetary voyaging a more feasible possibility.

In short, this developing technology may indeed be bringing we humans to the threshold of a truly Star Trek era, where we’re voyaging around what we call…SPACE…in craft much like the star ship Enterprise.

But the real benefit of all that would be that this would give us other options other than having to engage in constant genocidal conflicts to reduce an over-populated world here on Earth, filled with geriatric types…not acting their age.

Sorry, molecular biologists, while we can appreciate your scientific accomplishments in this field, and all of the above possibilities we may derive from them, there’s a greater consideration besides all that, which is this quote from the lyrics of this aria in Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess…It Ain’t Necessarily So…”Methusalah lived nine hundred years… but who calls that livin’ when no woman will give in to no man what’s nine hundred years!”

CENTURION