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Boredom. Life just looses interest. This whole subject of conquering death has the most unusual connotations if you stop to think about it. Would we retire how would we remember all the names of the thousands of family members we would build up. How long would a judge sentence a prisoner to life in prison for? And the one you have cleverly pointed out, would life loose its novelty value? On this last one you could write a book.. But mostly I think your initial idea stems from the youth culture and modern schooling system. Children are all sent to one big building where they develop their own pecking order and value systems. Think, if there wasn’t that scholastic break from the normal activities of the real world, and you had all the time in the world (because you were immortal) you could learn everything by actually being there, rather than by reading it from books in a classroom) To learn geometry you would fly to India and draw out a drainage system for a small village that had severe sanitation problems. With enough time, even very untalented people can learn skills they are not naturally gifted in. For example, that robot you have as your personal icon, say you couldn’t turn a bolt to save yourself. With time, you could build that by hand, and when you were finished you could keep improving upon the design as you learned new skills. Would life get bored? I don’t think so. The possibilities would open up dramatically.

good point! we seem to be wandering off the topic here. will see if I can start another topic about how nature chases energy. like the present focus around sex and death. has all the makings of a great thriller. lets see if we can find some examples from nature to support or erode the sex death link.

ah, a politician. you think like my brother! those blasted greeks, putting everything into boxes for logical contemplation. how about this. Energy comes from the sun. it hits earth and is then re radiated. life occurs in that small delay between absorption and re emission. now start to construct your web of evolutionary events from that point. all reasons can stem from that.

you do this kind of thing with electronics and data checking. to repair any lost or distorted data. as for telomeres, if the parallel with electronics runs true, then you simply get the strand to skip the "check telomere then subtract one then activate" part of the programme.

Just had a brain storm on this. Why does the idea of immortality appeal to us? Because we are genetically predisposed to try and survive. And death is fairly final. And scary. And we are genetically predisposed to form relationships and despair when they cease. So what on what levels do we attempt to survive? The macro level,- where we fight disease. The immediate level, - where we fight physical threat. And the strategic level - where we plan for some future threat not yet present. So what kind of evolution is “immortality”? Possibly the last one, strategic. I’m not sure if evolution does strategic enhancements.

That my friend is a question best answered by Charles Darwin. but basically, well adapted genes get to reproduce in some way more than less well adapted genes. just like a sports team gets to the top of its league. read Darwin’s original books , they are not at all dated. tx boot.

you got that right, the tooth fairy wont pay up on the second set. ok here are some questions to help get to the core of this. what creature lives the longest. why. what creature lives the shortest, why. what person lives the longest why. what person lived the shortest, why. does sexual reproduction go hand in hand with shorter or longer life cycles. do creatures that live longer depend on their parents longer. at what point exactly does maturation become aging. is there a connection between creature complexity and length of life. Ps just read Darwin’s struggle for survival, he's a really good writer, subject matter aside

say if all the cells in our body get replaced by the time we reach sixty, how are early memories maintained? brain cells are cells as well arent they?

I just thought of shark teeth compared to ours. they have rows of them all revolving to the front, as one set wears out. ours do the replacement trick once only, then stay. while oxidation and mutations etc etc are interesting factors, if mother nature found it needed to make a creature live for two hundred years at peak operational efficiency, then it would construct systems to combat any one of those factors you mentioned. no the answer to this question is not in the physical limitations of replication systems. it's in the strategy that is served by limiting a lifespan.

question. are any of the cells that were alive in a person at two months old, still there at sixty years. or have they all been replaced?

and it even spills over into other areas, machines evolving...(cars are way cooler now than the first model T) and Social structures, evolving – like the corporate for example, they take over and compete with each other, just like mother nature intended.

ok ok I think I really have got it figured this time. wasn't it normal for people to die at about twenty throughout most of mankind’s history. they were either eaten or became lame or sick, because the environment was so severe. so why on earth would you install an industrial strength repair system into a creature that had a statistical survival period of about twenty years. you know nature doesn’t waste, so it would be sensible for it to just divert that extra repair capability elsewhere.

this death thing. It would not be that easy to avoid it. what might be under consideration is a person getting to puberty, then having the ageing genes switched off. so you would stay young for eighty years. -but subject to death by any number of ways. fire, blood loss and so on. I think the real answer to your question is in the sheer number of processes that it takes to keep an organism alive. the question shouldn’t be, why do we die, but rather how on earth is the body so good at repairing itself that we get to live as long as we do?

and another. How about this , it may be a simple energy equation. It may take less energy to start a new creature than keep repairing an older one. Therefore the population that expresses the expiry date characteristic will win over the one that does not. Because for the equal units of energy, the "expiry" type population gets more biomass. huh..what do you think?

just had a thought on this. because it's smarter to carry improvements in a creature in the genetic code rather than in learned behaviour. the genetic improvement is far more durable, and more in sync with the core rules of evolution. Think for example of a really old experienced creature competing for the same resources with an inexperienced but genetically improved younger creature. One of the prime control factors of evolution would blow a gasket.

Because, the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. Creatures in the deep cold cold artic sea live for ages, people started to notice this when a bone harpoon was found in a recent whale kill. A few creatures on earth do not age, tortoises are one example I think. Would you have it that we reached puberty then stopped the aging algorithm. that may be possible. nice for the living, not so good for the yet to be born.

from what you just said, I have realized that the way to win the evolution game is not to be the last man standing. it is to be the last group of life forms each efficiently utilising their particular niche. there is no point for example to have people photosynthesise light. plants do that and pay the price for it.

that made me laugh. you just had to throw the dramatic in there for effect. somehow I don’t think comets have to employ world war two fighter tactics to sneak up on unsuspecting planets. it's more like, I’m a big flaming comet what are you gonna do about it.

hey Martin. great poem. try this. remember the sensations of say fear and pride and shock and excitement etc and see if you can place them along your median line (from input port to exit port). the strangest one is one of extreme affection, it seems to sit in the heart, or is that just social conditioning?

Artorius. God creating all things is fine with me. science satisfies curiosity, but can never satisfy the soul. in the end even a belief in science can be considered faith. True story. Exiting an aircraft the first time with a parachute, looking down at the ground, I realised that the concept of air and gravity and all the things I held as fact were simply a matter of faith. I found myself realising that I had just taken my teachers word for most of the scientific principles I was about to trust my life to. but what the heck I thought. I took a leap of faith , a leap of faith in science. But still a leap of faith none the less. Ok, perhaps the palm of the person waiting to exit behind me shoved into my back made it a little easier.