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Looking For The Fountain Of Youth

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Although science fiction writers often keep their characters young, the search for a fountain of youth has always proved futile.  To date, our achievements have been limited to slowing the aging process down and patching up failing body parts.  The quest for an anti-aging pill has always left us empty handed.

However, there are some fascinating animal studies which indicate that the aging process can be delayed.  It seems that energy can be maintained throughout life.  Most scientists now think that aging involves more than just wear and tear.  It seems also to involve a pre-programmed genetic process, that begins at conception and continues until our biological clock runs down.  Humans hit a wall at 120 years - the limit mentioned in the Bible - no matter how much patching up we do.

Certainly wear and tear is a significant factor.  Thousands of free radical attacks are made upon our cell's DNA every day.  The damage takes its inevitable toll.  Antioxidants, in combination with substances that help cells produce energy, work well at the cellular level to prevent aging.  A chemical mixture like this can keep rats behaving like youngsters well into old age, although it doesn't significantly increase their life span.

So next time you read about an anti-aging pill, remember physical immortality is not available.  It seems our best bet will be a fountain of middle age!

MOVING BEYOND MATTER
 by William G. Hobbs

Who wants to live forever?  I do.  Why?  I'm not sure.  I have trouble imagining being dead.  Or rather, I have trouble imagining not being.  My life functions and my thinking works, based on the assumption that tomorrow I will still be here.

I know there was a time when I was not.  My birthday reminds me of when I entered the world, and I can read and learn about things that happened before, but I will never have any memories of times before I was born.  But when I think about the future, although I can't fully imagine what the world may look like in the next one hundred years or so, I can't imagine myself not being there.  If death and birth are common occurrences in everyone's life, why do I have a sense of one and not the other?  

Now, you may say, of course, you can't imagine your death, no one can see into the future.  But somehow some animals seem to know.  For example, Pacific salmon are born in freshwater rivers, travel to and spend their lives in a saltwater ocean, and then return to the place of their birth to spawn and then die.  They seem to be wired to know when the end of life will come.  Why aren't we?  Is this why we search for the "fountain of youth"?  Because we can't imagine not being alive.

Dr. Humphrey's mentioned the Bible saying the limit to human years would be one hundred and twenty years and modern science has been unable to prolong life much beyond that.   The verse is found in the first book of the Bible, in Genesis 6:3.   At that point in time the Bible records that the average lifespan of people was around nine hundred years of age!   

Not only did people live longer, Genesis records that death only entered humanity when Adam and Eve disobeyed God.   According to that we were never intended to die at all.   Could this be why long to live forever?   Is this sense of immortality the natural state?   And is death actually an unnatural result of Adam's and Eve's actions that have been passed onto us?   So I ask again, do you want to live forever?