Cenegenics.

Looks like immortality is just around the bend.

 

Scientifically, a human could live up to 200 years, all we have to do is know how to get there, before succumbing to our own organism.

 

I'd think the brain would be the one thing keeping us from living forever. The longer a person lives, the faster time seems, the more memories you'll have clogging up the works, and the harder it will be to learn new things while still remembering your life. And, you can never form a relationship with someone who isn't immortal, because eventually something like a 50 year marriage with a normally aging woman will seem like a blur in the massive expanse of time that is your life, apart from that an infinite amount of time in the universe would make someone crazy.
Plus, if immortality works, eventually your perpetual life would turn you into the last of a dying breed millions of years in the future. No sex, look like a freak compared to the rest of the evolving world, and possibly life in a zoo.

 

Evolution hates immortality.

Apart from the pressure on resources for the entire ecosystem (baby-boomers who never die off? Goodbye everything!) the Red Queen Model states that your dna must keep changing to keep ahead of evolving parasites and pathogens, ie, you have to keep running to stay still.

Therefore a few centuries on, these immortals would have either (1) their own species of parasites and diseases, perfectly adapted to their dna, OR, (2) the entire planetary ecology would have crashed thanks to history's most wasteful generation never ever stopping.

In fact, evolution already hates us. Any species which lives long, breeds fast, kills anything and eats everything is always going to collapse the ecosystem which supports it and go extinct in the process. Thanks to old, energetic baby-boomers, we can look forward to an accelerated demise.

 

Well, I won't make it to 200.

 

Biblically, max-level is about 120 years. Personally, I intend to be all used up by 65.

 

Biblically, we can come back to life after we've been killed. Well... Gross can!

 

I thought Jehova capped the lifespan at four score and ten (90) years.

But that would have been rescinded with the New Testament along with other damnations with the Sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

 

Nope, it was 120 years, and there is no indication in scripture that the level cap was removed. Nor has living beyond 120 become a normal thing. I'm not sure where you got fourscore and ten, or the idea that anything was rescinded by the death of Christ. The earth is still cursed, man is still sinful, people still die.

 

Enoch lived 365 years and Methuselah lived 969 years. Gen 5:21-27

 

Actually, it took several generations after the flood to go into effect. (Genesis 11) Although each generation lived for a shorter time than the previous.

The max-level verse:
"And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." Genesis 6:3

 

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/05/world/jeanne-calment-world-s-elder-dies-at-122.html

 

Anyone else noticed that if Methuselah etc were actually counting their 'years' in 'moons' then it adds up to an ordinary lifespan?

What's more likely? Antediluvian human-gregorim hybrids with elven lifespans or... prehistoric moon-worshipping peasants forgot to divide by thirteen for the new calendar?

 

I'm more worried about the starman waiting in the sky. He knows I'd like to meet him but he thinks he'll blow my mind.

 

Some do believe that years is a mistranslation and it was supposed to be months/moons like you suggest, that would put Methuselah at 96.9 years old (incredibly ancient for pre-biblical times) when he died and Enoch at 36.5.

If you go with the 10 month calendars from the time the torah was being written, Enoch's 365 years would translate to 304 and a few months and Methuselah would be 807.5.

 

Or... successive generations of story-tellers embellished and exaggerated the stories.

 

Either that, or successive generations of people carried on the work and names of those biblical figures.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UOPQ6gxCow

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100525060751AAKUt2M

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_have_lived_120_years