Out of Pod Experience

... Each exceedingly long lived human would would become it's own unique version of itself, as it collected anomalies over long periods of time. The longer the lifespan of said organism the greater this divergence would be. ...

While I prescribe to the "non-sexist" camp, I'll head off the sexists out there by asking the question that I know they will ask:

Ectothermia, or cold-bloodedness, is a major benefit to big animals. They need only a fraction of the food other animals need, their hearts beat more slowly, their cells burn and die more slowly, many diseases cannot affect them, they can tolerate a lot of environmental and dietary change, and they can go dormant when things are too bad and just wait for better times.

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He shoots!
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World needs more Chimeras that will fix everything!

While you are correct that "we do not die because we have to", I have to disagree with you in that we have evolved to do so. There is no incentive for evolution to develop organisms that have to die. Take oxygen for example. Oxygen is a poison. Because of the high reactivity of oxygen it will lead to, if not countered, degradation of cellular functions and eventually to death of the cell. But precisely because of this quality of oxygen, it has been advantageous for organisms to evolve to use it in energy metabolism by the reduction of oxygen with electrons from carbohydrates. This produces much more energy in the form of ATP (or adenosine triphosphate) than using some other element in reduction like anoxygenic bacteria do. To counter the harmful effects of oxygen, oxygen using organisms have evolved several mechanisms to transform the harmful oxygen radicals to less harmful forms. But eventually oxygen will kill us (...indirectly).

Also, due to the nature of DNA replication, the DNA strands get shorter and shorter after each replication and this will eventually lead to degradation of the genetic code, loss of cellular functions and programmed cell death (or apoptosis). To counter this, organisms with linear chromosomes have evolved to include telomerase sequences to the ends of the DNA strands. These sequences do not code of any function, but allow the cell to maintain its functions longer. Incidentally, cancer cells develop when the programmed cell death is not functioning, which allows the cancer cells to replicate indefinitely. Cancer cells also have the ability to regenerate the telomerase sequences, thus extending the cells ability to replicate.

So, we die because of the accumulated effects of genetic degradation and diseases, not because we have evolved to die (since the ability to counter the harmful effects of living is there. It just isn't good enough to keep organisms alive forever.)

He's ignored!

...because he is still prattling on about sexist comment and doesn't understand that a discussion does not involve winning over someone else. .

No, you missed the point that complex fauna can live a long time and I wasn't interested in discussing the pedantic points of your tangent.

You appear to be doing forum PVP with the goal of 1-up man ship. I am not interested in playing that game.

He's ignored!

...because he is still prattling on about sexist comment and doesn't understand that a discussion does not involve winning over someone else.




Thank you for your response. You sound like you either work or are studying in that sector, (I am just a programmer that reads non fiction into other subjects)

My original talking of us using recombination would go like this:

Individual "Wun" turns eighteen and has sex multiple times. On one occasion, they take on the genetics of their partner and start growing into a new life form, as Landrae said, Chimeras, however, it wouldn't be permanent. So, at eighteen they have a child and they recombine. At twenty five they are genetically speaking a new person, their own child, now when they have a child, it will genetically speaking be their grand child. Thirty two? Great grand child.

Since we wouldn't be copying ourselves but growing into a new body, I think we would combat most of the reasons that we grow old and die. Additionally, we would have much more reason to live longer as we are producing a next generation every seven years instead of every eighteen.

Two side effects of this would be that we don't replace brain cells, so we would grow senile and eventually go insane. The other is that with no inbuilt control system, we could change sex every seven years. Although, changing the bodies gender could also have evolutionary benefits and if we did have influences on what we become, we could fulfil imbalances in the population.

I have been reading about genetics lately and one thing that occurs to me is that people breed like vermin, giving in to their base desires too young.

Another problem that stems from young parents is maturity and the poor emotional upbringing that they give their children, lowering the quality of society.

We do not die because we have to, we die because we evolved to do so. If you work in the medical field you will understand what happens to a large portion of the human population as they age. Even if our cells were not hard coded to stop dividing, each and every human being would amass a wealth of their own personal body changing events. Take for example a simple toe corn. It is a simple enough of an example, life creates it and makes it grow, much like the force only much more disgusting. It gets to a certain size in a human lifetime if left unchecked, but think what would happen if that person lived many times longer?