Posted on 12/01/2014 5:14:34 AM PST by WhiskeyX
On a cold night in a remote cabin, Professor John Oldman (David Lee Smith of CSI: MIAMI) gathers his most trusted colleagues for an extraordinary announcement: He is an immortal who has migrated through 140 centuries of evolution and must now move on. Is Oldman truly Cro-Magnon or simply insane?
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Readers of Flash comics will reemember a character named Vandal Savage who has a similar backstory. Only he was a bad guy, not the hero.
I like old fiction.
I just re-read “The Variable Man” by Phillip K Dick yesterday and was struck by how much like the world of about 100 years from now we are today.
A man plucked from pre WWI Poland creates chaos in a 2100s world where training is so specific that people can’t do anything beyond what they know.
The revelation in the movie which umpteen zillion Christains will object to is that he was Christ ...
oops. couldn’t get the link to work, Mel brooks 200 year old man
Mel Brooks was the 2000 year old man with Carl Reiner.
The complete animated version, about 24 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqPtV-tOoMA
I remember an interesting treatise on immortality, a concept that has been around as long as there has been people.
The ancient Greeks had some interesting stories about goddesses making handsome men immortal. The first just did so, but could not inhibit his aging, so he eventually withered to the point of becoming cricket-like. The second goddess wanted a different man to retain his beauty, so she turned him into a statue.
More recent stories go deeply into things like the decision making process, and how mortality makes it easy. An immortal needs an alternative means to force decisions, or they will become inert, never doing anything.
The campy, science fiction movie Zardoz illustrated that with immortality, people reach the limits of their capabilities relatively quickly, which they cannot evolve beyond. But evolution effectively ends the immortality of an individual, because they do not remain the same.
Even with an ordinary life, so much information is recorded by the brain that a few times people have been seen going into a “mental erase” mode, eliminating a vast number of unimportant memories to make room for more.
Then there is the immortal jellyfish, a real thing. Turritopsis dohrnii is a species of small jellyfish which is found in the Mediterranean Sea and in the waters of Japan. It is unique in that it exhibits a certain form of “immortality”: it is the only known case of an animal capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
And do not think that this jellyfish can only do this because it is a simple organism. Some jellyfish have over 200 chromosome pairs, so they are more complicated than humans with a mere 46 pairs.
Oddly enough, though science is putting a lot of research into extending adult life, this jellyfish technique may be far more practical, that is, for people to revert to a far more flexible stage, perhaps just a few years old, using a stem cell ‘flood’ to rebuild themselves as young children.
However, it is very unlikely that either knowledge or personality would be retained in the process. So the body would be “somewhat” immortal, but the self would be forfeit in the process. It will anyway, with mortality.
Obsolescence is built into our DNA, with the telomere chains which shorten with each mitosis of the cells. When the telomere reaches the end of the chain,, the cells die off with fewer and fewer healthy new cells to replace them and maintain the vitality of the body. Death follows.
I started to watch this last year with much interest.....right up to the point that he declared himself to be Jesus Christ himself....WRONG!!
I never saw the end....garbage!
That is true, in a normal aging model. However, it may not have to be.
As a small example, telomeres are just one aspect of cell aging. Because ordinary cell reproduction happens with division, over time, this reproduction can become flawed.
When people fast, after about three days, their bodies start to harvest their white blood cells for food. Many of these cells have been through several reproductions, and are “old”. But when they begin to eat again, a priority for their stem cells is to produce new white cells.
This new production has been described as “rebooting” their immune system. Chronic infections that they had not been able to overcome before are quickly gone.
Recent experiments of connecting two very similar animals together, that is, very compatible, but one animal is young and the other old, have shown that the immune system of the younger animal to some extent repairs the body of the older animal.
This is all extremely complicated, but there is at least a chance that someday people might be able to perform the jellyfish trick.
they also did the 2013 year old man which, imho is better
I’ve been doing the jelly fish trick for years,
women seem to like it.
Oh, you said jelly FISH, I meant jelly doughnut trick.
Sounds like “The Boat of a Million Years” by Poul Anderson. One of the better treatments of immortality I’ve read.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.