Humans, as thinking beings, have always strived to live long. Ideally, as long as possible. In other words, physical immortality has always been a goal. But the path to achieving it has always been fraught with serious obstacles: illness, aging, hereditary factors, and accidents.
The terrible injustice lies in the fact that as a person grows older, they acquire knowledge and experience, and improve through mistakes, but at a certain point, death wipes all of this out in one fell swoop. Nature's irrationality is astoundingly wasteful of “material.” If Darwin's theory holds true for humans, then nature is obliged to “correct” the situation. But this doesn't happen. Even the most outstanding geniuses are mortal, and their children often show no signs of genius at all. Why does nature “switch off” such an important aspect of evolution?
A decrepit body carries a host of genetic disadvantages for offspring. This has long been observed. Having a child at an advanced age is fraught with many problems for the child. These primarily affect their physical condition. Later, mental retardation becomes apparent. In the distant future, premature aging occurs.
It turns out that nature has foreseen all of this and, with death, “turns off” the possibility of passing on senile “garbage” to the next generation. It's no coincidence that the reproductive functions of the elderly are severely limited. But not completely shut off.
Here's the paradox. Let's say the knowledge and experience of the elderly are important for evolution. Nature itself doesn't think so. But humans can “tweak” it. How? If immortality becomes truly achievable by fixing age at some level.
For example, at age fifty, aging stops completely. Such a person is still socially active, can contribute to society, and can continue to expand their knowledge and experience. Science fiction? Not really. If you lead a healthy lifestyle, take care of your health, and have a good genetic background, your life expectancy will increase.
But immortality doesn't come here either: the organ supply cannot be infinite. Organ transplantation is a dead end. The moment will inevitably come when the body will reject the donor organ. We're talking about multiple “engraftments,” not just one.
Replace organs with artificial analogues? Create a biorobot? This idea has long haunted scientists. Science fiction writers carefully avoid the idea of biorobots reproducing themselves, not as copies, but with a “hereditary baggage” of experience. Unfortunately, biorobots, like humans, are not given the green light here. So, it's also a dead end. And all dreams of individual immortality are just that—dreams.
But the theory of physicist and leading nuclear energy expert Ivan Filimonenko raises some interesting questions. He is considered a recognized authority on radiation neutralization. What is the essence of his theory?
Simply put, the idea is that the primary source of radioactive contamination of the body is the isotope potassium-40. As potassium-40 decays in the body, it seriously impacts cells and, therefore, the lifespan of any living being. The body naturally repairs cells, but the isotope continues to “work” and damage other cells. Eventually, the body can no longer “repair” cells. For humans, the genetic “program” for this is no more than a hundred cycles of mass cell repair. But if disease, depletion from poor nutrition, and the effects of harmful habits (smoking, alcohol) are added to this, lifespan is significantly reduced.
I. Filimonenko's theory is based on a significant discovery in Iraq. Its territory was once home to a Sumerian state known for its long-lived rulers. Archaeological excavations in layers dating back to the Sumerian period have revealed very low levels of the isotope potassium-40. This means that this isotope was also present in low levels in the Sumerians. But the most astonishing and puzzling aspect is that historically, only ten Sumerian rulers are known before the Great Flood. The antediluvian history of the Sumerians, recorded in cuneiform tablets, spans many thousands of years! Does this mean that each ruler lived for several thousand years?
What mysticism and absurdity! A calculation error? But how do we understand the fact that many long-lived people today come from areas with low potassium-40 levels? It seems that lifespan is highly dependent on the amount of this isotope in our bodies.
As for thousands of years—here, in my opinion, we still need to understand how the Sumerians kept cuneiform history. It's quite possible that it doesn't fully correspond to our concept of time. And a thousand years lived is a hundred of ours? So, with low potassium-40 levels in the body, a modern person, with a lucky combination of factors, could live two or three hundred years?
