5 Immortal Animals

5 Immortal Animals

Juniper Russo, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Jan 6, 2011

Source: voices.yahoo.com

 

Immortality is an age-old concept. Mythology as old as human history refers to people and animals who never die. But, for the most part, immortality is a fantasy-- right? Well, right. Sort of. Surprisingly, there are some animal species that, for whatever reason, have simply decided that they don't like the idea of death and that they will have no part in it. These animals are functionally immortal. They never age, and-- unless an outside force does them in-- they could theoretically live forever.

The Sea Anemone


library.thinkquest.org

The lowly sea anemone doesn't look like an immortal animal. In fact, it doesn't even look like an animal. In between swaying to the left, swaying to the right, and occasionally swallowing a bit of debris, this brainless polyp is busy defying everything we know about mortality. A sea anemone doesn't age as it gets older; it simply grows bigger. Fortunately for those who find this a little creepy, none of them have lived long enough to develop sentience yet-- they get wiped out at around age 80 by heat, water pollution, infections and greedy collectors.







The Lobster

123rf.com

Like the sea anemone, the lobster is an idiot. It has no brain, and its central nevous system is about as simple as a common household insect. But lobsters have somehow figured out a way to defy aging as we know it. Unlike people, lobsters don't experience any change in metabolism or body-function as they get older. A one-hundred-year-old lobster will even continue eating, moving and making baby-lobsters without any sense of shame. They also keep getting bigger-- meaning that, after a couple-hundred years, they can be the size of a wolf, and capable of scaring the living daylights out of anyone who's read the Dark Tower series. Did-a-chik? (For more about the lobster's functional immortality, click here.)


The Aldabra Giant Tortoise

en.wikipedia.org

Aldabra giant tortoises are exactly what they sound like-- freaking giant. The males can weigh nearly 800 pounds, which would make them the most terrifying animals in the world if they ate meat and moved a little quicker. Fortunately, Aldabra tortoises barely seem to notice humans like us-- they aren't tame; they simply don't care. Because, inside their little reptilian brains, they are laughing at the fact that we get old and die. We aren't sure just how long Aldabra tortoises live, because they have a pesky tendency to live longer than the people watching them. The oldest confirmed age of an Aldabra tortoise was 255 years, but some may have lived to be twice that age.



The Rougheye Rockfish

afsc.noaa.gov

The rougheye rockfish just sounds defiant. In fact, I'd include a few more desciptions-- like riptide, rugged, rumblin', radical and ravin'-- in its name, but that would probably remind you too much of that douchebag surfer-guy who smoked a joint with your sister ten years ago. And, just like that surfer-guy, the rockfish is incredibly ugly but makes up for it by being defiant of everything. Including mortality. A rougheye rockfish, which is a functionally immortal animal, can live to be 200 years old or more, unless some guy with a fishing-pole manages to break it of its persistent addiction to life.


The Immortal Jellyfish


a-z-animals.com

The name says all. When the immortal jellyfish gets tired of being a sexually mature adult, it can decide to be a polyp-- that is, a baby-- again. To do this, the jellyfish (technically a medusa) turns itself inside-out, then re-absorbs its tentacles and other dangly-bits. It then land in its grave (or birth site) somewhere in the sand and becomes a colony of tiny little polyps. It's like your grandpa deciding that he's going to go to bed and turn into a few dozen fetuses-- only the immortal jellyfish doesn't have dementia and actually will follow through on its threat.







The Hydra


uni-kiel.de

The hydra is a nearly microscopic immortal animal, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in stamina. (You probably know at least a handful of men who use the same excuse with with their girlfriends.) Hydras are actually remarkably efficient predators; they release an explosion of neurotoxins into their prey, paralyze it, and then consume the animal whole. Every single cell in the hydra's tiny body is constantly dividing and rejuvenating, so any injured, polluted or defective cells are diluted by the thousands of others. Because they are constantly replenishing their living cells, hydras do not age at all-- ever.







Immortality doesn't truly exist in practice, but, in theory, any of these immortal animals really coulld manage to live forever. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for us) environmental conditions do eventually destroy every living "immortal" animal.

Published by Juniper Russo

Juniper Russo is a freelance writer living in the Southern US. She writes for several online and print-based publications and passionately advocates an evidence-based approach to holistic health and activism... View profile

Ray Kurzweil on How to Combat Aging

Ray Kurzweil on How to Combat Aging

Ray Kurzweil
July 6, 2009
Source: technologyreview.com
 
The noted futurist says that exponential advances will allow us to intervene in the aging process.

Ray Kurzweil

Submitted in response to Technology Review’s interview with Leonard Hayflick. See “Can Aging Be Solved?”

Entropy is not the most fruitful perspective from which to view aging. There are varying error rates in biological information processes depending on the cell type, and this is part of biology’s paradigm. We have means already of determining error-free DNA sequences even though specific cells will contain DNA errors, and we will be in a position to correct those errors that matter.

The most important perspective in my view is that health, medicine, and biology is now an information technology, whereas it used to be hit or miss. We not only have the (outdated) software that biology runs on (our genome), but we have the means of changing that software (our genes) in a mature individual with such technologies as RNA interference and new forms of gene therapy that do not trigger the immune system. (I am a collaborator with a company that performs gene therapy outside the body, replicates the modified cell a million-fold, and reintroduces the cells to the body, a process that has cured a fatal disease–pulmonary hypertension–and is undergoing human trials.)

We can design interventions on computers and test them out on increasingly sophisticated biological simulators. One of my primary themes is that information technology grows exponentially, in sharp contrast to the linear growth of hit or miss approaches that have characterized medicine up until recently. As such, these technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years (by doubling in power and price performance each year). The genome project, incidentally, followed exactly this trajectory.

Hayflick cites the automobile as an example to support his thesis that you cannot stop aging. Yes, automobiles will wear out if you don’t maintain them adequately. However, we do have the knowledge to perfectly maintain automobiles and completely prevent aging. There are century-old automobiles around in vintage (perfect) condition that are still driven around. That is because the maintenance was sufficiently aggressive for those cars. Most people don’t think it’s worth the trouble with regard to an automobile, but it will be worth the trouble for our bodies. With regard to automobiles, we have all of the knowledge and tools needed to completely stop aging. We do not yet have all of the knowledge and tools to do this with the human body, but that knowledge is growing exponentially.

As for the implications of radical life extension, Hayflick assumes that nothing else would change. But the same technologies that will bring radical life extension will also bring radical expansion of resources (nanoengineered solar panels, water and food technologies) and radical life expansion (merging with the intelligent machines that we are creating, virtual reality from within the nervous system, etc.). We have already democratized the tools of creativity so that kids in their dorm room can create a full-length high-definition motion picture or write software that results in disruptive change (e.g., Google). Hayflick has not considered the implications of these recent developments. We don’t have to do any of these things perfectly (and there is no such thing as perfection in the real world)–just well enough to stay ahead of the curve.

Our intuition is linear, so many scientists, such as Hayflick, think in linear terms and expect that the slow pace of the past will characterize the future. But the reality of progress in information technology is exponential, not linear. My cell phone is a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer we all shared when I was an undergrad at MIT. And we will do it again in 25 years. What used to take up a building now fits in my pocket, and what now fits in my pocket will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.

With regard to Hayflick’s own limit, he acts as if that limit is impossible to engineer. Just in recent years we have discovered that just one enzyme controls the telomeres and that cancer cells use telomerase to become immortal. Now, I realize that it is not a simple matter to just apply telomerase to overcome this particular aging limit, as we have to figure out how to administer it, and we don’t want to encourage cancer, but these are all solvable engineering problems.