Can We Live Forever Yet?

Can we live forever yet?

Maybe someday, if a Belgian child prodigy has his way. Eleven-year-old Laurent Simons, who recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Antwerp after only a year, said he is on a mission to achieve immortality by replacing “as many body parts as possible with mechanical parts.”

No word yet on how he aims to realize that goal, but Simons said for now he will focus his energies on “the first piece of the puzzle”: pursuing graduate work in quantum physics. Best of luck to the boy genius, with whom I’m not sure I’m philosophically aligned, as I have doubts as to whether a human who is mostly machine is still human.

As a traditionalist, I am much more interested in achieving immortality through slowing down the physiological effects of Father Time himself. Unfortunately, a new study led by researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Duke University suggests that aging and death are inevitable. “No matter how many vitamins we take, how healthy our environment is or how much we exercise, we will eventually age and die,” said study co-lead Fernando Colchero to Science Daily. That is, of course, assuming we don’t have a scientific breakthrough sometime in the future, which could still be on the table, thanks to the nature of scientific breakthroughs.

But to answer the original question: no, sorry, not yet :(