Is immortality achievable?

I sometimes wish I could bring my Uncle Bill, the man who raised me, back from the grave so he could see the amazing world I live in today. He and I did everything together when I was growing up. That was before interstates, of course so on Sundays we would sit on the front porch of our house and count the cars going east and west on the highway in front of us, also guessing the make and model of the car and where it was from.

Later on in the day we would walk the railroad track for a mile or so and then walk it back. We watched television together, went to movies together, played ball together and he never missed a school function or athletic event I participated in. He was the best friend a young boy could have. And although he's been dead for only 40 years, he would marvel at the world today.

When he died, there was no cable or satellite television, no cordless phones, no cell phones and no smart phones. There were no home computers, laptops, iPads or iPods, no email and no Internet. So living in today's world would be pure science-fiction for him. He knew we were born and he knew we would die. He often told me it's what we did between those two end points that made the difference in people.

But that may be changing and the change could be coming faster than most people would have thought. Scientists are working diligently at finding ways for us to live longer; much longer, adding several decades to our lives and they also say it's not beyond the realm of possibility that someday in the not too distant future, we could live forever.

According to the Oct. 11 edition of The Week magazine in their Briefing article, the maximum human life span today is around 125 years but most people fall far short of that because of poor diet, self-destructive habits, disease, or organ failure.

But advances in medicine have already extended the average human life span in the United States and other modern nations from 46 in 1900 to 78 today and science is now making steady progress toward solving the problem of aging itself.

We may be approaching an era in which people can bring their aging bodies to a clinic for maintenance, like a car, and have new organs installed that were grown from stem cells or manufactured by 3-D printers. Gerontologist Aubrey de Gray says, "I'd say we have a 50-50 chance of bringing aging under what I'd call a decisive level of medical control within the next 25 years or so."

And there really isn't any reason why that shouldn't happen. Technology has advanced more rapidly in the past 100 years than it did in the millions of years before that and since technology tends to advance exponentially, things that were once light years away in our imagination are now achievable in our own lifetimes.

Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov has pumped millions of dollars into his "2045 Initiative," vowing to cure death within the next three decades. Ray Kurzwell, Google's director of engineering, predicts that humans will simply merge with computers, uploading our consciousness and memories and becoming immortal super beings in the process.

This push to extend life by several decades and perhaps forever is being made because death is feared more than any other thing by most people and, as one ages, it takes up more and more of a person's thought process. Most people think it would be absolutely wonderful not to ever have to worry about dying but there are other obvious problems that would accompany immortality.

I learned a long time ago that whenever there's a problem, there's also a solution and seeking immortality is no different. Many things would have to change for us to accommodate a planet full of people who no longer died but we've always been good at reacting to problems and solving them in the past and there's no reason to think that won't continue.

These changes aren't going to come along in time to save me but they might save my children and that's all that's important to me anyway. It's a brave new world we're living in with possibilities we've not even dreamed of yet.

And some of you are going to be around to see and experience them.