Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Hence, the search for immortality has been one of the oldest quests in human history.
    In the Bible, God banishes Adam and Even from the Garden of Eden for disobeying his orders concerning the apple of knowledge. God’s fear was that Adam and Eve might use this knowledge to unlock the secret of immortality and become gods themselves. In Genesis 3:22, the Bible reads, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”
    Besides the Bible, one of the oldest and greatest tales in human civilization, dating back to the twenty-seventh century BC, is
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
about the great warrior of Mesopotamia. When his lifelong, loyal companion suddenly died, Gilgamesh decided to embark upon a journey to find the secret of immortality. He heard rumors that a wise man and his wife had been granted the gift of immortality by the gods, and were, in fact, the only ones in their land to have survived the Great Flood. After an epic quest, Gilgamesh finally found the secret of immortality, only to see a serpent snatch it away at the last minute.
    Because
The Epic of Gilgamesh
is one of the oldest pieces of literature, historians believe that this search for immortality was the inspiration for the Greek writer Homer to write the
Odyssey,
and also for Noah’s flood mentioned in the Bible.
    Many early kings—like Emperor Qin, who unified China around 200 BC—sent huge fleets of ships to find the Fountain of Youth, but all failed. (According to mythology, Emperor Qin gave instructions to his fleet not to come back if they failed to find the Fountain of Youth. Unable to find the fountain, but too afraid to return, they founded Japan instead.)
    For decades, most scientists believed that life span was fixed and immutable, beyond the reach of science. Within the last few years, this view has crumbled under the onslaught of a stunning series of experimental resultsthat have revolutionized the field. Gerontology, once a sleepy, backwater area of science, has now become one of the hottest fields, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds and even raising the possibility of commercial development.
    The secrets of the aging process are now being unraveled, and genetics will play a vital role in this process. Looking at the animal kingdom, we see a vast variety of life spans. For example, our DNA differs from that of our nearest genetic relative, the chimpanzee, by only 1.5 percent, yet we live 50 percent longer. By analyzing the handful of genes separating us from the chimpanzees, we may be able to determine why we live so much longer than our genetic relative.
    This, in turn, has given us a “unified theory of aging” that brings the various strands of research into a single, coherent tapestry. Scientists now know what aging is. It is the accumulation of errors at the genetic and cellular level. These errors can build up in various ways. For example, metabolism creates free radicals and oxidation, which damage the delicate molecular machinery of our cells, causing them to age; errors can build up in the form of “junk” molecular debris accumulating inside and outside the cells.
    The buildup of these genetic errors is a by-product of the second law of thermodynamics: total entropy (that is, chaos) always increases. This is why rusting, rotting, decaying, etc., are universal features of life. The second law is inescapable. Everything, from the flowers in the field to our bodies and even the universe itself, is doomed to wither and die.
    But there is a small but important loophole in the second law that states
total
entropy always increases. This means that you can actually reduce entropy in one place and reverse aging, as long as you increase entropy somewhere else. So it’s possible to get younger, at the expense of wreaking havoc elsewhere. (This was alluded to in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Mr. Gray was mysteriously eternally young. But his secret was the painting of himself that aged horribly. So the total amount of aging still increased.) The principle of entropy can also be seen by looking behind a refrigerator. Inside the refrigerator, entropy decreases as the temperature drops. But to lower the entropy, you have to have a motor, which increases the heat generated behind the refrigerator, increasing the entropy outside the machine. That is why refrigerators are