- 6/2/2025
Mitochondria function like engines in our bodies because they produce energy. Valter Longo at USC has extended the life of a yeast culture from 6 days to 11 weeks by removing the Ras2 and SCH9 genes.
Aubrey de Gray believes that the accumulation of "garbage" in the lysosome of the cell causes aging. Greg Fahy has tried to preserve a rabbit kidney by freezing it. Short of preserving the whole human body, Olaf Sporns has worked to map the human brain in what he calls the connectome using diffusion imaging.
In 1970, John Conway attempts to create an artificial life form (a computer program) that can "live" forever known as the "Game of Life". Instead of transistors, "quantum devices compute with individual atoms." Freeman goes on to state that perhaps humans will give up on human biological immortality but focus on "eternal artificial life."
Clock of the Long Now is designed to last for 10,000 years.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season2
#episode8
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#canweliveforever
Aubrey de Gray believes that the accumulation of "garbage" in the lysosome of the cell causes aging. Greg Fahy has tried to preserve a rabbit kidney by freezing it. Short of preserving the whole human body, Olaf Sporns has worked to map the human brain in what he calls the connectome using diffusion imaging.
In 1970, John Conway attempts to create an artificial life form (a computer program) that can "live" forever known as the "Game of Life". Instead of transistors, "quantum devices compute with individual atoms." Freeman goes on to state that perhaps humans will give up on human biological immortality but focus on "eternal artificial life."
Clock of the Long Now is designed to last for 10,000 years.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season2
#episode8
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#canweliveforever
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00the end of life it's a reality that terrifies us and motivates us now cutting-edge science
00:12embarks on a bold mission to extend human life some think the answer lies in biology
00:22some believe it might be in our brains
00:24and others claim that immortality will mean the end of humanity will death remain inevitable
00:36or can we live forever
00:43space time life itself
00:47the secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole
01:07the sands of time run swiftly a reminder that life is fleeting death is a humbling reality
01:17but what if life had no end
01:21in just the past 200 years the average lifespan has doubled from about 40 to almost 80 years
01:30breakthroughs in biology and physics could soon bring immortality within our grasp
01:36for better or worse many of you watching me right now may live to see the day when aging
01:42and death itself are relics of the distant past
01:50i remember rummaging through my grandmother's trunk once happening upon objects that had been stored
01:55away for years everything was faded curled rusted
02:02i couldn't help but wonder when would the same decay happen to me
02:14michio kaku a theoretical physicist at city college of new york is fascinated with the big questions in
02:21science like whether the laws of physics require that all living things die
02:26one of the iron laws of physics is the second law of thermodynamics which says that everything
02:34rusts everything decays falls apart we're all made out of atoms and these atoms in turn obey the second law of
02:42thermodynamics
02:46anything and everything in the universe has the tendency to go from order
02:50to disorder and once the damage is done it's extremely difficult to reverse things and unmix them
03:01it's a process known as entropy if i mix coffee i realize that when i put cream into coffee
03:11i increase entropy i increase disorder in fact to see this milk jump out and reform in this cup
03:18is such a preposterous event that you would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to see it happen
03:27the second law of thermodynamics is an unremitting force nothing is immune to the power of entropy
03:36not even the cells in our body and that's why we age in fact that's why we die
03:43but it turns out that there is a loophole to the law of entropy there is a way to restore order from disorder
03:54imagine that each one represents an atom now if i apply the second law of thermodynamics it means that
04:01entropy increases it mixes chaos reigns watch this the candy on the tray starts off organized and color
04:10coated but if the tray begins to vibrate the second law takes over even though this is entropy in action
04:17i can reverse entropy by adding energy from the outside but the price is i have to constantly be on the alert
04:26constantly add energy from the outside
04:31i mean this is hard work
04:32with energy and concentration michio can step in and stop the chaos but reversing entropy in a tray of
04:43vibrating candy is far less complicated than reversing entropy in our bodies where would we even begin
04:51water long ago is searching for the answer he is a professor of gerontology at the university of
05:03southern california he knows that many things live fast and die young and he believes the road to
05:11reversing entropy in the body starts where things get the hottest in the engine in the engine the gasoline
05:20gets oxidized and that's a combustion process and this provides energy to the car but because of the
05:27combustion the engine itself can become damaged and eventually you have to rebuild the engine
05:34every cell in our bodies have tiny engines called mitochondria
05:41mitochondria are double membrane structures whose job is to provide energy
05:46energy but when these powerhouses wear down our body begins to decay and age and so you can imagine in
05:57the in the cells instead you have hundreds of these mitochondria these little engines and these hundreds of
06:03engines provide the energy locally to every single cell in our body but walter has found a way to reverse
06:11this deterioration process and rejuvenate mitochondria in one tiny organism he has extended the life of baker's
06:20yeast the kind you use to make bread and beer to 10 weeks that's 10 times the yeast's normal lifespan of six days
06:30it may not sound like a long time but it's equivalent to 800 human years
06:40the yeast's longevity occurred when two genes ras2 and sch9 were removed from its dna
06:51so these pathways that we've identified in yeast in addition to promoting aging they also promote
06:57dna damage and the damage of a variety of different systems within the cells
07:03walter wondered if this fountain of youth for yeast might apply to more complex life forms
07:09and so he began looking for the equivalent genes in a much larger organism
07:17mice when he knocked out those two genes
07:21these mice doubled their life expectancy this is very encouraging because if you look at the
07:29similarities between a mouse and a human we are over 90 percent identical in many ways
07:36the mouse lives for two years and people live for 100 years so you can see with just a small
07:43modification of the genome you can go from two years to 100 years
07:47you can see it there's no law of physics that prevents us from finding the secret of longevity the secret
07:54perhaps even of immortality if you take for example the genome of millions of old people
08:02and the genome of millions of young people which we will do in the coming years and subtract you will
08:08then find the genes where aging is concentrated already we've identified over 60 genes involved in the
08:16aging process now the question is how do you reprogram a human that lives a hundred years to be now a two or three
08:24thousand year old person
08:28balsa's mission to keep our engines running forever has just begun and he's in it for the long haul
08:35suppose we do find a way to keep our engines running for hundreds of years or more
08:40we would all be very old for a very long time but this scientist is digging for ways to keep us
08:48not just eternally alive but eternally young
08:58take our current lifespan and stretch it five or even ten times longer the joys of our youth would endure like
09:07an endless summer but imagine suffering decade after decade with fragile bones failing eyesight
09:17and an ever more feeble mind if we want to become immortal we can't just extend life
09:25we need to discover how to keep our bodies eternally youthful
09:29aubrey de gray thinks of himself as a modern day methuselah he has dedicated his career to fighting aging
09:43aubrey believes that many people who are born today could live to be a thousand years old and remain
09:50physically young for most of that time the key is a matter of good biological housekeeping
09:58taking the trash out of ourselves so what happens indeed is that certain types of material in the
10:04body just accumulate junk certain types of junk accumulate inside cells and between cells and stuff
10:12that we would not think of as junk like dna accumulates randomness which is a type of junk
10:18cells have the important job of constantly breaking down waste and they're mostly pretty good at it
10:25but sometimes a cell comes across things that are so weird none of this degradation machinery works on
10:32them that's when the job is rerouted to what's called the lysosome a vessel that houses the most powerful
10:40degradation machinery in the cell and if the garbage can't be broken down it stays there forever
10:47aubrey believes that the accumulation of garbage in the lysosome storage unit is what causes aging
10:57and he wants to free our bodies of these buildups he realized the most logical way was to take a close
11:04look at waste itself and he wondered in nature what likes to eat junk we're working on an idea that
11:14we might be able to find other species especially bacteria that are able to break down the substances
11:22that accumulate in the human body aubrey's hunt for the fountain of youth led him to a final resting
11:30place graveyards
11:35since graveyards are riddled with the waste of decomposing bodies he suspected he might find
11:41microbes who live to feast on death and if we can find the genes and enzymes that they are using to
11:50actually perform that function then we might be able to put those genes and enzymes into our own cells
11:57so that our own cells can break stuff down that they could not naturally break down
12:01the secret to longevity might be six feet under
12:05aubrey and his team are still digging for the right microbe that will work in mammalian cells
12:12and when they find it he believes we will all live like 25 year olds forever
12:20i think that we have maybe a 50 50 chance in the next 25 years or so of developing what i think
12:27of as the first generation of bona fide rejuvenation biotechnology in other words technologies that
12:34are sufficiently comprehensive that we can give them to middle-aged people people 60 or 70 or so
12:41and fix them up well enough that they don't become biologically 60 or 70 again until 30 years later or
12:48something like that
12:49aubrey is looking for the magic bullet that will fight aging but synthetic biologist chris voigt
12:59is looking to build an entire army out of various parts from all over nature
13:07all right let's give this a shot
13:08one of the things we're often trying to do in synthetic biology is create new functions out of
13:20parts that already exist in nature for other reasons so we're often having to go out and grab those
13:26components from different organisms and put them together chris searches for microorganisms throughout
13:33biology to find the right parts and they end up at his lab at the university of california san francisco
13:42where biology meets mechanics when you look at being able to fight disease whether it's identifying
13:49malignant cells and killing them we're trying to go through the garbage of all the functions that are out
13:54in the natural world and identify those that are useful to us in trying to be able to
14:00identify and correct a disease state in the body to build a bio robot that can detect its surroundings
14:07chris and his team needed to find an organism with a sensor and they found it in pond scum
14:16where they discovered that algae are equipped with light sensors we took a bacterium that normally
14:22lives in your gut so it's not used to the sun shining and we put in a light sensor out of an algae
14:30inside chris's bacterial dark room colonies of bacteria that are now implanted with allergy light
14:36sensors are able to take photographs of slide projected images
14:43it might look like bacterial art but this is the first big step towards creating programmable
14:49biological robots that will keep our bodies healthy forever there are bacteria all throughout our bodies
14:57and we can reprogram those bacteria in order to be able to implement therapeutic effects for just
15:03about any disease that you can imagine the possibilities are limitless
15:12chris's photographic bacteria are able to turn themselves on and off like the flip of a switch
15:17but the question is can chris figure out how to program and control that switch
15:22we'd like to see the programming of cells to be the same as programming a computer or designing
15:28electronic chip where as programmers we would write out the exact function that we'd want the
15:34cells to do and then that would be automatically compiled into a dna sequence in the same way that
15:40a computer program gets compiled ultimately into ones and zeros that's the dream
15:49bio robots may one day roam our blood streams police our organs and respond to our internal 9-1-1
15:56cause keeping us free from the threat of disease
16:03chris voice and aubrey de gray's research to keep our bodies healthy for eternity is still in the beginning
16:08stages but what does this mean for us mere mortals who will never live to see the day when immortality is
16:17within reach there is one chilling possibility that will give us all a chance to hang on
16:24even after we die
16:31we're all genetically programmed to lust for life and to flee from death
16:39eventually we will discover the secret of immortality but we're not there yet to cheat death right now
16:48we need to put aging on ice and be ready to grasp eternal life long after life abandons us
17:02greg fahey is a cryobiologist the goal of his team at biotech outfit 21st century medicine
17:09is to freeze human organs and tissues so that they can be revived undamaged centuries from now
17:19cryopreservation is the preservation of living systems of very low temperatures we usually are
17:24referring to temperatures that are low enough that you can store the system as long as you wish
17:30before you use it again crowd preservation is essential to get a cell or tissue and organ from
17:37one place in time to another place in time without allowing that system to change in the process
17:44scientists have been trying to preserve whole organs for decades but it's a lot harder than throwing food in the freezer
17:53when biological material freezes ice crystals form which push the cells out of their normal positions
18:02when you thaw the organ it may look okay from the outside but on the inside it's damaged beyond repair
18:10the biggest problem we think is really mechanical it's the formation of ice between cells
18:18if the cells are dislodged from their normal locations then you can destroy the function
18:24of that structure as a whole even if the cells survive
18:30greg and his team decided to focus their efforts on preventing bodily fluids from freezing
18:35and eventually developed a way to turn those fluids into a form of biological glass
18:42a technique he calls vitrification vitrification is the formation of a glass so if you take water and
18:50you mix it with various chemicals in high enough concentrations of chemical and then cool it down to
18:55low temperatures the system will never freeze no matter how low you go to test whether vitrification
19:02actually preserves the function of whole organs greg's team vitrified a rabbit kidney
19:10this is the kidney perfusion lab what john is doing in the background is delivering
19:16cryoprotectins through the vascular system of the kidney so the kidney becomes unfreezable
19:21the kidney is sitting in a special chamber chamber is temperature conditioned to minimize toxicity
19:27and at the end of the process kidneys taken out and is transplanted this kidney even though it has
19:34been stored at minus 22 degrees celsius works just as well as a normal kidney it's proof that
19:42graves vitrification technique actually works and might be the key to preserving human organs far into the future
19:51so if you cool to below that glass transition temperature our calculations indicate you can
19:58store a system for tens of thousands of years imagine being able to put your body on ice and then being
20:06revived 10 000 years from now you could wake up and find yourself in an age when science has made
20:14immortality possible greg fahey may be just a few years from giving a few select people a shot
20:23at eternal life but that can only happen if cryopreservation works on an entire human body
20:30not just simple organs like the kidney or the bladder but on the most complex organ of all
20:35the brain this is the brain slice vitrification lab the setup shows a hippocampal slice of the part of
20:45the brain that's associated with learning and memory in a little dish essentially from the right side we
20:51have a stimulating electrode coming in piercing the slice on the left side we have a recording electrode
20:58this brain slice has been vitrified if it's still functional when the pulse of electricity is fired into
21:07it it should fire a signal back to greg and his team's surprise it does electrical activity actually
21:16sparks up in this brain tissue and the electrical response is every bit as strong as it was in its
21:24original state the recovery of the brain slice complete preserving a slice of the brain is a crucial first
21:35step towards preserving the whole thing it's an ambitious project that greg is already working on
21:43we have found that it's fairly easy to vitrify the brain that all of the structure seems to be
21:49preserved but i have to say that so far our techniques are not up to the level that we would like for
21:57that kind of speculative idea but i couldn't say that you couldn't make up for whatever deficiencies
22:04that we have in our preservation technique today using some unknown future technology i can't rule that out
22:11as possible one day centuries after we say goodbye to our loved ones our frozen bodies could be reanimated
22:25and we'll walk the earth again but there could be a better route to immortality one that would change
22:33the very nature of what it means to be human imagine if no one ever died where would we all live our planet is
22:46already crowded enough but maybe there's a way to live forever without all this excess baggage poets
22:55say the essence of us is here but i know what really makes me me all up here so if i want to endure
23:05for eternity perhaps that's all i need to hang on to what if we could find a way to upload our brains
23:15to digitize the very essence of ourselves our minds could go on living long after our flesh has died
23:22but to make that happen we need to understand the brain's architecture and figure out what truly
23:29makes us who we are olaf spawns is a neuroscientist at indiana university he is attempting to unscramble
23:42the brain's tangled web the brain is like a big city cities are examples of complex systems thousands of
23:48inhabitants of inhabitants and their social interactions the flow of materials the brain
23:53is like that millions of neurons interactions between these neurons in a sense the brain is like
23:59a city of the mind the human brain is one of the most complex systems in the universe if you stretched
24:08out all of its electrical wiring it would extend from the earth to the moon figuring out how we get from
24:16cells and wires to thoughts and memories is one of the greatest challenges known to science
24:25even though we've been studying the human brain really for decades perhaps centuries we still don't
24:29have a complete map of how it's connected but olaf is taking on this challenge his goal is to chart every
24:37single neuron and synapse and create a complete map of the brain called the connectome it's a comprehensive
24:45set of connections that will allow us for the first time to understand in more detail how brain regions
24:50are connected to each other olaf is creating the connectome using a leading edge technique called
24:57diffusion imaging it reveals the brain's long distance connections by tracking water molecules
25:03along the neural highways and what emerges is a detailed map of the central core of brain cell connections
25:11olaf thinks this is the area where our personality resides as we've been discovering recently some brain
25:20regions are more connected than others some are more essential perhaps for the functioning of the brain
25:24as a whole those regions we call hubs if the brain is like a city hubs are like major intersections where
25:34a constant flow of traffic passes through getting people from one place to another these intersections are so essential
25:43if they become disrupted in any way the whole city shuts down by their nature hubs are focal points of
25:52information traffic information converges on these regions and it is that ebb and flow of information
25:58and the magnitude of the information flow that really sets these hubs apart from other regions of the brain
26:05olaf is getting closer to figuring out where consciousness resides searching for the origins of
26:12consciousness is the holy grail of neuroscience only when this mystery is solved can we replicate the human
26:19brain and take consciousness from a person and transfer it to a machine as a way to live for eternity
26:28and olaf believes he has discovered a hub that might solve this mystery the medial parietal cortex
26:36it's located between the brain's two hemispheres olaf suspects it might house the essence of who we are
26:46a lot of wires from the brain converge on that region there are many lines of evidence that point to that
26:52part of the brain being really central and really important perhaps even for awareness and consciousness
26:59olaf believes he may have solved the secrets of consciousness but there is much more work to
27:06be done before he can be sure i think we're getting closer to answering this question and as we identify
27:13which parts of the brain are critical in bringing about that particular functionality that gets us closer
27:19to answering the question what is consciousness and also where are the critical components of the brain
27:24that contribute to it neuroscience has taken enormous steps towards mapping the brain and solving the riddle
27:32of consciousness but will we ever be able to capture the trillions of synapses billions of neurons and
27:40download ourselves onto a machine just imagine all the things that happen in the real world the conversation
27:48we are having now me producing speech sounds and gestures our brains interacting in this embodied
27:54manner that could not happen in a computer and yet it is somehow the essence of what life is all about
27:59so i'm skeptical about that the brain might be far too complex to immortalize but maybe there's a simpler
28:10path to eternal life not for you but for immortal beings that we create from scratch
28:17life on this planet has had four billion years to evolve we are the latest in the long line of species
28:31we hope we're the last but our quest for immortality could end in disaster because the first eternal beings
28:41may not be human and they might just make us extinct
28:52complex life began from a few simple laws the same might be true for artificial life
29:01if humans discover those laws there is a chance we could create living things that live forever
29:07oxford physicist vlad govid drawl is trying to understand how intelligence might emerge from a
29:15system that operates on just a few basic ground rules so this is chess it's a very complex game and yet
29:24it's governed by a few very simple rules you really have only 16 pieces on each side and each piece can
29:32do one or two things and you can say the same thing about life even though you're talking about one or two
29:39very simple rules you still get this multitude of different possible behaviors in the universe
29:47in 1970 a mathematician named john conway ran with this idea and attempted to create artificial life
29:55forms spontaneously using a computer program he called it the game of life
30:02the game simulates the growth of artificial life using a two-dimensional grid and simple cells that
30:08are either dead or alive whether the cells live or die is governed by a few basic rules
30:16so we have here in front of us a large cell block and we can see this one central cell which is on and we
30:25can see that it has only one neighbor to its left the cell just switches off which means that it dies and
30:34it dies of loneliness because it has too few neighbors now we've got a central cell which is on but it has
30:42five neighbors it dies because of overcrowding overpopulation it doesn't like it either in the third
30:49so it's a good example a cell with only two neighbors the cell just keeps on living it can even move
30:56around in this environment and it can reproduce so this is a good example where the population is just
31:02right for the cell to to keep on living given enough time increasingly complex patterns emerge from this
31:10simple set of rules some even take on the appearance of living organisms
31:15john conway tried to make the same point regarding life that it looks very complicated to to us and
31:22indeed it looks like a miracle that there is life around us but in fact he constructed a game which
31:29consists of two or three again very simple rules and it gives rise to some very complicated patterns
31:37how complex do these patterns need to be before they become something alive intelligent or immortal
31:43blotko thinks the human brain is a good yardstick and has calculated its processing power the brain
31:52is currently still much more powerful than the existing computers so the existing computers can do
31:58something like you know 10 to the power of 12 bits per second whereas our brain is still probably
32:04something like a million times faster than that so you need one million laptops to simulate just a single
32:10human brain today's computers are nowhere near powerful enough to house artificial intelligent life
32:17blotko believes the answer might be to use a completely different type of computer
32:22the quantum computer quantum computer is basically the future technology of computation
32:29it's a computer that's so fast in principle that no current computer can compete with it
32:36in place of transistors quantum devices compute with individual atoms and instead of sorting piles
32:44of ones and zeros to give yes and no answers the atoms and quantum computers can be ones zeros and
32:52everything in between existing as a computational maybe the quantum computer really utilizes the quantum
33:01effect known as the superposition which means being in many different states at the same time
33:08this ability to handle a multiplicity of states allows quantum computers to juggle many overlapping
33:15problems at once just the way our brains do
33:20the analogy would be if i play the chord for you
33:24then you would get many different modes played at the same time which would really correspond to many
33:34states being out there simultaneously all in one location and the full power of quantum computation
33:40which is actually unlimited in some sense if you start to store all the values in between the zero and
33:45the one so then you really reach you reach a stage where you can encode much more and the capacity really
33:52has no limit in that sense there might be a time when humans forego their own dream of immortality
34:00and create eternal artificial life and if they do how would artificial and biological life get along
34:08some people think that very soon computers will be smarter than us and they'll put us in zoos
34:16they'll put us behind bars and throw peanuts at us and make us dance behind bars just like we make
34:21bears dance in zoos today but at the present time none of these technologies are ready for prime time we
34:30simply don't have an operating quantum computer the world's record for a quantum computer calculation
34:37is tada three times five is 15. we sometimes forget that computers and robots no matter how advanced they
34:47are are adding machines but that doesn't mean they have creativity imagination initiative it doesn't
34:55mean they understand human values it doesn't mean that they can make leaps of logic like we can in other
35:00words we have a long ways to go before we can begin to approximate the real thinking process that takes place
35:07in a human being we're safe from becoming slaves to quantum intelligence for the time being but this
35:15physicist envisions a different fate for mankind one where the lines between artificial and biological life
35:23will blur and immortality will become reality not just for the living but also for the dead
35:32we're taught to think of science and religion as separate truths albert einstein didn't believe that
35:44he said science without religion is lame religion without science is blind the secret to achieving immortality
35:55could require the fusion of humanity and god into an everlasting cosmic computer few people think
36:04further into the future than frank tipler a mathematical physicist at tulane university in new orleans
36:11frank predicts that at some point in our evolution something truly remarkable will happen humanity
36:19the universe and god will unite a moment he calls the omega point the omega point is the very end of the universe
36:33in the process mankind or more precisely our descendants will expand out from this planet and ultimately
36:40engulf the entire universe as our descendants are moving into this final state
36:48their knowledge and their power and their computer capacity is increasing without limit
36:56the laws of physics allow a process that will convert matter stones of this graveyard for instance
37:04in to pure energy that will be the ultimate energy source which our descendants will use and gain control of it
37:11at the omega point frank argues our descendants will be capable of doing anything and with infinite power they
37:22will create a cosmic computer and reconstruct in a simulation everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe
37:31now from the point of view of the beings in the far future we will be their ultimate ancestor as rational
37:38beings so they will be interested in what we were what we will like as a consequence every man woman and
37:46child will be brought back into existence it will be just like you are brought back with your body into a
37:52reconstructed earth just like we now live on it will be different in one crucial respect we will be
37:59resurrected but we will never have to go through death again frank claims the laws of physics not only permit
38:07this type of immortality they actually require it to happen second law of thermodynamics says
38:15the complexity of the universe at the most fundamental level is increasing without limit
38:21i conclude that the validity of the second law of thermodynamics throughout all of time actually
38:30requires life to come into existence to gain control of the universe whether immortality comes in billions of
38:39years or whether it comes this century the conquest of death will transform our civilization the way we live the
38:48way we work the way we love maybe the question is not can we live forever but should we
39:01alexander rose is the executive director of the long now foundation an organization whose main focus
39:09is the building of an unusual timepiece
39:11is called the clock of the long now and it's designed to tick for 10 000 years we built the 10 000
39:24year clock to give people a different perspective of the really long term if you believe that medical
39:31science or other things are going to increase human longevity then the way that you would approach the
39:37world would be very very differently just the same way that if we're designing a 10 000 year clock instead
39:42of a clock that just has to last for 10 years we have approached this design problem very differently
39:48and we have to be responsible over those next 10 000 years for our clock 10 000 years in the past we
39:55were still living in the stone age flash forward the same period and our civilization and technology will be
40:03unrecognizable unrecognizable we realize in designing a 10 000 year clock that the most durable design is
40:10likely the simplest the clock of the long now will be all mechanical power in the clock will come from the
40:17force of gravity a weight driven system will turn a threaded bar and the clock will keep time in both the short
40:27term with the pendulum and in the long term through a solar synchronizer this device may or may not last
40:35for 10 millennia but that's not really alexander's point he wants to make us imagine what we will be
40:42like 10 000 years from now as soon as you see that 10 000 year clock and you visit it the conversations
40:50that you have around whether or not humans will be there the shapes of the hands of the people that might
40:55wind it are they going to be the same as ours are they going to be different those kind of conversations
41:00immediately allow you to take responsibility for that kind of time span and that's the hope with this
41:05club 10 000 years from now human beings may be immortal even if they are not their lifespans will surely
41:14be vastly longer than ours but it won't be just our bodies that will change what it means to be human
41:22will be different if you think about all the human values quite a lot of them come from the fact that
41:29we know that life is finite if you think how do i feel towards that person the fact that you know that
41:36the person is not going to be there one day probably makes your emotions far stronger in some sense than
41:43otherwise they would be so this could all change and maybe some of these things would even disappear
41:50from the human race if we simply knew we could live forever what happens to marriage and relationships
41:56if our lifespans grow to a thousand years or more right now half of us get divorced just in our short
42:02lifetimes but if we live for a thousand years who knows how many times you might get married i don't
42:09think that i would be able to live forever i think my wife would kill me first whether we like it or not
42:15more and more scientists believe we will one day live in a world without age disease and death that
42:23we'll revel in the joys and wonders of endless life and that we'll just have to learn to cope
42:30with the consequences of living forever mythology says that the gods envy our mortality our mortality is
42:43what makes life precious and something to be savored driven by the pressure of time to achieve greatness
42:50it may be our mortality that gives us our humanity but as long as we are mortal we'll never stop dreaming of
42:58life everlasting that too is what makes us human