I wouldn't mind being immortal...

[cherydactyl]

I have so many things I would like to do in life, I think I need several lifetimes to do them all. Concurrent ones might be nice, but consecutive is fine too.

It occurs to me that a long-lived male person is easy to conceive of...Lazurus Long, for example. The problem with conceiving a similarly long-lived female is in reproductive timelines. Unlike men who mature sexually and pretty much stay viable and potent, women have a definite reproductive lifecycle defined by a limited number of ova, which are said to be created before she is born. Or, at least the men don't decline because of reproductive schedule, only due to overall health.

Would a long-lived female only be able to live the bulk of her life post-menopausally? Or would it imply she had an extra-big set of eggs, that her 'monthly' cycles only happened once per year, or less frequently? Were of longer duration? Would it mean she violated the rule of being born with all the ova she would ever have? Would menopause after a few hundred years of cycling mean impending death within a few decades?

How annoying it is that men could easily be supposed to be long lived and fully potent for their duration, but to have an immortal woman be believable requires one to consider her reproductive stage. Well, I guess really it requires *me* to consider it. I can't help it that I must critically examine ideas. Truly I can't.

I heard somewhere (I believe it was a Frazz strip, bolstered by Roald Dahl's Matilda, I suppose), that mammals have a certain number of heart beats in their lifetimes and then they are done. Which explains why exercise is so good for longevity, because although heart rates peak during exercise, it also causes a slower heart beat at rest.

To paraphrase George Carlin, these are things I think about when the computer is downloading and my family are asleep (so I can't make too much noise).

p.s. I keep thinking I need to write down some of these ideas in a file and start writing short stories.

p.p.s. I did finally start reading The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry this morning. Maybe poetry first. Then later, I can tackle drawing, painting, photography, sailing, fencing, aikido, tai chi, game design, juggling, calligraphy, paper making, baking, science reporting, essay writing, mountain climbing, and all the other hobbies I would like to pursue but don't have time for.

Comments

[xsaltyx.livejournal.com]

I think that one of the ideas behind yoga and the practice of pranayama is actually that a human being only has so many breaths in this lifetime, so if you can slow your breathing down, living longer is a possibility!

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

That makes sense to me, both as something that's in the set of yogic ideas, and as something that would correlate with heartbeat. I'm going to be putting pranayama in the rotation in the next month more than I have, while I participate in World Yoga Practice Month (see previous post).

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

Someday popular understanding of the biological clock will match what science already knows: men have a biological fertility clock, too. Recent studies show that not only does male fertility drop after 40, but babies born to older men have a higher risk of genetic defects because quality of sperm does actually decline with age.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/44641.php
https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/news_releases/2006/NR-06-06-01.html

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

Interesting links. It still seems less clear-cut than for women. For one thing, one of the articles you linked said...
The report suggests that socioeconomic, ethnic and/or dietary factors may also influence how age affects human sperm quality. If you hypothesize a Lazurus Long, it's a short step to say that they must have some X factor that corrects what are normally increasing genetic errors from cell division as the person ages. But such a hypothesis does not get around the ova problem for a hypothetical woman who is long lived.

[shekkara.livejournal.com]

I agree. There is a big difference between being unable to have more children (women after menopause) and able to have more children but having increased risk for certain genetic defects (older men).

You can probably get around the issue by having artificial uteri and frozen eggs. Then an immortal woman isn't bound by any finite number of eggs.

Here's another solution... have immortal women put their periods on hold. We're doing that now with certain types of birth control pills. If don't have a period, then you're not using up an egg. Then we have deal with any problems of aging eggs may cause.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I'm not worried about it from the perspective of the hypothetical immortal woman wanting to reproduce through her lifespan (I figure we have stem cells in the possibility pipeline in the next 20 or 40 years, for example), but about what stage of life she would be in throughout her extended span. I would rather be a physical 30-something than a physical 65-year-old if I were to live for hundreds of years. For one thing, apparent-65-year-olds rock climbing and sky-diving are rather more remarkable, and therefore such a person is more likely to be noticed as the ages wear on.

[vretallin.livejournal.com]

See I think that women's reproductive cycles will last longer throughout her lifetime. Women are already going into menopause later in life. So I do not think that, in the end, the bulk of her life would be post-menopausal. Sorry I can't point to a study on it, it had been a topic of conversation years and years ago in my physical anthropology class.

Although if we look at long lived women today, those that are over 100, then I wouldn't say the bulk of it was post-menopausal, but there is the potential there currently.

It is entirely my goal to live to be over 200. Goals are good to have. If I thought I could make it to 400 or 500 I would totally try!

I am not very good with bible verses, but there is one my grandmother used to quote, "Those who love life, lose it, those who hate life keep it." I never understood it until I hit my mid twenties and my mortality started to creep in and I realized..ooh yeah I am not indestructible. Somewhere in there I had this epiphany, that the quote is akin to the glass half empty or half full. It all in the perception. :)

[nicegeek.livejournal.com]

Hmm....idle musing here, but I wonder whether menopause is delayed by the (relatively new) use of the pill to skip periods. I doubt that it's been done long enough for there to be any data, but it would be awesome if, in addition to reducing the frequency of periods, it also extended the fertile period by a proportional amount. I've got to assume that someone is or has studied this.

[tlatoani.livejournal.com]

Good question, but one thing to keep in mind -- in the old days, women wound up skipping a ton of periods too, because you don't get them when you're pregnant or at least some of the time you're breast-feeding.

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I don't know overall, but I have to say the pill screwed me up but good. My experience was that I didn't cycle at all for a long time (>6 months) after going off the pill, and it took infertility treatments to get me restarted ovulating again at all.

I doubt it's been studied. My experience with infertility medicine is that they only fractionally know what the hell they are doing.

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

Sigh... My experience with pretty much *all* branches of medicine is that they only fractionally know what they are doing.

(By the way, I can't think of anything intelligent to say about it, but I was completely intrigued by your musings about women and immortality.)

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I figure if I don't write this stuff down somewhere, I will forget it, and, more importantly, never get to develop it into anything.

Thanks.

[orogeny2000.livejournal.com]

oohhhh what a fun topic. Maybe if there was a female genetic freak that could choose when she ovulates, she could get old old old and be pre-menopause. I think the coment about the birth controll pills is very interesting, I wonder if AARP would study a long-term study of that type. Then again, having 'eggs' and having good, genetically sound 'eggs' may not bee the same thing. This made me think of johnatian swift's take on immortals. In gulliver's travels, the immortals are people who just get older and older and older and don't die, but become useless. Like you said, I'd much rather be a young-ish immortal. As for the aging and heart beat/ or breath thing, I really find I disagree with that idea. Off the top of my head I can't think of any exceptions, but I know there are some. If you'll pardon a scientist moment, 'corelation is not causation' I'll also admit, I really don't like the idea of a timer like that either, if feels constraining. Anyway, I don't know that your particular thoughts about female immortality have been brought up before, so, cool!

swift