Question: Do you think living forever is possible, if yes, how? If no, why not? Should people be forced to live forever or should it be a choice? If we do live forever would we have to sterilize everybody to prevent overpopulation?

Jason Chu answered on 22 Jun 2018:

Ooft, this is an interesting question with many parts to it.
I’m an optimist, and so I believe that one day in the future we may be able to “live” forever. From the wildest dreams of sci-fi, it may be in the form of retaining our memories, thoughts and feelings into a medium like a super-computer or it may be somehow reversing and cancelling the whole ageing process itself.
However, I think humans were all evolved to have an expiry date – so it’s going to require some advanced technology to prolong this to infinity. Biologically, we have an end-date for our physical and mental being.

Whether we should or shouldn’t is another question.
You bring up a very good point about the problem of overpopulation – this should be a priority over the notion of infinite life. We need to figure out how to maintain our environment, secure our food and water resources, figure out how to promote clean and green energy. And in the ambitious route, figure out how to house everyone – whether that’s space travel to a new “Earth” or building underground bunkers.

But you’re right to ask would we have to sterilise the population if we could all live forever. A problem with that though (not including the ethics behind it all) – because you’d stop the reproduction of the human species, you would stop the whole evolution process. Humans would no longer subtly evolve and adapt to an ever-changing environment!