The dream of perpetual life and eternal youth is not new. Notions of how to achieve it are roughly the same today as they were 300 years ago. But technological change has stretched the boundaries somewhat.
To remain young, or at least to look young, is an ideal that is growing stronger and stronger. Aging and death must be combated; staying young and living a long life are important. You have to work out and maintain your health.
This may seem to be a modern ideal, but it isn't really. Humankind's struggle to extend longevity, and the dream of perpetual youth, is rooted far back in history. Notions of how to achieve the dream have also been surprisingly similar throughout the ages.
"The foundations of the practical advice are the similar from the 18th century to our day. It's a matter of healthy or even ascetic diet, natural life, sleeping well, exercising, simple country life, and hygiene," says Janicke Andersson, who is defending her doctoral thesis at NISAL, ( National Institute for the Study of Ageing and Later Life) Linkoping University, in Sweden. She has studied historical handbooks on how to prolong life and compared them with contemporary debate and advice books.
In the 18th century, the idea was that humans had an optimal age, all the way up to 250 years (which was supposed to be the age of the patriarchs), but that we had degenerated and thus lived considerably shorter lives. If so, it should be possible to reach our optimal age by living properly.
Today there is no upper limit to for the notions on the extension of life. Institutions like the Immortality Institute and Life Extension Institute and associations like the Transhumanists strive for longer, or even eternal, life on earth. With transplant surgery we are able to replace worn-out body parts; hormone injections and pills are used to prevent the aging process; and dead people are frozen down in the hope of being thawed out again when it has become technologically possible to revive them.