I heard about these [immortal jellyfish](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii) that are ‘[biologically immortal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality)’. I have three questions that I would like to have eli5:
1. How can animals be biologically immortal?
2. What can we learn from it in terms of human aging science and biotechnology?
3. What would it take for humans to ‘achieve’ biological immortality?
In: 2
Our human dna is complex and difficult to replicate. We have a lot of it and while most mistakes won’t kill you, and some are good in fact, having so much complex dna means we have a lot of dna that just regulates dna… But jelly fish don’t even have brains and they have close to no neurons compared to other ocean life and humans. Their dna can replicate very simply with almost no errors. Their developmental stages of growth differ indefinitely so that there is less competition. They can live for a very very long time and they usually get killed by something else before they die naturally. Thing is they don’t have many natural predators so nothing is really killing them.
In summary, they’re not immortal. They have very simple dna. They have natural population control and little predators.
To evolve to be immortal like them we would have to evolve into some light weight floating creature that just orbits the earth at high altitude and does nothing else ever except occasionally sting a high flying bug or bird and take in a little carbon from them.
When creatures become too complex, like humans, the dna that regulates dna slowly breaks down. It’s difficult to evolve those genes because the complexities have inherent weaknesses. Places in the genome where many mutations occur which is good. But over time the dna ultimately begins to have too many errors and that species will go extinct. Who knows maybe we got our mutations in the the perfect spot of the chromosome and the mutations will fix themselves. Probably not though.
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