Replicants are the unsettling human-like clones in the Blade Runner movies. They are programmed to die — most of them in just four years — so they have the consciousness and intelligence of normal humans combined with the knowledge that they have just a few blinks of an eye to live.
Like tears in rain, to use the memorable line from Rutger Hauer’s character in the first (1982) Blade Runner movie, replicants are destined to leave barely a mark on the universe they so briefly inhabit.
New research is revealing that we real humans aren’t that different, however, because we too are programmed to die. We are programmed to die in about eighty years — twenty or so times the allotted timespan of replicants, but still just a few blinks of an eye.
Programmed? Yes. Here’s how.
Josh Mitteldorf and Dorian Sagan’s excellent 2016 popular science book, Cracking the Aging Code, describes the current biological theories of aging, knocking down the usual contenders one by one and leaving only Mitteldorf’s theory standing. His theory, known as the Demographic Theory of Aging, makes the case that we and other mammals could live much longer if our bodies didn’t go into programmed self-destruct mode.
They argue that most of the symptoms of aging that we all accept as natural and generally…
