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loadingSearching for the elixir of eternal life
Maria Fonseca
Thu May 29 2025
I have always been fascinated by the idea that we might live forever. But what does it mean? To live forever? And what lives forever? My interest was never in the in a science fiction, cryogenic, billionaire in a space pod kind of way, but in the deep, yearning and longing that humans carry: the wish to remain, to continue, to be. That yearning echoes across cultures and centuries, from the Taoist masters who spoke of the Golden Flower to the scientific labs of Harvard and Cambridge where researchers explore how nutrition can bring more hope towards the dream of eternal life.
The shift in mindsets and the rise of science moved the question from philosophy to practice: Can we actually defeat aging? And if so, how? Yet the philosophical inquiry remains. If we can, should we? And if we can't, what does this dream reveal about how we might live more fully in the present?
The 21st Century Laboratory: A Golden Age of Longevity Science
Longevity research has never been so well funded as nowadays. Nutrigenomics, senolytics, partial cellular reprogramming and AI directed drug discovery all promise to turn back the biological clock. Speakers at the recent Cambridge Festival on Longevity and Nutrition traced in detail how diet, gut microbiota and intermittent fasting modulate the epigenome—switching genes on and off like tiny mood lights for our cells.
Yet when the dust of data settles, the longest running evidence still points to the basics. The 1938–present Harvard Study of Adult Development follows more than seven hundred lives(including original recruits such as President John F. Kennedy and longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee) across eighty plus years and concludes, with almost frustrating simplicity, that good relationships trump whatever benefits nutrients like kale or enough money in the bank provides. Warm connection slows biological decline better than any supplement yet invented.
Meanwhile venture backed labs hunt molecular silver bullets. What they find instead is complexity: each pathway patched seems to reveal two more frayed threads. Longevity, it turns out, is a tapestry woven of physiology (yes) …. and meaning. The art living well - Eudaimonia
Few pieces capture that tension better than Rosa O’Hara’s extraordinary long form essay in Noema Magazine, Searching for the Secrets to Life Everlasting. O’Hara begins not in Silicon Valley but at a tidal estuary in Long Island Sound, trailing biologist Daniel Martínez as he collects Hydra vulgaris—tiny polyps rumoured to sidestep senescence.
From there the story hopscotches through a series of strange organisms considered as death defiers:
- Naked mole rats, whose eusocial tunnels under East Africa shield them long enough to polish DNA repair systems that shame our own.
- Quahog clams, one of which—nicknamed Ming—outlived an entire Chinese dynasty before scientists inadvertently killed it while dating its age.
- Turritopsis dohrnii, the so called immortal jellyfish that somersaults back from adulthood to youth in a cellular Groundhog Day.
O’Hara article weaves biology with myth: tales of Renaissance courtiers sipping liquid gold, of emperors dispatching alchemists to find elixirs, and today’s tech moguls commissioning epigenetic blood swaps. Each vignette ends on the same quiet note: the breakthrough always recedes just over the horizon, and mortality remains stubbornly undefeated - something we all have to deal with.
Yet the essay’s most poignant passages arrive when scientists themselves blink under the bright light of possibility and admit they’re not sure endless life would feel like living. Martínez, after two decades nurturing his hydra, finally euthanised them and went on holiday. “My recommendation? Drink wine and enjoy your life,” he laughs.
Perhaps the long dark night of the soul resisting the inevitable biological decay, cannot be solved by CRISPR.
Ancient China and the Golden Flower
Long before our modern interest in physical immortality, Taoist adepts mapped a different route to longevity—one that spirals inward. Two slim, enigmatic manuals have guided seekers for over a millennium:
The Secret of Everlasting Life
The Secret of the Golden Flower
Both texts describe inner alchemy: circulating breath and awareness through the microcosmic orbit until the Golden Flower—a symbol of awakened spirit—blossoms inside. This immortality is energetic, not epidermal. The body may wrinkle; the shen (spirit) remains luminous. In Taoist art a single yellow bloom often floats above a sage’s head, representing consciousness untethered from decay.
And yet, would work on immortality which is energetic expand the longevity of the epidermal physical one? Perhaps the reply is that the epidermis is not made invulnerable, but the pattern of ageing is rewritten from the inside out
Paradoxically, the resonance with O’Hara’s hydra is accidental but poetic: stem cell renewal mirrored by soul cell renewal. One is molecular, the other metaphysical, yet both whisper the same rebellion against entropy.
Soul Time vs. Machine Time
Silicon Valley tends to view death as a coding error. Replace the bad part, rerun the program. But even if we could engineer ageless bodies, would we avoid existential fatigue? Philosopher Byung Chul Han warns that without limits, meaning diffuses; eternity risks becoming a loop devoid of climax or closure.
Taoist and all kinds of timeless traditions instead treat time as spiral and sacred. To live forever might mean to drop so deeply into this moment that chronological time dissolves. The Harvard data intriguingly concurs: people who feel connected, purposeful and playful speak of time as abundant—even when clocks tick on. And when we meet the soul within, the possibility of living longer and meaningful lives also expands.
The Gift of Impermanence
Is our quest to defeat aging another manifestation of perfectionism, a refusal to accept that every growth curve plateaus? That every summer is followed by winter, every sunrise followed by dusk ? Perhaps aging and death are not failures to be debugged but teachers. They urge urgency, empathy,depth. They remind us that every conversation is unrepeatable, every spring unique.
Yet rejecting death does not require rejecting health. The convergence of science and wisdom reframes longevity as life amplification: sound sleep, nutrient?dense food, cold?morning walks, heartfelt friendships. Practices known to the ancients, are now measured by wearables and published in online magazines such as Nature Aging.
Living Well, Now
We may never abolish death, but we can abolish a life half?lived. That is the quieter, more radical victory on offer. To inhabit the body kindly, to learn the songs of our microbiome, to weave kinship strong enough that, when the final breath comes, it arrives to a life already complete.
“To preserve life, first understand the Way; to understand the Way, first forget life.” — The Secret of Everlasting Life
In learning to forget the grasping self, we remember the self that endures. May we bloom like the Golden Flower—not because we never die, but because we have learned how to truly live.
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Maria Fonseca
Maria Fonseca is an interdisciplinary educator, writer, artist and researcher whose work bridges the realms of academic knowledge, community engagement, and spiritual inquiry. With a background in Fine Art and a doctorate in creative practice, Maria has spent over a decade exploring the intersections of human experience, cultural meaning, and collective transformation.
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