The Immortal Children

This isn't a Twilight reference. I recently came across the quite interesting stories of Brooke Greenberg, Gabrielle Williams and Nicky Freeman, all of whom are seemingly kids that seem to age at an extremely slow rate or don't appear to age at all(in Brooke's case).

Whatever this "Syndrome X"(that's what the experts call it) is, could it be the key to potential biological immortality? The kind that certain jellyfish are famous for? Or is this another case of the media(and the most overzealous scientist involved in all of this, Dr. Richard Walker) merely misinterpreting the function of this disorder.

Edit: Link problems fixed.

Interesting, seems like a miscommunication between genes that would oversee the aging process in different systems. Very interesting.

^I have a feeling that this is just Walker and the media in general hyping up these kids' unique state. Once this Syndrome X condition is diagnosed and better understood by the medical community, it'll probably turn out to be not as impressive as everyone is making it sound.

So is this like reverse progeria?

^Sounds like it.

Though in Brooke's case, her bones appear to have aged a little normally, as they're biologically 10 years old. Some of her other organs also age erratically. And she also seems to have magically healed from medical problems in the past(tumors and whatnot).

Wait, all those people are completely healthy, right?
And without any mental disorder?

Negligible senescence.

You know, I posted a crack pot conspiracy theory topic on Movie Codec Lounge about 3 years ago talking about negligible senescence and natural selection of humans as Emperors and Leaders 3000-2000 years ago and what that could say about modern society.

If a man or woman born with negligible senescence lives an extremely long time than they have the potential to father many children with those same traits, and a female with negligible senescence could mother children well into her 70s.

If high intelligence, dominating willpower, good money-management are all desirable traits, than it is likely these long-lived peoples will all eventually bear children with those who have these other traits. What you get are a series of prodigious, long-lived, clandestine families who were likely rulers.

Any good way sto test the hypothesis? Who are incredibly smart people who disappeared and were never heard from again? Are there hospitals specifically for their own? What happens to unusually gifted people that aren't born in these special anonymous hospitals? Where is all the money going?

When in doubt, follow the money. In the 1960s American banks irrationally printed trillions of extra dollars and our government has been illogically shutting down R&D programs, slashing funding. These two developments effectively destroyed an emerging techno-utopian America. Vietnam, the Iraq Invasion, made and still make no sense. Perhaps our Government is at the stranglehold of these anonymous, clandestine bankers who've managed to print trillions of extra dollars and electronically reroute non-existent backings after the Gold Standard was abolished?

Look for money that has no resources to back it. Look for how American bankers may be negotiating with Oil Companies in the Middle East, maybe we'll find the real reason we invaded Iraq. Where did the money come from to build the Burj Dubai. Why is there this massive economic boom in the Middle East? Why are they building taller and better skyscrapers than us?

Are there clandestine families operating in secret? Interacting through Transcontinental Subterranean Vactrain transportation systems?

Tall, blond hair, blue eyes, the Aryans, the Nephilim. They could be behind modern society now, puppet masters.

I mean, we'd already had 8,000 years of post-nomadic, societal evolution of civilizations and cultures; 2,000 years ago.

Originally posted by TheGodKiller
Whatever this "Syndrome X"(that's what the experts call it) is, could it be the key to potential biological immortality?

Given that all these kids seem like they would have died early without significant medical attention I'm going to go with "No".

Originally posted by TheGodKiller
The kind that certain jellyfish are famous for?

This isn't even remotely like that . . .

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Given that all these kids seem like they would have died early without significant medical attention I'm going to go with "No".

Originally posted by Dolos
He's talking about the lack of degradation to dna strands during mitosis, the delayed or (in Brooke's case) entirely negligible apoptosis of new cells. Not the other problems they inherited.

You're not immortal if you die from endogenous failures of your body. Actually that's kind of the opposite of immortality. We should come up with a word for it. Disimmortality? Negaimmortality?

I'm all for a new word. It's annoying having to go in to detail what I mean by my greatest desire being immortality. I don't want to be invincible/eternal immortal. I want to be an Elf from Lord of the Rings immortal.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
You're not immortal if you die from endogenous failures of your body. Actually that's kind of the opposite of immortality. We should come up with a word for it. Disimmortality? Negaimmortality?

NoOOOOOoooooOOOOOOAAAHHHH!

I'm saying that it is extremely likely that, mathematically speaking, sometime between the year 10,500 BC to the year 4,000 BC or so thousands of negligibly senescent humans were born (from just a few dozen every few hundred years) without any endogenous defects that would negate the effects of said biological immortality, or dramatically slowed aging processes.

I'm saying, due to a combination of natural selection and wealth collected by individuals who worked far longer than normally possible when culminated with the inherited wealth of their descendants, that is is also very likely that these long lived peoples developed families throughout the ancient world that survived far more generations than they should, allowing them to consolidate leadership over others. I'm saying that the descendants of these clandestine families would have inherited all the best genetics (scientific and creative intellects, traits for optimal money-management and leadership skills, tall, thin, hairless, blonde hair blue eyes) and would not have ruled abroad, but eventually in secret upon gaining Solomon's level of wealth.

At which point, who knows? Perhaps they caused the bubonic plague to thin the herd so they could make sure no other negligibly senescent children were being born throughout their secret empire. Perhaps, at the dawning of the 17th century, when the world was interconnected through boats and roads, they engineered their own little radio, by the 18th century these separated families would no longer be able to ignore each other. We could all be puppets for a subterranean sup-species of human that has better technology and a far more advanced understanding of science than us.

I'm no evolutionist, or biologist, but if I were, I would be making this my hypothesis. A good way to test it is to see if any newborns go missing in hospitals; as they can't have more negligibly senescent children running around, now can they?

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
You're not immortal if you die from endogenous failures of your body. Actually that's kind of the opposite of immortality. We should come up with a word for it. Disimmortality? Negaimmortality?

imimmortality

Originally posted by Dolos
A good way to test it is to see if any newborns go missing in hospitals; as they can't have more negligibly senescent children running around, now can they?

That is a terrible way to test this.

Originally posted by Lord Lucien
I'm all for a new word. It's annoying having to go in to detail what I mean by my greatest desire being immortality. I don't want to be invincible/eternal immortal. I want to be an Elf from Lord of the Rings immortal.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Given that all these kids seem like they would have died early without significant medical attention I'm going to go with "No".

This isn't even remotely like that . . .

another case of the media(and the most overzealous scientist involved in all of this, Dr. Richard Walker) merely misinterpreting the function of this disorder.

Originally posted by Bardock42
That is a terrible way to test this.

The existence of people, with the defective variants of negligible senescence, aren't covered up because they have defects. So if we could find someone born without the defect, affirming that their existence has been hidden from society, we could assume the likelihood of people being born like that in the tens thousands of years that homo-sapiens have been around, further cementing the time they'd have to reproduce and form clandestine families that were, at some point, publicly at the top of many social hierarchies around the world. Then it becomes a testable hypothesis.

Originally posted by TheGodKiller
You want to be Jones the Wandering Eye from Gunnerkrigg Court.

Originally posted by Lord Lucien
Actually I was thinking Randy from Questionable Content.

+5 for a QC reference.