Is Death Inevitable?

In certain religious and historical traditions throughout the world, there are oral (and occasionally, written) traditions that recoutn the tales of very old kings or leaders (mostly men, it seems) who lived for generations.   Modern academics engage in radical debate over how these timelines were calculated (since academics generally don't have much else to do) and no real consensus has been reached. Some examples of these - whether they are archetypes or real kings probably will remain uncertain - can be found in the Sumerian Kings list.  Another example is the Jewish patriarch called Methuselah, whose mention can also be found in the Chrisitan Bible.   

Across all of these traditions and histories, however, is the common theme - these rulers and leaders lived extraordinarily long lives.  Now as I mentioned above, these resources are decried by academics as allegorical, and may or may not refer to actual historical figures.  It's much easier to explain away the large spans of life lived by these people if we decide that their calendars were subject to different interpretation, so this is the value we've assigned to them.  And it may be accurate. 

But let's ask another question:  what if these people had to learn how to die? And further yet, what if their long-lived stories means something else: what if death and dying are not inevitable? What if they are created constructs of the reality we currently experience through our interface of consciousness?   The very idea that anyone anywhere on Earth could ever have biologically survived for 150,000 years (as in the SKL) seems contritely absurd, I'll agree.   And there is a strong likelihood that time was given different parameters then, so that years may represent days, or these kings may not have been real humans at all. So much conjecture about what really might have been.   But no one even seems curious about whether or not dying is endemic to our existence. 

I don't personally believe it is.   I write a lot about consciousness and the exploration of it, in terms of trying to define it and figure out how exactly it correlates to being alive.   But it migh also be possible that - in a very biological sense - we were not originally engineered to die.  Maybe our original programming contained the code for eternal biological entities, but realized quickly that newer, higher experiences were necessary for exploration, and so began our descent into entropy and systems failure.   I'm guessing here, of course, but its worth considering that there may have been a point in our distant history in which we literally didn't know how to die - our cells weren't accustomed to going offline at all, and so we simply didn't do it. 

Death may be something we learned over time, and not
an inevitability into which we are born. 

Is death inevitable, then?  If these biological lifespans are ever legitimized (unlikely though that may be, since some of the people themselves haven't been so), it may turn out that death has been acquired skill over time.   And if that's the case, then it might be possible to unlearn it, and reverse its effects, so that instead of the eternity of an ephemeral conscious entity, we may be able to realistically and biologically declare the end of celluar deathf, and the availability (for those who may be able to afford it, no doubt) of medicine that treats the disease of death itself.  At least one man believes this is possible, and is committing time and funds to see its unfolding.  

I, however, believe death is optional for other reasons altogether, and those reasons transcend biology and biochemistry.  And if we can untether ourselves from those two roots, we may be able to eliminate death from our vocablulary without medical intervention. And that is a solution that - in any version of the world - will allow the availability of such technique to all who wish it, and not just those with large and deep wallets.