@ Woofgang No, I would say we are fairly clear on both the why and the how of death, tbh.
The why only becomes a source of angst, I think, if you agonise over "the meaning of life". As I said in my previous post, humans can be viewed as essentially a biomechanical vehicle whose job it is to pass on genetic information to the next generation.Once that job is done, as far as nature is concerned, the vehicles job is done, and it is a slow shutdown :)
Now, if you want to get really metaphysical and start wondering about why life has this desire to reproduce at all,you could probably have an interesting discussion, but for me it does just come down to biochemistry.
@goodlife - No one but the most evangelistic and fundamental of christians believes the bible can be relied upon to offer substantive scientific fact. Since the overwhelming majority of it, as with the koran, can be dismissed as a collection of folk myth, legend and cautionary tales, it follows that it is a completely unreliable source for anything beyond a bit of sermonising.
To believe in the age of methuselah as 900 odd years old based upon a literal interpretation of the bible would be to make the same credulous mistake, as Archbishop Ussher did - believing in the inerrancy of the bible - when devising his chronology of creation : essentially counting the number of "begats" to arrive at the date of the Creation as being nightfall preceding 23 October 4004 BC. It is, frankly, a preposterous assertion to use the bible or the koran ( lets keep everyone happy and criticise all religions equally here) as a foundational truth for anything scientific.
I think, in the absence of some of the more truly creative sci-fi solutions becoming a reality, we can determine that the maximal upper limit of human life, in very exceptional cases, is not going to be very much more than where we are now. And goodlife - before you start making assertions like "you cannot because God is the life giver. And that is all for now" - First you have to offer evidence for this god of yours - incontrovertible evidence, which you cannot.