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THE FIRST IMMORTAL HUMAN BEINGS ARE PROBABLY living among us today. You might be one of them.

There are men and women alive today who may well be able to live for centuries, perhaps even extend their life spans indefinitely. For them, death will not be inevitable.

As the American immunologist William R. Clark put it, "Death is not inextricably intertwined with the definition of life." Just because human beings have always died does not mean that they always will die.

Accidents and violence will not disappear, of course. People will still be vulnerable to poor judgment, bad luck, and evildoers. But death from old age, death as the inescapable end of life, will become a thing of the past, a dark memory of primitive days.

You might be one of the immortals. Particularly if you are less than 50 years old, in reasonably good health, and live a moderate lifestyle, you may live for centuries or longer. If you smoke, or drink to excess, or take narcotics, or are involved in hazardous work or play, your chances of extending your life span are of course reduced.

But if you have a normal life expectancy today, the medical and biological advances that will be achieved over the next ten to twenty years will probably allow you to live long past 100; and the longer you live, the more knowledge that our biomedical scientists glean, the farther and farther your life span will be extended.

Time is on your side.

I am not talking about living as a feeble, sickly old person. You may well be able to maintain the youth and vigor of a 50-year-old indefinitely or perhaps evenreverse the effects of aging and become physically younger.

Few reasonable scientists would agree with this prediction. They know too much about the difficulties of their work, the intricacies of the human body, the vast seas of unknowns that stretch ahead of them to be so glib as to accept the idea of imminent human immortality and the reversing of the aging process. But scientists are usually not the best predictors of their own futures. For example:

In 1903 the American astronomer Simon Newcomb wrote, "Aerial flight is one of the great class of problems with which man can never cope. . . ." Two months later the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

In 1933 the British Nobel prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford, soon after the first splitting of the atomic nucleus, predicted, "The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine."

Albert Einstein agreed: "There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear] energy will ever be obtainable."

Hiroshima was only a dozen years away.

Nor are politicians and media pundits any better at prognostication.

In 1844 Senator Daniel Webster railed against the acquisition of California by the United States: "What do we want of the vast worthless area? This region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, cactus and prairie dogs? ... What use can we have for such a country?"

On January 18, 1920, The New York Times chided rocket pioneer Robert Goddard and proclaimed its editorial opinion that rockets could not work in space because "of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react."

Perhaps our best guide in examining the future is the maxim of writer Arthur C. Clarke: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

Today hardly anyone in science, medicine, or government has faced up to the inevitable challenges—-and opportunities—-of vastly extending human life spans. In the United States, political arguments rage over the financial health of the Social Security system and Medicare, the government's medical insurance program for persons over 65 years of age. What will happen when the "elderly" live far beyond the century mark and are healthy and vigorous enough to keep on going, draining every pension fund in the nation?

Possibly, healthy and vigorous "golden agers" will eschew retirement in favor of new careers, but as the laws now stand—-not only in the United States but in every industrialized nation of the world—-most people can retire at age 65 (or younger) and collect their pensions and medical benefits as long as they live.

Clearly, the biomedical breakthroughs that will come over the next few decades are going to shatter these social arrangements and force us to deal with the facts of greatly extended life spans and virtual immortality.

There are more than fifty thousand centenarians in the United States today. Americans live longer after the age of 80 than any other nation's population. And the number of Americans who live past 100 is doubling every ten years. People over 85 are the fastest-growing segment of the nation's population.

If these trends continue, by the time today's 30-year-olds reach 80, there will be some 1.6 million centenarians in the United States. And today's trends will not merely continue, they will accelerate, thanks to the advances in biomedical knowledge coming from research laboratories all over the world.

Psalm 90, a prayer that the Bible attributes to Moses, says:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Thus the concept that a human being's "natural" life span is at best somewhere between 70 and 80 years has been with us for a long time.