अढळ ध्रुवाचा ढळला तारा....Dhruvapada, Is it?

बा सी मर्ढेकर:
"… अढळ ध्रुवाचा ढळला तारा
सप्तर्षींचा चुकला प्रश्न;
..."

Sean Carroll, ‘The Big Picture. On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself’, 2016:

“…A friend of mine, a neuroscientist and biologist, can make individual cells young again. Scientists have developed techniques for taking stem cells in the adult human body, which have aged and taken on some more mature characteristics, and reverse-aging them until they are just like newborn stem cells.

There is a long road from cells to complete organisms. So I asked her, half-jokingly, whether we would someday be able to reverse-age human beings, and potentially keep them young forever.

“You and I are going to die someday,” she mused. “But if either of us has grandchildren, I wouldn’t be so sure.”

That’s thinking like a biologist. As a physicist, I know it doesn’t violate any laws of nature to imagine living beings lasting for millions or even billions of years, so I have no objection there. But eventually all of the stars will have exhausted their nuclear fuel, their cold remnants will fall into black holes, and those black holes will gradually evaporate into a thin gruel of elementary particles in a dark and empty universe. We won’t really live forever, no matter how clever biologists get to be…”

Wikipedia informs:

"...Pleased by his (Dhruva's) tapasya and by his stuti, Vishnu granted his wish and further decreed that the lad would attain Dhruvapada - the state where he would become a celestial body which would not even be touched by the Maha Pralaya, or the final cataclysm..."

courtesy: Amar Chitra Katha

Biman Nath, Frontline:

"...because of the precession of the earth’s axis, the positions of stars in relation to the earth slowly change with time. Since the axis points towards different spots at different times, what is North Star today would not remain so after thousands of years. In fact, after 14,000 years, the star Vega (Abhijit) that shines almost overhead on summer nights now will become the ‘north star’..."