Why People Don't Live Past 114 916
kkleiner writes "Average life expectancy has nearly doubled in developed countries over the 20th century. But a puzzling part to the equation has emerged. While humans are in fact living longer lives on average, the oldest age that the oldest people reach seems to be stubbornly and oddly precisely cemented right at 114. What will it take for humans to live beyond this limit?"
A statistical blimp (Score:5, Interesting)
What will it take for humans... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oblig. (Score:5, Interesting)
Tyrell: The facts of life... to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Batty: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies, like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship... sinks.
Batty: What about EMS-3 recombination?
Tyrell: We've already tried it - ethyl, methane, sulfinate as an alkylating agent and potent mutagen; it created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before it even left the table.
Batty: Then a repressor protein, that would block the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication; but it does give rise to an error in replication, so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation - and you've got a virus again... but this, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Batty: But not to last.
Re:The oldest person lived to 122. (Score:5, Interesting)
quote:
“the odds of a person dying in any given year between the ages of 110 and 113 appear to be about one in two. But by age 114, the chances jump to more like two in three.”
Re:yet more biblical contradictions (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Genesis 6:3 (Score:3, Interesting)
Epiphenomena (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't read the article (shock), so I'm not arguing with those who say this isn't interesting, but it reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter in GEB:
"I was talking one day with two systems programmers for the computer I was using. They mentioned that the operating system seemed to be able to handle up to about thirty-five users with great comfort, but at about thirty-five users or so, the response time all of a sudden shot up, getting so slow that you might as well log off and go home and wait until later. Jokingly I said, "Well, that's simple to fix -- just find the place in the operating system where the number '35' is stored, and change it to '60'!" Everyone laughed. The point is, of course, that there is no such place. Where, then, does the critical number -- 35 users -- come from? The answer is: It is a visible consequence of the overall system organization -- an "epiphenomenon".
Similarly, you might ask about a sprinter, "Where is the '9.3' stored, that makes him be able to run 100 yards in 9.3 seconds?" Obviously, it is not stored anywhere. His time is a result of how he is built, what his reaction time is, a million factors all interacting when he runs. The time is quite reproducible, but it is not stored in his body anywhere. It is spread around among all the cells of his body and only manifests itself in the act of the sprint itself.
Epiphenomena abound. In the game of "Go", there is the feature that "two eyes live". It is not built into the rules, but it is a consequence of the rules. In the human brain, there is gullibility. How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation".
Re:I find myself thinking it is unfortunate (Score:5, Interesting)
I just spent a couple of years working at a "retirement community" where I was as old as the residents. There were a couple of very healthy residents, such as a Vietnamese doctor (76) who got up every morning and did Tai Chi and an 87-year-old guy who walked two miles around the campus each morning. But most of the residents were rotting away under the burden of a lifetime of bad food and no exercise.
I don't mind the thought of dying, but I want to die reasonably suddenly after a full, active life. Frank Lloyd Wright was brilliant well into his 80's. I just read something about a biotech entrepreneur who started two major companies while in his 70's and 80's.
Exercise may be the fountain of youth.
Re:Genesis 6:3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering Jeanne Calment [wikipedia.org] lived to be 122, I'd say God needs to update his manual.
Is average lifespan a useful metric? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say the answer here is fairly simple, we haven't put much effort into keeping 100+ year olds alive, relative to the amount of effort to keep, for instance, 5 year olds alive. As I understand it, a huge amount of the gains in average life length have come from squeezing the bottom of the graph, not extending the top of it. Here's an interesting, though somewhat morbid, exercise. Go to a very old graveyard and look at the stones on the family plots. You'll often see a family with 12 children, half of whom died in childhood, and the other half lived to their 90's. So in that family the average life length was around 50, but that doesn't mean that a 50 year old should be looking for the grim reaper around the corner, quite the opposite in fact. As I understand it, the life expectancy of a 25-year old has been fairly stable for a fairly long time. Once you've survived the fragility of youth and the stupidity of adolescence, the following decades are a cake-walk, morbidity-wise.
Re:Genesis 6:3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Taken in context of Genesis (as a whole) it would seem that "yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years" means something quite different.
[Source] [bible.cc]
Re:yet more biblical contradictions (Score:5, Interesting)
When a lion ate a lamb, what happened to it if death didn't exist?
The image I have in my head is horrible, just horrible, if things continued to live after being eaten. Or experienced bone-shattering falls, or drownings.
Are you sure this is a merciful god we're talking about?
Job 26:7, 26:10 (Score:5, Interesting)
If you search to the ends of the Earth, I suspect you'll find someone who can elaborate on it.
It could be argued that the ends of the earth are merely the shore.
Until then, I suggest Job 26:7.
You make a good point about this. Some people reading along might not get the Job 26 [watchtower.org] reference. Verse 7 ("hanging the earth upon nothing") suggests that there isn't anything that "holds the earth up", as some cultures' myths about turtles all the way down [wikipedia.org] suggest. Likewise, the shape of the curve between day and night is "a circle [...] where light ends in darkness" (26:10), which along with Isaiah 40:21-22 too shows biblical knowledge of the spherical earth [christiananswers.net].
Before the flood it was easier to be vegan (Score:4, Interesting)
When a lion ate a lamb, what happened to it if death didn't exist?
Before the fall, did animals even eat animals?
Before the flood, which happened 1,656 years later, it was easier to be vegan because there were probably plants with nutritional profiles similar to meat. I'm guessing these plants may have died off in the flood. Notice that God didn't mention eating meat until after the flood: "Every moving animal that is alive may serve as food for YOU. As in the case of green vegetation, I do give it all to YOU. Only flesh with its soul--its blood--YOU must not eat." --Genesis 9:3-4.
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Interesting)
Aside from the god joke, you are right on the money.
Living organisms haven't evolved to survive very long. Passing on your genes to a couple new specimen has turned out to be the superior strategy. Obviously, since eternal life is pretty much the end of evolution in organisms that don't do runtime-mutations very well.
Shapeshifters are about the only imaginable species where eternal life could evolve, and even there I'd say the odds are stacked against the trait for reasons of risk-spread.
Re:Genesis 6:3 (Score:5, Interesting)
And the best part:
In 1965, aged 90 years and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer Andre-Francois Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died. Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death.
Re:yet more biblical contradictions (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny bit is, back in the days I went to church, there were nutjob answers to everything, and as a kid, that shit was presented as if it made a damn bit of sense (it was grownups telling me, so it HAD to be truth by definition).
Re:What will it take for humans... (Score:3, Interesting)
You didn't exist for billions of years in the past, and you seem to have handled that just fine. This 'existence' thing is just a glitch.