How Long Will You Live?

I don’t often think about it anymore, but lifespan is one of my many interests. A few months ago I wrote a blog about how people perceive time, and that is only one aspect of the matter. I have noticed that people seem to have a good idea of how long they will live. I have known some people who pretty much predicted their own deaths. I am also interested in the research that is being done in longevity, and I posted a link to the Wikipedia article on Aubrey de Grey, a British longevity researcher who has said that he thinks that the first person who will live to be one thousand years old is alive now. I hope to prove him right, but we will have to wait and see.

Much of the research that de Grey and others are doing concentrates on DNA, both cellular and mitochondrial. I am not as familiar with mitochondrial DNA, but the time limit on cell nucleus DNA is a matter of the telomeres deteriorating. Telomeres tend to deteriorate with each division of a cell, so slowing cell division can be helpful for longevity, and there is an enzyme, telomerase, which will build telomeres back into shape. Alas, telomerase is very carcinogenic. We are hoping to find a way to restore telomeres without causing other damage.

Telomere Lengths Predict Life Expectancy in the Wild, Research Shows

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121119213144.htm

“Don’t be surprised if your doctor asks you to sit on the floor at your next checkup. A new study says testing a person’s ability to sit down and then rise from the floor could provide useful insight into their overall health and longevity.”
http://health.yahoo.net/experts/dayinhealth/weird-test-predicts-longevity

Then there’s palmistry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQbshEeuq6U

600 to 1200 years, but this is just a wild claim
http://www.paklinks.com/gs/philosophy-and-spirituality/202918-human-life-span-can-be-jacked-up-to-600-to-1200-years.html

I was kind of wondering again about potential human lifespan. It looks like the predictions are about the same, and Aubrey de Grey’s thousand years are the upper limit of predictions that have any credibility. (I like the idea about sitting on the floor. I can sit and get up from the floor without using my hands, but even when I was a skinny teen ager I preferred to use my hands on my knees getting up, because it impressed some easily impressed people.)

My lifeline goes into my wrist without any breaks, but I don’t think that’s significant. I suspect that we are genetically programmed to live a certain range of years, and I think that we are pretty much aware of this; although most people would say that it’s just “a feeling”; although it may be well known at some level of consciousness.

Time travel might make long life spans more common and interesting. If one can live for thirty years in the eighteenth century, another fifty in the thirty-second, and hop back to the third millennium BCE for a century of research on the Indian subcontinent before the Indo-Europeans, then back to the twenty-ninth century for a vacation, then one might lose track of how many years one had lived. That might be even a bigger problem after effective space travel becomes available. Or would it be a problem at all? Even General Relativity says that simultaneity is rather meaningless. Long lives and space travel would bring that home to humans, and it provides material for science fiction writers now, and provides more material for writers of romances in the future.

I expect that longevity will turn out like Quantum Mechanics; there will be a huge advance that I won’t notice until a few years later.  If that does happen, then it will be more evidence that there are many worlds or that a time traveller came around and updated the knowledge of this era. At present, the finger of blame is pointed at DNA, and that fits with what kills people. People don’t kill people; DNA kills people. There are evolutionary reasons for DNA to have a built-in expiration date, so the obsolete models will not continue to take up space. There are some species of animal that appear to be immortal; they activate telomerase, and the cells become young again, but those are relatively simple animals, jellyfish, sea squirts, starfish, etc. Those have the ability to regrow parts also. The possibilities are out there. Some say that human evolution ended with central heat; they probably are mistaken, but evolution will end, if people start being immortal. At present, the best indicator of longevity is to look at how long a person’s ancestor’s lived in the times before antibiotics. I had an uncle who was born in the 1780’s and died in 1893, and others who had similar lifespans. They haven’t done as well since antibiotics and other modern inconveniences came into use.

A more accurate questionnaire for determining how long someone will live should include the terminal ages of ancestors, because that is an inheritable trait. Sometime we will have to look at making humans females fertile for their entire lives. That is a characteristic that would also lead to a longer lifespan.