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Why People Don't Live Past 114
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?"
And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.
No, I didn't read the article. It really doesn't matter. 114 is not some magic barrier.
This has been noticed before. Here is another article on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_person
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
is 42. And 114 is 42 backwards if you add the 1's together. The opposite of life is death - metaphysically speaking of course.
Look a bunny!
what?
The emphasis is mine.
Even if medicine could keep me alive that long, I'd rather just live a normal lifespan and make space for my sons.
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...God plays with the same modus operandi than most corporations built to his image; It simply planned obsolescence.
Football Odds
...by eating Dannon Yogurt.
Turn me into a machine, then I'll live past 114!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
...to live beyond that limit? Cryogenic freezing, I guess. But seriously, the problem is not the ability, but purpose. It's one thing to be able to survive into 100+, and completely another to enjoy your time on this planet. If you survive for 150 years, but enjoy the first 50 and suffer for the next 100, that sounds more like a Doom episode: Hell on Earth. All people are measuring when it comes to age is heart beating. But what they should be focusing on are different questions. Like: "do you enjoy getting up in the morning?" "how fast can you read?" "and write?" "do you hear me well enough?" "can you describe me what you see outside the window?" Can people over 80 on this forum add to this discussion, if they are interested to live another 34 years, until the "current limit" of 114?
there is no issue with my network
You first. Don't worry, the rest will be right behind you. laughing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
So if the lord limited humans to 120, why did Methuselah get 8 times that much time?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm betting there is some warranty clause that kicks in at 115.
No one likes the idea of dying, but I think we might be less traumatized by it if we felt our time on earth meant something. Let's face it, working a McJob, fighting with an unfaithful spouse, buying lots of crap on Amazon.com and cheering for corporate football teams just doesn't make us "feel alive."
"A person born in the US at the turn of the 20th century could expect to live 49.2 years. Their ancestor born in 2003 could reasonably expect to see their 77th birthday".
Wow. Just wow. Any article involving the violation of the known laws of physics is a waste of the electrons it was written in.
The rest is crap, too.
Whatever happened to, "Hope I die before I get old"?
A lifetime of healthy food (fruits, vegetables, nuts and algae), regular exercise, no stress, meditation, happiness and joy. Achievable, but not easy.
Or just to as the world's oldest person ever did, smoke for 96 years.... I doubt what shape you were in 50+ years ago matters for whether you become 100, 110 or 120.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I find myself thinking it is unfortunate that we keep people alive for so long. My grandmother who is 84 is living in an assisted living facility. It's one thing to live into your hundreds if you can actually do things that make living life worthwhile, but it seems the elderly I've seen living in those facilities are miserable. It's a horrible place to live. You can play board games with other strange elderly people that you may not like, or you can watch tv, or you can stare at the walls and wish for death.
Maybe I'm not your standard issue human, but I sincerely hope I don't live anywhere close to 114.
Well according to this post http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/02/15/2338229/scientists-study-how-little-exercise-you-need?utm_source=feedburnerGoogle+UK&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+(Slashdot)&utm_content=Google+UK earlier today. A person's maximum heart rate can be calculated: "very roughly, by subtracting our age from 220".
From these two 'facts' that I have learnt today I conclude that once your maximum heart rate drops to 106 - you die.
Should we even live past that age - from a practical perspective?
I'd rather take population control and live to be a thousand years old. The trick here being, of course, to make sure that when you age you don't spend the first 50 of those years healthy and then spend 950 years old and weak.
I suspect most others would feel the same way. I'd gladly sign a contract stating that I would not procreate irresponsibly if it meant I could lead an extremely long and healthy life.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Simple: the Matrix has a 4 Yotta bytes limitation for any human memory.
Each lived day stores 150 Peta bytes of sense information in short term memory, which quickly decays in 100 Peta bytes for long term memory (of lot of which is kept for dreams and feelings, only 3% is used by conscience simulation).
This storage limit translates into 114,9 years of life simulation.
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".
In the article there is a link to yet another article here
It states that at least 2 people have made it to 115 and the oldest person lived to 122. From the article:
The longest-living person ever, a French woman named Jeanne Calment, died at age 122 in August 1997; no one since 2000 has come within five years of matching her longevity.
So although it seems MOST people can only live until 114, there are some exceptions. Too bad Jeanne Calment died in 1997 because it would be interesting to see her DNA and how it compares or differs from all of the other people that live that long.
I'm with the article it must be genetics, and I think that GE(yes genetic engineering), will push that number even higher...
Frankly I cannot believe that many people live past 100 years old, let alone 114.
I for one love the Bible, and I found this hilarious, not trollish.
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.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
We live about 1000 moons (82 years).
Some Christian denominations have become more sane about this. Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, don't "pass the hat". Instead, people discreetly put their donations in a slot in a box outside the auditorium so that only the Father needs to see (Matthew 6:4).
except you could also produce 10x as much. With the growing experience of living 10x as long you'd probably contribute much more than 10x as much.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Logical flaw: How are you supposed to find happiness and joy if you're stuck with a lifetime of eating algae, nuts & veggies?
I think I'm going to have to settle for 72 years of steak, pork, fried foods & beer.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No, this is;
Roy Batty: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. :)
Has to be watched again. I'm always just utterly gobsmacked when he lets the dove go, then dies on the roof.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
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 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 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.
I don't think it's so simple as that. See: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/02/28/the-mere-existence-of-whales/
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.
Wikipedia has a list of the oldest people in the world.. 27 of them got older than 114 (only three of them disputed) and one of them is still alive.
So... "nothing to see here, move along..."
..."must have 435 years of experience with C++, Objective-C and XML. At LEAST 145 years of scripting and linux experience...." "... please forward your resume with work history, titles, salaries and referrals "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Reading that, I can nearly hear his voice, and am picturing the tears as they mingle with the rain on his face. What a brilliant scene. Thanks, you guys, for reminding me that I need to see that movie again.
It seems when someone has challenges in life (no, not fighting unfriendly people at home or at McJobs) but on new gadgets or architecture or ballroom dance competition (even open amateur takes as much work as open pro). There are some that keep working on a endeavour until they are dead of old age but it was that passion that kept them going. As opposed to someone that retires, is financially secure but simply "coasting" which statistically they will be dead six months after they retire. OK so I didn't RTFA (was it biological limitations?) but I've read and seen people that work on something passionate and it keeps them going, but not everyone is immortal, and they leave their endeavour "feet first."
mfwright@batnet.com
Mary was no virgin; Jesus was just a man; it's a horrible tale about deception, greed and lust for power; the taking advantage of people's gullibility, fear and inability to think critically. Jesus catches out Judas using GPS, buttonhole cameras, and bribed Roman constabulary. Three stars; needed more CGI, and story seems at least partially cribbed from the Egyptian Book of the Dead [a Warner Bros. title.]
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't know, but I'm sure it has something to do with Cialis.