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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.
...God plays with the same modus operandi than most corporations built to his image; It simply planned obsolescence.
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...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?"
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."
Lifespans gradually decreased post-flood.
It is a little known fact that Methuselah exploited the life span mechanics of the Real Life MMO. That and other bugs, hackers, gimmicks, etc. got so bad that God had to nearly completely revamp the game. The new mechanics were firmly put in place after The Flood patch.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
as an aside, euthanasia and predetermined lifespans are recurring themes in sci-fi. Usually it's a story where people are only allowed to live x years and the protagonist rebels reaffirming that people want to live! It's a good story because it's true about humanity. I don't think i've ever seen a story where society has decided not that it will kill you after x years, but instead that after x years, it becomes your duty to humanity to start doing more and more dangerous things for the benefit of the race. Youd do stuff like going to habitable worlds and other grand adventures where you'll likely be killed by alien monsters.
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".
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.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I for one love the Bible, and I found this hilarious, not trollish.
Gorramn legacy support...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
In the beginning, there was nothingness.
Then he brought something from nothingness.
Then he brought order from the chaos.
And he looked upon it, and saw that it was good.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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?
He traded immortality for sex. Pretty much every man would do this if given the choice.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
and he did... Adam got married.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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).
I see. So he might as well have warned them that they would be given a ride in a helicopter if they ate the fruit, for all their understanding of the matter.
Ok, my bad, the word is yom, it can mean day or afternoon or age or daily or eternity or entire or lifetime or long or perpetually... the word doesn't translate well to a term we have in English, but in short, it roughly translates as "when you eat from the tree you will die". Also, even if you assume the 24 hour day is the correct translation, in a very real sense, Adam did die at that point even if it took time for him to physically die. The Bible clearly refers to both spiritual death and physical death and the spiritual death was at the time of eating from the tree.
AJ Henderson
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?
Actually, he traded immortality for the knowledge of good and evil. Essentially for a loss of innocence. Pretty crappy trade if you ask me.
Also, it is fairly certain that Adam and Eve were banging regularly already. (They were both naked, physically mature, and had all the functional bits as far as we know.)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The real question is this: If the fruit of knowledge is how Adam gained the understanding of what is good and what is evil, how on earth was he supposed to know that disobeying the big guy was wrong? And my understanding isn't that he was banished as punishment, but rather, as a pre-emptive strike so that he didn't think too hard about what the "Tree of Life" would mean. Wait a minute - tree of life - the tree that granted immortality? Guess Adam wasn't going to live forever to begin with after all, or else the big guy wouldn't have put that tree there or cared! ... Why the hell did he put either tree in the garden? What was the purpose?
To catch someone who doesn't know the difference between right and wrong doing something wrong?
What the hell kind of Poseidon-as-a-horse-copulating-with-a-Nereid nonsense is this??
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.
You are getting ripped off! Demand the full 1024 moons that you thought you were getting!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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'm not sure why someone gave this a "Funny" mod. Methuselah dies in chapter 5, God's proclamation is in chapter 6, following the flood. He didn't even have to be "grandfathered" in, if you'll excuse the pun.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This is like arguing if Superman can beat Spiderman.
Yeah, accepting that superheros are real and superpowers are real and the Marvel universe is real and the D.C. universe is real... ok Superman can beat Spiderman.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
> he traded immortality for the knowledge of good and evil. Essentially for a loss of innocence. Pretty crappy trade if you ask me.
You think that's bad? The Highlander fought and beat every other immortal to gain "the prize". What was "the prize" you ask? He lost his immortality and gained mind-reading. That's like picking the goat behind door number 3.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Everything was, apparently, vegetarian in the Garden of Eden. The lions and the lambs were, also apparently, good pals, lounging about all day. This also explains why they didn't fall or drown. And last, God's only merciful sometimes, other times he's wrathful, dopey, sleepy, happy, grumpy, sneezy, bashful, doc, and pissed.
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).
Umm.. No. you've got that all pretty much wrong.
1. It was the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil", not the "Tree of Life."
2. He knew it was wrong because God told him so. To Paraphrase: "You can eat anything that grows here in the garden except the fruit from that tree over there. If you eat that fruit you'll die, so don't eat it." Not a good/evil thing so much as a "Hey that's bad stuff, if you're smart you'll obey my instructions and not eat it" kind of thing.
3. Adam and Eve were kicked out AFTER they ate from the tree and were corrupted by sin. It was as punishment for disobeying his instructions. Also, they then started to age and die.
4. He put the tree there as a basic test of obedience. He wanted to be obeyed, but he also wanted people to have the free choice to do it. Not that making the wrong choice would be without consequences, but the choice had to be there or it wasn't ever REALLY a free will. (If you have only one choice, is it really free will to choose it?)
Adam and Eve chose to go their own way, as have most of humanity since that day. Thus we have sin, the fallen state of man, and the need for redemption through Christ. Of course, it is all still free will. You don't HAVE to believe in and obey God, but that doesn't mean there won't be consequences for choosing not to. Every choice has consequences. What sense would it make if they didn't?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
It has nothing to do with support. It was reasoned that humans could develop proper emotional responses if they were left to live beyond 120, so a limiting factor was built in.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
..."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 "
Are you joking with me? Genesis 3:22. ""Lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever ..." therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden." As for the "Not a good/evil thing", if you had absolutely NO moral faculties, would you know whether to trust glowy beard guy versus snake and sexy rib woman? Just because someone tells you something is wrong, if you have no sense of morality whatsoever, you'll take their word for it?
Don't answer that, actually. I think I know the answer. :(
A Man said to god "What's a million years to you?"
God said "A second."
Then the man said to god "what's a million dollars to you?"
God said "A penny."
So the man said to god, "Would you give me a penny?"
God said "Of course I will. Just a second..."
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.
Maybe this is a different interpretation, given my Jewish and not Christian upbringing, but I learned that after Adam and Eve ate the apple, they realized they were naked and clothed themselves. God came walking by (metaphorically speaking) and they hid. He asked where they were not because He didn't know, but because it was a test. Adam and Eve revealed themselves and God asked why they ate the fruit of the tree. Here, He was giving them a chance to repent their sins, but they chose to blame each other. Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake. (Not sure it's recorded who the snake blamed.) Only after they chose not to repent (especially having now learned good from evil), did they get their punishments.
Like I said, though, this might be different interpretations from different religious perspectives. Christianity is big on the "Fall of Man" in Eden leading up to Jesus sacrificing himself to absolve that sin. Judaism, meanwhile, is big on repenting as a means of absolving sins. (See: Yom Kippur when Jews fast and repent in order to have our sins from the past year forgiven.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.