Do you think humans can live longer than we think?

[InventiveMeasures]

Animals like tortoises, koi, and bowhead whales can live for over 200 years. I don't see why humans couldn't. There's even an immortal jellyfish that can reverse its life cycle and go back to a polyp. Also there's trees like the bristlecone pine that can live for thousands of years. I definitely think it's possible but things like the deforestation, harmful chemicals, pollution, processed foods, drug side effects, stress, and overall lifestyle choice limits our potential of a much longer life than what's documented.

So let's say other things like disease and killing wasn't a factor, do you think humans can live to maybe 200+?

[May90]

Humans can live forever, with proper technological advances.

Although, a 50 gigaton thermonuclear bomb detonated from within your belly will probably still end you...

[Blueobelisk]

If you disinclude those things you mentioned, I still don't think a human could live up to 200 years old, naturally. Maybe up to 150 years for really lucky people. I mean genetically lucky.

May90 is sort of right that with technological advances we can do anything, but even our current lifespans are only because of things like vaccines and medicines so...I think the things you mentioned led to us having increased lifespans overall.

[Speaker]

So let's say other things like disease and killing wasn't a factor, do you think humans can live to maybe 200+?

Those things aren't the limiting factors here. The limiting factor is your cells can only replicate so many times before defects start occurring to your DNA. This is why people start to look different as they grow older. Over time these defects add up and the cells no longer function at all. That is when you die.

Here is a nice Wiki to read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_da...heory_of_aging

And the more general term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence

[InventiveMeasures]

Humans can live forever, with proper technological advances.

Although, a 50 gigaton thermonuclear bomb detonated from within your belly will probably still end you...

Haha, maybe Stitches can survive that one.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

Animals like tortoises, koi, and bowhead whales can live for over 200 years. I don't see why humans couldn't. There's even an immortal jellyfish that can reverse its life cycle and go back to a polyp. Also there's trees like the bristlecone pine that can live for thousands of years. I definitely think it's possible but things like the deforestation, chemicals, pollution, processed foods, drugs, stress, and overall lifestyle choice limits our potential of a much longer life than what's documented.

So let's say other things like disease and killing wasn't a factor, do you think humans can live to maybe 200+?

We aren't turtles. Different species live different lengths of time. Cats and Dogs are lucky to get 20 years.

That being said the average lifespan today is over double what it was 100 year ago.

[hrugner]

Not without adding something to people to keep them going. There are a number of things our bodies stop doing on their own that are just caused by staged development, hormone changes mostly. Creatures without heavily staged development cycles don't need to worry about it as much. But, since we want big brains and live births, we end up with a bunch of extra stages most creatures of our complexity don't have.

[ComputerNerd]

The shortening of the Telomere's is a barrier to that, one which no lifestyle change will do anything about.
Chromosomes when replicated are truncated, a portion cut off the end.
That would be very damaging were a functional part removed, so they have a cap that acts as a buffer that is sacrificed instead.
That cap or Telomere is shortened each time, therefore there is a finite limit on the number of duplications before there is functional damage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

[Hotmail]

Yes, if we can overcome brain decay.

[Reeve]

If anything, "chemicals" and "drugs" are increasing our life spans, not decreasing them.

[In Ogres We Trust]

With technological advancements that focus on reducing or eliminating the aging process... yes.

[Imnick]

As we are? No.
We've already pretty much hit the effective peak of how far we can get with "lifestyle choices". At most you're going to eke out two or three more years, not a hundred.
We are different animals than the other creatures (and plants!) you have listed. No special diet is going to keep you alive as long as a tortoise, especially not if it's by removing "chemicals".


With future medical advances? Who knows.
Of course that would probably involve ""chemicals"" so I guess it would be bad for you
Your list is kind of silly. How is "deforestation" effecting our individual lifespans?

[Theodarzna]

Not naturally know, you'd need some of that Connal techno-wizardry to prolong the life span.

[InventiveMeasures]

Good points. I still wonder though because although the average life expectancy is apparently now 82 years old, there are people that have gone beyond that up to 122. Or even Li Ching-Yuen that apparently lived even longer than that. Science is always evolving and contradicting itself.

- - - Updated - - -

If anything, "chemicals" and "drugs" are increasing our life spans, not decreasing them.

I guess I should clarify "harmful chemicals" and although drugs have improved our well-being they come with a variety of long and short-term side effects.

[Imnick]

There's few such things as "harmful chemicals", it's about the amounts.
Chemicals are not separated into "good" and "bad", they are just ingredients. Their combinations and interaction with your body are what produce an effect.
Trace amounts of something that is in the public consciousness as a deadly poison is often harmless and sometimes even beneficial (hell, sometimes it's beneficial in large amounts, under the right circumstances and used the right way!), and copious amount of anything that is "good for you" will inevitably kill you.

It's really never useful to talk about things in this way.
When you are not being specific it only leads to scaremongering.

[sheggaro]

Only I can live forever.

[Schattenlied]

Animals like tortoises, koi, and bowhead whales can live for over 200 years.

And there's also other animals, like cats and dogs, which rarely live to see 20... None of this is remotely related, we are different organisms with different DNA, we do no function alike.

[Ripster42]

The shortening of the Telomere's is a barrier to that, one which no lifestyle change will do anything about.
Chromosomes when replicated are truncated, a portion cut off the end.
That would be very damaging were a functional part removed, so they have a cap that acts as a buffer that is sacrificed instead.
That cap or Telomere is shortened each time, therefore there is a finite limit on the number of duplications before there is functional damage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

Functional parts don't even need to be removed. The shortened telomere can change the strand's polarity enough that even though the promoter/coding regions are still intact, the polymerases aren't guided correctly.

[Fritters154]

Good points. I still wonder though because although the average life expectancy is apparently now 82 years old, there are people that have gone beyond that up to 122. Or even Li Ching-Yuen that apparently lived even longer than that. Science is always evolving and contradicting itself.

Average: a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data

Those aren't contradictors of science. There are people who die on both sides of the average. What would honestly be more interesting to discuss is the standard deviation from the average life expectancy, which is reportedly ~15 years. Three standard deviations gives us 99.73% of the population (assuming normality) not living past age 127. However, a well known principle with biology is that nothing is ever normally distributed in nature. The human body breaks down before that point and modern medicine pushes more towards the point of insurmountable breakdown, so life expectancy (in first world countries) is probably highly left skewed with a huge drop-off in probability to actually live past a relatively tight biological threshold. That's sort of a big accomplishment though, because historic life expectancy was right skewed instead of left skewed.

Just a fun note because I liked your immortal jellyfish example (love those things!): The immortal jellyfish is an extremely simple creature in terms of cellular structure and can actually use transdifferentiation to just change the cell type for many of it's cells, allowing it to go between an adult and polyp (newborn) state when it needs to. Humans simply can't do that. It would be really useful if we could, but the degree of cellular differentiation that occurs in vertebrate species is far too complicated for transdifferentiation to occur unassisted. It's something that could potentially be done in the future using technological or chemical developments, but definitely not currently.

[Mihalik]

Good points. I still wonder though because although the average life expectancy is apparently now 82 years old, there are people that have gone beyond that up to 122. Or even Li Ching-Yuen that apparently lived even longer than that. Science is always evolving and contradicting itself.

I guess I should clarify "harmful chemicals" and although drugs have improved our well-being they come with a variety of long and short-term side effects.

Science doesn't contradict itself. It corrects itself, that is part and basis of the scientific method.

Self reported ages are horribly horribly unreliable. A lot of people who claim over centenarian ages (especially outside Western nations) have no idea when exactly they were born, or often intentionally pile years on to their self reported ages. If there is no paper trail you might as well consider it bullshit.

Human lifespan exponentially increased over the past few centuries and decades. As have infant and child mortality rates plummeted.

Obesity and bad dietary habits are a major limiting factor in lifespan, but otherwise the trend has been an increase to lifespan.

Human lifespan is biologically limited. With good nutrition and normal exercise (hard physical labor reduces life expectancy, and no genetic defects humans generally live somewhere in the 75 year range naturally. Anything beyond that in natural conditions would be extraordinary, and is mostly made possible thanks to modern medicine.