Well, guess 120 is doable for the human body, biology, as it currently exists, given proper environmental conditions.
World’s oldest person passed away this past week.
At 119, She Was a Symbol of How to Live With Wit and Vitality
Kane Tanaka, who died in Japan this month, survived two world wars, the 1918 influenza outbreak, paratyphoid and two rounds of cancer. She loved chocolate and hated losing at board games.
The oldest documented person ever lived to be 122. These individuals are obviously genetic outliers.
Here’s more on this topic, which states we haven’t yet reached our maximum lifespan yet, according to Live Science. I found it a very interesting read:
Theoretically we should be able to live forever as long as our bodies can perform mitosis.
Trees can live thousands of years, But relative to humans trees are very simple organisms and only very simple organisms can withstand the ravages of time.
The practical problem lies in the eventual degrading of the genetic codes and accurate cell copying. Over time little transcription errors amount to large errors.
What’s this “Theoretically” thing?
“Relative to humans”
This is storytelling.
Seriously, what organism withstands the ravages of time?
Without the storytelling and the misdirection of anthropomorphizing.
Nothing can step outside the ravages of time, except our imagination and the stories it concocts.
It does Physical Reality a disservice. Write have you had a chance to check out Ed Yong’s, An Immense World? It really brings our senses back down to Earth,
Theoretical can be the idealized concept that can only be approximated in a ever-changing dynamic environment.
Living is a process and a process requires a reliable machine to perform the homeostatic processes consistently. As with all complex machines the human biome is subject to ageing due to information loss.
So theoretically the human biome can regenerate itself infinitely, but practically that will never happen.
Nothing can . That’s the point!
The oldest known single individual living thing on earth is a tree.
150 years would be great, if I could live the majority of them in good health. My grandmother, as did her mother, did well. Even helped my mother make lunch on her last day. My great grandmother fixed her own breakfast the day she died. Both took a nap and that was it. Here’s the thing though, they didn’t eat a lot, especially not a lot of meat. They ate a lot veggies and fruit. Sometimes they had dessert for dinner and that was it, but it wasn’t a large piece of cake or pie or large anything. Many of my ancestors often lived 60-70 in the 1700 and 1800s. 1900s we’ve been seeing 90s, so it’s quite possible, if my sons ate their veggies and keep their dead animal intake to a very small percentage of their diet, they could live well into their 100s.
Science, along with diet, has also helped to increase longevity among humans. So I see the article as talking about a good possibility. Okanoans (spelling? Spell check isn’t catching it) eat a diet high in plant food, much like my grandmothers. They aren’t vegetarians, but they eat more plant based foods than they do meat. The U.S. diet is high in dead animal fats, which can short life greatly. Between medical science and a diet that is is more plant based then dead animals, could very well increase human life expectancy to well over a 100. Of course, there is also genetics, but medical science is working on genetically inherited illnesses. Of course, there will always be the unexpected diseases like COVID taking lives, but the more medical science advances, it might not be as bad in the death count as past pandemics.
And stay away from shady supplements, you never really know what’s in them.
Welcome shivasup.
IMO, longevity depends on the ability for continued cell division (mitosis). Without cell division the body begins to age as old cells die and are not replaced by new daughter cells.
And cell division (mitosis) is performed by microtubules. It appears that microtubules eventually undergo a process called microtubule catastrophe that results in all kinds of neural problems as well as inability to function as the mitotic spindle and perform the transfer of chromosomes into a daughter cell.
Therefore I suspect that longevity might be possible from our ability to stimulate continued microtubule health.
