Longevity

I'm taking some liberty in defining the word "longevity", a term commonly referred to as the length/duration of an individual's life. I am broadening that to include the duration of all organic life forms and the inorganic.

I'll begin with the estimated age of our universe: 13.8 billion years.

Our itsy-bitsy Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

There is general agreement among cosmologists and astrophysicists regarding our Sun's future. It is predicted that in about 1 billion years from now, the sun's luminosity will increase significantly causing the Earth's oceans to evaporate. Life, if any still exists, will cease.

Currently, Hominids are the new kids on the block. Some examples:

Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago Homo Neanderthalensis, 400,000 to 40,000 years ago Homo Sapiens, 300,000 years ago to the present.

We are currently living in what is known as the Holocene Epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago, a period that marked the end of the last ice age. Glaciers were retreating and homo sapiens were on the move, migrating, multiplying, and managing to figure out how to exist in larger numbers on this planet.

On the scale of geologic time, we're newbies. And yet, in the past 200 years, we've witnessed humankind's good, bad, and ugly: incredible technological and scientific advances on the one hand and human-caused disasters on the other. Our species is being pushed and pulled in every direction and it remains to be seen if mankind will survive into the next century.

Oldest Living

Currently, some of the oldest known organisms include:

Bristlecone Pine known as Methuselah, estimated age: ~ 4,845 years old.

Armillaria ostoyae fungus: Example, the "Humongous Fungus". Age range estimate: 2,400 to 8,650 years old.

Greenland Sharks: Age range estimates between 272 to 512 years old.

Kane Tanaka lived to be 119 years old despite suffering several major illnesses (paratyphoid fever, pancreatic and colorectal cancer).

Jeanne Louise Calment lived to be 122 years old.

Juan Vicente Pérez, lived to be 114 years old.

Short-Lived Organisms

Some bacteria and microorganisms have life spans ranging from minutes to a few hours

Mayflies, Stoneflies and Drone Ants emerge, eat, mate and die within a few days or weeks.

Black Widow Male. I watched a David Attenborough documentary on insects. It included a segment on the mating ritual of a much much smaller male and a much much larger female--a classic example of why size does not matter.

The itsy-bitsy male gingerly approached the female from below, vibrating various web strands to signal to the female "Helloooo sweetheart it's me! I've come for a visit!" If the male is lucky enough to vibrate the right strands at the right time and the right way, he'll succeed in mating with the female. Once finished, he then needs to skedaddle... really skedaddle. Unfortunately, more often than not, he usually ends up as a post-coital meal. Fortunately, we humans have evolved a much more sophisticated form of post-coital consumption.

Death Stats

In the US, on average there are 11,000 people born, and 8,000 die every day. Globally it's estimated that there are approximately 360,000 births and 155,000 deaths per day.

This brings me to a few "longevity IFs."

IF you...

. Happen to live in a "developed" country that offers good healthcare, and

. Have someplace you can call home, and

. Have access to food, and

. Have a healthy diet, and

. Don't engage in any/too many risky behaviors: smoking, drinking, drugs, etc., and

. Have a genetic profile free of any life-threatening anomaly, and

. Have a good/positive mental outlook and don't own a gun, and

. Live in an area that has fresh air and clean water, and

. Have a reasonable expectation that you can leave home and return safely,

... Then chances are you will live into your 70s, 80s or 90s.

Of course, we can all probably point to exceptions, people we've known or seen featured in the media who beat the odds and lived to a ripe old age. Personally, most of the people I've known who broke one, or several, of the "clean living" rules, died a premature death.

To frame all of this in a broader perspective, there are other risks to our collective longevity:

The eruption of a supervolcano like the one simmering under Yosemite. There are somewhere between 12 to 20 of these scattered around the globe.

Asteroids. It is estimated that the 180-kilometer wide Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico was created by an asteroid that was 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter. It is estimated that the Astroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter contains more than 1.1 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer and millions of smaller ones.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), is currently the hot topic in various circles. I prefer to focus on the incredible promise that it holds but I am not some rose-colored-glasses-pollyanna. In the wrong hands--and there are plenty of those--we could very quickly and very irrevocably f*** things up in a big way.

So what do you think? I welcome your feedback and invite you to post a guest blog on the general topic or any of the other points mentioned above.