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Humans probably can't live longer than 150 years, new research finds:
Science is once again casting doubt on the idea that we could live to be nearly as old as the biblical Methuselah or Mel Brooks' famous 2,000-year-old man.
New research from Singapore-base biotech company Gero looks at how well the human body bounces back from disease, accidents or just about anything else that puts stress on its systems. This basic resilience declines as people age, with an 80-year-old requiring three times as long to recover from stresses as a 40-year-old on average.
[...] Extrapolate this decline further, and human body resilience is completely gone at some age between 120 and 150, according to new analysis performed by the researchers. In other words, at some point your body loses all ability to recover from pretty much any potential stressor. The study's conclusion that the body loses all ability to cope -- or at least to recover -- from stress before age 150 is line with the conclusions of similar studies, including one from last year that pegged the maximum possible human age at 138 years.
The full study [PDF] is published and available to the public in the open journal Nature Communications.
I think that quality of life is much more important than number of years. Would you like to live longer?
Journal References:
1.) Dmitriy I. Podolskiy, Andrei Avanesov, Alexander Tyshkovskiy, et al. The landscape of longevity across phylogeny [$], bioRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2020.03.17.995993)
2.) Aleksandr Zenin, Yakov Tsepilov, Sodbo Sharapov, et al. Identification of 12 genetic loci associated with human healthspan [open], Communications Biology (DOI: 10.1038/s42003-019-0290-0)
3.) Timothy V. Pyrkov, Ilya S. Sokolov, Peter O. Fedichev. Deep longitudinal phenotyping of wearable sensor data reveals independent markers of longevity, stress, and resilience [$], medRxiv (DOI: 10.1101/2020.12.24.20248672)
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday May 30 2021, @04:12AM (1 child)
In principle, seems only logical that any animal could be immortal. In a sense, animals already are, on the species level, not the individual level, able to produce infinitely many generations.
It's an awful lot of effort to produce and raise offspring. In a lot of animals, parents are really nailed down by the needs of offspring. Gets to the point where everything you do is for the kids. Maintaining a body would seem a lot less work. Yet we age anyway. Aging can't arise from lack of resources, as one of the more curious findings is that caloric restriction (that is not so severe as to cause malnutrition) prolongs life. If aging is caused by genetic damage, from ionizing radiation and accumulated error, why doesn't that also mess up reproduction?
So I think aging is, shockingly, an evolutionary advantage. Why a species that replaces all its members every generation should have an advantage over a species that doesn't, is the question. Perhaps it's that the mortal species is more flexible, better able to adapt to change. Stories are legion of the old fogey who lives in the past, still using terribly obsolete ways, all their knowledge and thinking hopelessly dated. Almost the same idea is that producing children serves as life's way of doing a reboot. Or perhaps mortality allows more risk taking, makes the loss of an individual life not particularly devastating.
Or it could be that despite appearances, maintenance is actually very expensive, so expensive that is really is less effort to produce and raise offspring. The stuff you have to do to keep a 1950s car in working order is a lot of things you'd normally never have to think about. Partly that's because newer cars are plain better, but it is also that cars have many parts that will last 20 years, no problem, but not 50 years. Plastic, vinyl, rubber, and such like flexible softer materials can turn brittle and hard, and split open or crumble the next time it is put under load. Kinda disconcerting to be driving along, and have the rubber bushings in the stabilizer bar, which have turned rock hard over so many years, suddenly disintegrate and make your steering wonky, the car unable to keep the front wheels aligned at all. Yeah, I had that happen to me. Fortunately wasn't going very fast, only 30 mph, when it happened. The car was still drivable, barely, and I was only a few blocks from home, so I turned around and went home, very slowly, with the front tries screeching every few seconds as they wobbled way out of alignment and then back in. Have also had a crack in an engine mount cause that to fail, so that the engine sank a little until it was resting on the steering linkage. Made it kinda hard to turn the steering wheel....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 31 2021, @07:30AM
To me it's quite obvious that that is the case. With every new generation natural selection can do its thing, making the new generation better adapted to the current environment than the previous. For that to work the old generation has to die at some point, otherwise the population explodes. If you want evolution you need death.