How Long Can We Live? We May Finally Know the Answer

What if you could live forever? Okay, maybe not forever, but would you take 150 years? A new study is shedding light on how we age...and may even show us a way to push the limits on human lifespan.

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So, not to get all metaphysical, but what is age, anyway? Let’s start by talking about the age we’re most familiar with: chronological age.

You know, the one that’s marked on the calendar as your birthday. But this isn’t the best way to gauge your health. If you want to find out what toll all that mileage has taken on your body, you need to know your biological age.

Biological age describes the accumulated damage to your cells caused by genetics and factors like pollution, disease, and chronic lack of sleep, as well as the natural decline of cells over time.

As age increases, DNA accumulates damage, mitochondria break down, and the telomeres at the ends of our chromosomes shorten.
This functional decline causes our organs to deteriorate, increasing our biological age as a result. Until recently, scientists thought the process was irreversible. But within the last couple decades, scientists are learning that cells can revive through a process known as “anastasis.”

#telomeres #immortality #healthyliving #longlife #Seeker #Elements

Read More:

How Long Can We Live?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/magazine/human-lifespan.html
"In 1990, not long after Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard began conducting a nationwide study of French centenarians, one of their software programs spat out an error message. An individual in the study was marked as 115 years old, a number outside the program’s range of acceptable age values."

The ethical implications of living longer
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/want-to-live-longer-consider-the-ethics
"There are many possible harms: Dictators might live far too long, society might become too conservative and risk-averse and pensions might have to be limited, to name a few. One that stands out to me is the injustice of unequal access."

Ageing process is unstoppable, finds unprecedented study
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/17/ageing-process-is-irreversible-finds-unprecedented-study
"All the datasets examined by Aburto’s teams revealed the same general pattern of mortality: a high risk of death in infancy which rapidly declines in the immature and teenage years, remains low until early adulthood, and then continually rises in advancing age."

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00:00 Live forever?
00:15 What is age anyway?
00:34 Biological age
01:01 Anastasis
01:54 Lifespan limits
02:02 DOSI
02:24 Resilience
03:22 Life extending treatments