In mythology, there are many explanations why eternal life is not a blessing, but a curse. Here and the death of friends with loved ones, and religious contradictions, and endless boredom, in the end. Nevertheless, no one would refuse to live longer - at least for a couple of decades. There are real centenarians! And some, they say, even managed to stretch out for centuries …
Medusa vs perch
If we exclude death from accidents and diseases not related to old age, old age will be the main cause of death. The body wears out, immunity weakens, and the efficiency of critical organs such as the heart and brain decreases. This is not a unique phenomenon, of course, almost all living things on Earth undergo similar changes. True, the key word here is "almost".
Almost everyone has heard about the longevity of turtles, for example. Consider a male Aldabrian tortoise named Jonathan, who has been living on Saint Helena since 1832. Almost two hundred years - and without that a considerable period, but Jonathan, among other things, retains all the functions necessary for procreation. But it would be okay to turtles associated in cultural consciousness with nobility and wisdom, and what did the Aleutian sea bass so pleased with mother nature? This most common fish, perhaps very spiky, can live for over two hundred years without any problems! If we consider simpler organisms, it is easy to unearth a bivalve mollusc Arctica islandica with an average age of four hundred years, a potentially immortal freshwater hydra and a jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii, which refuses to die in most situations. Is death near? Medusa turns into a juvenile polypfrom which its full copies then appear. It is just as if a person, reaching the age of one hundred, turned into an embryo and lived life anew. But people, fortunately (or unfortunately), are not jellyfish, and they are not capable of such tricks. On the other hand, why are we worse than turtles and perches?
VERIFIED MOSES
You can try to find the answer in legends and traditions - it is there that the largest number of centenarians live. Biblical heroes, the Chinese and the ancient Greeks were the first in the field of outstanding existence. The Chinese did not hesitate to scale: here is a certain Taoist hermit, Guan Chengzi, who sat in a stone cell in the Kuntong Mountains for 1200 years, avoiding any irritants. Or Peng Zhu, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, who lived during the Shang Dynasty in the 17th - 11th centuries BC, the personification of Chinese longevity of 880 years. The Greeks were a little more modest - the hero of the Trojan War, Nestor, celebrated his 300th anniversary during the siege of the city, and the sage, poet and priest of Zeus Epimenides lived the same.
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How about the Bible? The Old Testament assures that the progenitor of the human race Adam lived 930 years, the builder of the ark Noah - 950, and his great-grandfather Methuselah - as much as 969! For the sake of mourning after his death, even the Flood was postponed for seven days. The numbers are unimaginable, but there is a way to reduce them to more reasonable limits. A number of scientists believe that in ancient times a seasonal chronology was used, where each of the seasons was equated to a year. In this case, Adam would have lived "only" 232.5 years, which is a long time even for the first man. Other biblical heroes lived for a long time, but it is quite plausible - Moses is 120 years old, and his successor Joshua - 110. Alas, the reason for such good health is not disclosed to readers - apparently, by default, it is closeness to God. But the same Moses in our days could well be among the "verified" centenarians - that is, thosewhose age is officially confirmed by birth documents.
If you just try to find information about centenarians on the Internet, you can easily stumble upon a lot of "Guinness Book of Records" personalities who have lived to 150 and above. But to dig deeper - and it turns out that the oldest person in the world with non-forged documents was the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who lived 122 years and 164 days. Of the living people, Jamaica Violet Brown holds the record for 117 years. Fun fact - 9 out of 10 confirmed centenarians are women, and, judging by their age, men barely made it into the top twenty. Moses would have been quite in place there … unless, of course, his age was counted according to the seasons.
THE POWER OF CHINESE HERBS
But let's say that some of the unverified centenarians spoke the truth about their age. Then the list expands significantly - and no longer at the expense of ancient characters, which are almost impossible to verify on the date of birth and death. The leader, of course, is again a Chinese - a certain martial arts master Li Lingyuan, who died in 1933 at the age of 256. The numerous descendants who remained after him "discovered the secret of the master" - special medicinal herbs that he collected all his life in the mountains of Sichuan. Without specifying which ones. On Lee's heels comes the Indian Devraha Baba, who also crossed the 250-year milestone, feeding exclusively on water from the Yamuna River. Another yogi, Tapaswiji, lived from 1770 to 1956 - a full 186 years. According to rumors, he was able to immerse himself in hibernation for months, thereby prolonging his life. But Shirali Muslimov, an Azerbaijani shepherd,who lived to be 168 years old. Embodying the longevity of the highlanders, Shirali married for the third time at 136 and became the oldest father in the world. Frenchman Jean Terel, according to the records of the 17th century, was born in 1684 and lived for 122 years, spending almost his entire life in the army. Napoleon Bonaparte himself sent him to an honorable retirement in 1802, and the old man fiercely resisted this.
DEATH PROGRAM
One of the theories says that aging, both in humans and in most multicellular organisms, is not an obligatory property, but, roughly speaking, a certain biological program. From an evolutionary point of view, it is unprofitable for almost any species to live for a long time - it eats up all available resources around it, and then completely dies out of hunger. Wouldn't it be better instead to slowly die of old age, but give way to the young and keep the population? If we are talking about any rabbits - certainly. But people themselves have learned to produce resources for food, with the exception of problem regions, and, of course, would like to live longer. Does evolutionary software not have an Off button?
Many prominent specialists are fighting over this, studying the problem from all available angles. Some are taking the obvious path by recommending calibrated exercise and healthy eating. Someone is convinced that the answer lies in the genome, studying the work of sestrin proteins that control many aging processes. Someone is struggling with the radiation background, as a result of which errors accumulate in the body and DNA is destroyed. In fact, the surest way is to impose a "healthy lifestyle" on your teeth, but it doesn't always work! Many people who lived to be a hundred years old and longer smoked, drank and did not take care of themselves, while the most abstinent and healthy died of heart failure in their eighties. Mystic herbs and meditation, mountain air or closeness to God are wonderful, but unverifiable things. There is only one hope - we know for sure that a person is able to live long. It remains only to achieve this.
Maxim Filaretov