Three Billion Heartbeats

We know that a human's average lifespan is about 75 years. That's mostly because of our biological and cultural evolution that's brought us scientific advancements; better hygiene and medicine have increased our average lifespan immensely.

_{Image by PublicDomainPictures - source: Pixabay}

A year is a long time however; what if we measured our lifespan in heartbeats? Well, that's not a too difficult question to answer: just measure the average number of heartbeats per minute and multiply that by the number of minutes in 75 years. I'm too lazy to do that calculation myself, so I'll just repeat what I've heard from several scientists: the average modern human lives for approximately three billion heartbeats.

How many beats do we get in a lifetime? If an individual averages 80 beats per minute, that's 4,800 beats per hour, 115,200 beats per day, and more than 42 million per year, which calculates to roughly 3 billion if you live to age 72. When you think about them that way, heartbeats are the most precious commodity on the planet. Hate to waste 'em.
_{source: US HealthWorks - September 19^th 2011}

This is not a very profound statement by itself, other than maybe it puts a little bit in perspective how short our lives are; three billion is a big number, but not unimaginably big and heartbeats go by all the time. How many heartbeats have you spent since you started reading this post? The positive news is of course that we've managed to double the number of heartbeats since we started walking upright and using our brains.

The really astonishing thing is this: scientists have discovered that this is true for all mammals! We used to live, on average, for 1.5 billion heartbeats and so does every other mammal on earth! The lifespan of mammals is also proportional to their size, or their mass: tiny mice live relatively short lives as compared to huge elephants and whales. But they all live for 1.5 billion heartbeats on average. Therefore mice have very fast beating hearts, and whales' hearts beat very slow; the life-pace of large mammals is very much slower than that of small mammals.

_{Image by Mysticsartdesign - source: Pixabay}

What makes this correlation even more astonishing is that not only heartbeats, but a lot of properties are paced according to the animals mass, like metabolism, reproduction rates, muscular movement... That's why they say that the entire life-pace is much faster with small mammals. This got me thinking: where did I hear that before? Where else do we see the link between mass and the slowing of pace..?

If you read my article Time, Space & Common Sense, you might already know where I'm going with this. In Einstein's space-time mass doesn't only curve space, it slows time too! Are we witnessing some profound correlation between physics and biology here? I mean if mass and lifespan are related in the same way as mass and time... Could that mean that gravity is the tendency of everything in the universe to want to be where time goes slow? Does everything naturally gravitate to a place where it lasts as long as possible?

I really don't know: maybe I'm letting my imagination get the best of me. It's just a sudden realization I had when listening to a podcast about those heartbeats. I'd love to hear your ideas on this, dear reader. I'm increasingly astonished about these little facts of life that seem to make us part of something far greater than our own three billion heartbeats.

Thanks so much for visiting my blog, dear fellow steemians. I'll be back in approximately 115,200 heartbeats, I hope you'll join me again. Until then, keep alive and keep steeming!

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