How old do you think you can possibly become?
Today, we are going to talk about the TIME. Specifically, how much time we actually have? What is the oldest, a person could ever be? Well the world record for the worlds longest living person belongs to Jeanne Louise Calment, a woman from France who got to live up until the age of 122 years and 164 days old.
Right now, there are only 37 people who were born in the 1800's. Those 37 people have lived in 3 different centuries but as medical knowledge expands and our understanding of biology improves, people are living longer and longer.
In fact, scientists believe that based on statistics the first person who will ever live to be 150 years old has already been born. It actually could be one of you! BUT, according to the math behind it, it's probably someone who was born in 2010 and beyond. Here is the thing, as humans get older, the likely-hood of them dying increases (logic much).
But there are some types of animals that have what is called Negligible Senescence also known as biological immortality. And these types of animals have ever been observed to actually age. Animals like the Hydra. They only die just because of accidents, disease or predators.
The worlds oldest individual tree has clocked in more than 4600 years old, it's called the Methuselah Tree and it exists somewhere in Methuselah Grove forest. Government officials won't actually release its exact location to protect it from vandalism but it's out there. The lifespan of an organism can be even longer than that if you include Clonal Colonies. For instance these white pines all look like individual trees but they're actually clones of one genetic code. They all share a root system and the root system continues making more trees, meaning that those trees are all part of one organism.
But lets get back to humans and rather than talking about how time IS lets talk about how time FEELS. In tense moments of your life are remembered as lasting much longer than times that was relatively dull. Psychologists say that the reason for this is that our brain take deeper and richer memories of events that are novel or the event that were intense than ones that aren't. When your experience are novel you're not remembering more things about it but you are making more copies. Rather than just making normal memories during stress the Amygdala (a part of your brain) gets involved and also remembers things and many people believe that is why intense moments are remembered as lasting longer. This phenomenon becomes quite mind blowing on a macro scale. Think of it this way when you are a one year old baby, 1 year represents a 100% of your life. But when you turn 2 years old, that second year only represent 50% of your life. And the next year you live through only represent a third of your life. And by the time you turn 80, one year only represents 1/80 of your life. Those percentages are important because they may explain in why your childhood feels that it took so long. But as you get older the years seem to fly by. You have more novel experiences when you're young. You first learn a language, you first see your mother, you first learn to walk, you have your first kiss. These are deeply and richly remembered by your brain and so later on it FEELS as if they took longer to happen.
The good news here is that the more novel things you do and things you see, and places you visit, and people you meet the slower and more richer time feels. So go out there and do something cool, do something weird, do something new, or follow and upvote this article if you haven't already and for the first time ever on steemit, thanks for reading!
