Longevity

"To die, to sleep—

 To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub,

 For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

 When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

 Must give us pause..."

-- William Shakespeare

I'm taking some liberty in defining the word "longevity", a term commonly referred to as the length, or duration, of an individual's life. I am broadening it to include just about everything from our universe to civilizations to what is left in the end. I am also including past and present threats to our imagined longevity.

I'll begin with the estimated age of our universe: 13.8 billion years. Our itsy-bitsy Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, and planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. More

Cosmologists and astrophysicists generally agree on our Sun's future. Scientists predict that in about 1 billion years, the Sun's luminosity will increase significantly, causing Earth's oceans to evaporate. Life, if any still exists, will cease. If we manage to colonize the Moon and Mars, both will meet the same fate.

We are currently living in what is known as the Holocene Epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago and marked the end of the last ice age. Glaciers were retreating, and homo sapiens were on the move, migrating, multiplying, and managing to figure out how to exist in larger numbers on this planet.

Civilizations

"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind." -- William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Act 4, Scene 1)

Apparently, no single, universally accepted number exists for how many civilizations have existed in human history, and no clear definition of what constitutes a civilization.

Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), 1918.

Ol' Oswald offered a stark prognosis: human cultures, like biological entities, have a predictable, deterministic lifespan. His prediction: Western civilization would enter a "...period of pre-death emergency around the year 2000, which would lead to 200 years of Caesarism (extra-constitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of government) before Western civilization's final collapse." More

The study of civilization lifespans is apparently "a thing." There's the ~336-Year Model (Luke Kemp, Cambridge University, the 250-Year Model (Sir John Glubb), and the Exponential Decay Distributions (Quantitative History) model.

The ~336-Year Model analyzed 88 distinct historical civilizations and societies spanning a 5,000-year period (3000 BCE to 2000 CE). Result: The average lifespan across the sample was 336 years. Exceptions included the Old/Middle/New Kingdoms of Egypt, the Aksumite Empire, and the Maya, which spanned over 1,000 years. The rest ended within 3 to 4 centuries.

British general and historian Sir John Glubb's 1977 essay The Fate of Empires" examined 11 major empires (ranging from Assyria and Persia to the Ottoman and British Empires). Result: A civilization's average age of collapse or major decline was 250 years. His conclusion: cultures follow a distinct, predictable trajectory: beginning with an "Age of Pioneers," progressing through ages of Conquest, Commerce, Affluence, and Intellect, before ending in an "Age of Decadence," a period characterized by internal political polarization, currency debasement, and loss of civic cohesion. Sound familiar?

Exponential Decay Distributions (Quantitative History): A mathematical approach that treats civilizations like complex adaptive systems, similar to companies or biological species. It addresses the question, "What is the probability of an empire or state falling in a given century?" The result is a "memoryless" exponential curve that produces an expected mean lifetime of roughly 200 to 220 years once a state passes its consolidation phase.

The Red Queen Effect. In Lewis Carroll's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice and the Queen run a race as fast as they can only to find, as the Red Queen explains it: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

Evolutionary biology's Red Queen Hypothesis adopted the metaphor to explain how species must constantly adapt, evolve, and reproduce just to survive against competing predators and parasites that are also evolving- think COVID, AI, or the really, really bad luck that gave us Trump.

In economics, the term describes competitive markets or technological arms races where companies must constantly innovate just to maintain their current market share. "Eat or be eaten," adapt or die.

Here are the generally recognized civilizations that emerged globally.

Region	Major Civilizations / Cultures
Near East	Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Persian (Achaemenid, Parthian, Sasanian)
Africa	Ancient Egyptian, Kush/Nubian, Aksumite, Mali, Songhai, Zimbabwe
South Asia	Indus Valley (Harappan), Vedic, Maurya, Gupta, Mughal, Maratha
East Asia	Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing (China); Jomon, Yayoi, Yamato (Japan)
Europe	Minoan, Mycenaean, Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Frankish, Holy Roman Empire
Americas	Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Inca, Chavín, Moche, Mississippian

Dynasties

A dynasty is a kind of subset of a civilization, specific to a region, period, and monarchy. It traditionally describes a series of rulers from the same family — for example, the Tudor family in England and the Ming family in China. From its mythical founding in 660 BCE, the Imperial House of Japan can lay claim to the title of the world's oldest continuous royal dynasty -- if you're doing the math, that's ~2,600 years and 126 sequential reigning emperors.

• Ancient Egypt: Historians typically identify over 30 dynasties spanning from the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3100 BCE) to the Ptolemaic Kingdom (30 BCE).  

• China: Traditional Chinese historiography recognizes dozens of imperial dynasties spanning roughly 4,000 years, beginning traditionally with the Xia Dynasty (c. 2070 BCE) and ending with the Qing Dynasty (1912 CE).

• Other Regions: In places like Europe or India, "dynasty" is used for specific ruling houses (e.g., the Habsburgs, Bourbons, or Mauryas), but because these regions were often fractured into smaller kingdoms or republics, they do not have a single, continuous "dynastic count" like Egypt or China. "

Oldest Living

Currently, some of the oldest known organisms include:

• Bristlecone Pine, known as Methuselah, estimated age: ~4,845 years old.

• Armillaria ostoyae fungus: Example, the "Humongous Fungus". Age range estimate: 2,400 to 8,650 years old.

• Greenland Sharks: Age range estimates between 272 to 512 years old.

Short-Lived Organisms

• Some bacteria and microorganisms have life spans ranging from minutes to a few hours

• Mayflies, and Drone Ants emerge, eat, mate, and die within a few days or weeks.

• Black Widow Male. A David Attenborough documentary on insects included a segment on the mating ritual of a much, much smaller male and a much, much larger female. The itsy-bitsy male gingerly approached the female from below, vibrating various web strands to signal to the female, "Helloooo sweetheart, it's me! I've come for a visit!" If the male is lucky enough to vibrate the right strands at the right time and in the right way, he'll succeed in mating with the female. Once finished, he then needs to beat a path to the nearest exit... skedaddle. Unfortunately, more often than not, he ends up as a post-coital meal. Fortunately, we humans have evolved a much more sophisticated form of post-coital consumption.

Homo Sapiens

Currently, Hominids are the new kids on the block. Some examples:

Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago

Homo Neanderthalensis, 400,000 to 40,000 years ago

Homo Sapiens, 300,000 years ago to the present.

On the scale of geologic time, we're newbies. And yet, in the past 200 years, we've witnessed humankind's good, bad, and ugly: incredible technological and scientific advances on the one hand and human-caused disasters on the other. Our species is being pushed and pulled in every direction, and it remains to be seen if mankind will survive into the next century.

Death Stats

In the US, on average, there are 11,000 people born and 8,000 die every day. Globally, there are approximately 360,000 births and 155,000 deaths per day.

This brings me to a few "longevity IFs."

IF you...

. Happen to live in a "developed" country that offers good healthcare, and

. Have someplace you can call home, and

. Have access to food, and

. Have a healthy diet, and

. Don't engage in any/too many risky behaviors: smoking, drinking, drugs, etc., and

. Have a genetic profile free of any life-threatening anomaly, and

. Have a good/positive mental outlook and don't own a gun, and

. Live in an area that has fresh air and clean water, and

. Have a reasonable expectation that you can leave home and return safely,

... Then chances are you will live into your 70s, 80s or 90s.

Of course, we can all probably point to exceptions, people we've known or seen featured in the media who beat the odds and lived to a ripe old age despite sampling all of life's sinful pleasures. Personally, most of the people I've known who broke one or several of the "clean living" rules died a premature death.

• Kane Tanaka lived to be 119 years old despite suffering several major illnesses (paratyphoid fever, pancreatic and colorectal cancer).

• Jeanne Louise Calment lived to be 122 years old.

• Juan Vicente Pérez, lived to be 114 years old.

Thanatology and Eschatology

Not words that come up in everyday conversation. From Wikipedia, "...the scientific study of death and the losses brought about as a result. The word is derived from the Greek language. In Greek mythology, Thanatos (θάνατος: "death") is the personification of death. The English suffix -ology derives from the Greek suffix -logia (-λογια: "speaking").

Then there's Eschatology, again, from Wikipedia, "... from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last' and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of the present age, human history, or the world itself.

Then, OMG, let's add the theological, spiritual, and parapsychological perspectives on everything from birth to the afterlife and everything in between. Throw in social media, influencers, AI-generated content, and my-oh-my-oh-my what a stew!

Regardless of whether or not one dies young or at an advanced age, we're left with the shell of a once conscious human being. Beliefs about what happens after that, I leave to the philosophers, theologians, and you.

The Final Chapter

Death, the last tick on our longevity clock -- or so some believe. For those of you who believe that isn't the end, is there ever an end? especially when you consider the law of conservation of mass? In that case, maybe we are all simply recycled, and the essence, the soul, and consciousness that make you "you" includes a "karma barcode." Based on your barcode, you return as Elon Musk II, a cow, or a cockroach.

Assuming that our sample corpse is left undisturbed and not:

• incinerated

• shredded by a bomb,

• eaten by some land or sea carnivore

• wood chipped,

• dissolved by acid or some flesh-eating bacteria 

• consumed or teleported away by aliens ...

...death brings dispersal. The human body gives up the organic and inorganic stew that once held it together. Enzymes and microorganisms go to work, releasing a bloom of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms back into the air and soil.

What remains is the skeletal frame around which the body molded itself, and a smudge of minerals in the soil. But the bones endure--locking calcium, phosphorus, carbon, oxygen, and the trace elements magnesium, sodium, and iron within a mineral lattice. Long after the flesh has been consumed, weather, water, and time continue to tease apart and repossess its dust. And then what? Heaven? Hell? Rebirth in another dimension? Nothing, that's it?

Super volcanoes

To frame all of this in a broader context, there are other risks to our collective longevity:

The eruption of a supervolcano like the one simmering under Yellowstone. There are somewhere between 12 and 20 of these scattered around the globe. It is estimated that if that supercaldera were to erupt with a volcanic explosivity index (VEI) of 8, the volume of deposits would exceed 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles). I don't think that any of us can truly fathom the impact of such an existential event. The USGS has run extensive simulations to forecast the effects of a VEI 8 event, if you're interested. More 

Asteroids.

Sixty-six million years ago, one of Earth's most cataclysmic events began with an asteroid 10 to 15 kilometers (~6 to 9+ miles) in diameter barreling towards what is now known as the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico--estimated speed 45,000 miles per hour (72,000 km/h), releasing energy equivalent to 100 trillion tons of TNT. It produced waves of destruction ranging from instantaneous regional obliteration to long-term climate disruptions. It ended the Cretaceous period, wiping out roughly 75% of all species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and large marine reptiles.

The remaining ~25% of species--primarily small burrowing mammals, avian dinosaurs (modern birds), crocodilians, and turtles survived, diversified, and paved the way for the emergence of homo sapiens.

And yet, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting evolution, a surprisingly large number of folks believe the Earth is roughly 6,000–10,000 years old, that Noah's Flood explains much of the fossil record, and so on... More

Artificial Intelligence (AI), is currently the hot topic in various circles. I prefer to focus on the incredible promise it holds, but I am not some rose-colored-glasses-pollyanna. In the wrong hands--and there are plenty of those--we could very quickly and very irrevocably f**k things up in a big way.

So what do you think? I welcome your feedback and invite you to post a guest blog on the general topic or any of the other points mentioned above.