Ten years ago, a bowhead whale washed ashore on the Alaskan coast with a harpoon dating back to the 1890s lodged in its shoulder. This particular harpoon carried explosives timed to detonate seconds after it hit its target. Charming hunting technique, huh? Anyway, scientists analyzed the amino acids in the deceased whale’s eyes to discover his age, with the knowledge that bowheads can live up to 245 years. This one was over 130 years old. He escaped the fate of becoming lamp fuel, but death did find him over a century later.
In 1964, a graduate student named Donald Rusk Currey inadvertently killed the oldest tree known to man—a Bristlecone pine growing near the tree line in Wheeler Peak in Nevada. He was taking a core sample and got his drill stuck. Bristlecone pines are not like the majestic Redwoods of California. Bafflingly gnarled and stunted, they make their living in the harsh, inhospitable environment of the Snake Mountain Range. Park authorities fell the Prometheus tree—posthumously named—to free Currey’s drill. The tree was 4,862 years old.
A Jamaican woman named Violet Mosse-Brown—whose friends call her Aunt V—is the oldest living person on the planet. She was born on March 10, 1900, and is the last living subject of Queen Victoria. When asked about her secret to longevity, she said, “Really and truly, when people ask what I eat and drink to live so long, I say to them that I eat everything except pork and chicken, and I don’t drink rum.” Her favorite foods are fish, mutton and the occasional cow foot. Researchers, take note.
Time has a way of creeping up on us, but it’s not the bogeyman under the bed. For children, time moves more slowly. Perhaps this is because kids are always looking forward to something—Christmas, birthdays, summer break or the ice cream truck. Time moves faster as we age. As adults, we never seem to have enough time. Projects, errands, deadlines and the awareness of our lack of time seem to distort our perception of it. Time is moving us all toward the same conclusion. Time is the gift that is promised to nobody.
The truth is, we are machines without manuals. Our bodies are enormously complex and what we know about them is infinitesimally small compared to what we don’t know. And our understanding seems even further dwarfed by all the stuff we don’t yet know that we don’t even know. Swallow that pill with a grain of unrefined sea salt. The fact of the matter is that we don’t yet understand why some people live longer than others. We are just improvising with our current technology. But there are many ways we can live healthier.
So how do we give ourselves more time? Or do people even deserve more time? We have a terrific talent for making a mess of things. Could extending human longevity have a positive effect on the planet, or will we simply burn up all the resources we are clearly running out of? Hard to know. Even harder to be optimistic. But maybe greater longevity—if we ever meaningfully extend it—will allow us to see the impacts of our choices more clearly. Perhaps in the future we will live long enough to solve our problems and not force our descendants to live with the fall-out. I long to see that day. In the meantime, let’s try a lot harder to not screw it all up. Do it for Aunt V’s sake.