New Delhi: Each species, including our own, has an inherent lifespan that serves as a sort of upper limit on the average lifespan. According to one interpretation of life span, a population of flies will converge to the maximum achievable life expectancy that is inherent for this specific species of flies if it is maintained in ideal laboratory conditions, properly cared for, and is generally kept safe. Throughout history the lifespan of all flies has been the same regardless of location or duration.
This indicates that biology provides more practical information. There is an inherent rate of biological degradation for each species. Some species, such as flies, experience this rate at a very high level and can only survive for a short time; Other species, such as bowhead whales, experience this much slower and can live up to 200 years.
The average age of a human being is about 97 years. Although the theoretical limit of human life has not been precisely determined, a section of geneticists believe it to be around 150 years, while damage-repair scientists believe that if we manage There is no theoretical limit to human life. It has been built as a repair.
This physical limit is unaffected by increased health services or global economic growth.
Why is there a prescribed physical limit?
It turns out that there is a limit to the number of times your cells can divide to keep you young and healthy. This restriction, known as the Hayflick limit, is determined by the physical length of telomeres, a unique cellular feature.
According to this assumption, a normal human cell can only replicate and divide forty to sixty times until it can no longer divide and dies due to programmed cell death or apoptosis.
The Hayflick Limit hypothesis helped scientists study the effects of biological aging on human populations from embryonic development to death, including the consequences of shortening of DNA sequences called telomeres at the ends of chromosomes.
Telomeres are chromosomal end caps. They work to keep chromosomes neatly wrapped in a nice, well-organized bundle, which keeps all the other little things within your cells from fraying and binding. Telomeres are a useful feature, but they have a drawback: each time a chromosome is replicated to make another cell; The cellular copying device will need to remove a small portion of these end caps.
Telomeres shorten over time unless they are present, at which point the cell stops dividing and may eventually die. This is what happens as we get older. Our skin, for example, stops regenerating, we get wrinkles, and our bones become brittle and fragile. We just get upset.
The simple solution seems to be to repair the telomeres in such a way that they never shorten, thus creating an eternal spring of youth. In fact, there is an enzyme called telomerase that accomplishes this exactly. This enzyme is naturally present in humans, but not in the most beneficial way.
but there is a big discrepancy
Even though our cells have a limit to how many times they can divide, many of us will never reach that limit. There are many ways to die, and only a subset of them are caused by our cells reaching the end of their lives. Until about a century ago, infectious diseases such as TB and influenza killed most individuals before their telomeres ended. However, with the two developments in medicine and hygiene, it is now uncommon to hear of individuals dying of these causes, and as a result, the average life expectancy has improved significantly.
Due to better health systems, people are able to tolerate diseases and infections.
Compensation Effect of Mortality
The “compensation effect of mortality” refers to the relationship between low mortality and rapid mortality at a young age as we approach physiological limits. It is also related to the “compression of morbidity”, which refers to the fact that we are now generally healthy at all ages.
For example, the survival rate of Italian males increased significantly between 1975 and 1999, compared to 1900–1924. As a result, an 80-year-old today, while significantly healthier than an 80-year-old from 100 years ago, has a far greater rate of body disintegration in his later years. No matter how healthy we were when we were young, the human species reaches the end of its life between the ages of 90 and 95.
Overall advances in health care systems make us all significantly healthier as children; But, the compensatory effect of mortality ensures that the better we are, the faster we will eventually age. Nature has endowed our species with an inherent rate of biological disintegration that would allow only a handful of us to survive above the age of 97.
conclusion:
So, biology says that the maximum human life expectancy is about 97 years, but there is a twist: humans appear to be unusual. If the assumption of constant life span were accurate for humans, we would see a slower pace of development in more developed countries and convergence across sectors; Nevertheless, life expectancy continues to increase. More significantly, the survey shows that 100 years ago, Italian men’s chances of living another year were almost zero at age 89; Nevertheless, according to the life span theory, it should have been almost zero at only 97 years of age, as it is now.
However, we usually do not reach the theoretical limit of how long we can live because we die prematurely from other diseases caused by damage caused by less-than-optimal life choices. . People are now more likely to die prematurely from diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
While some of these early deaths are simply the result of bad luck or poor genetics, many can be avoided through good lifestyle choices. If we do things like quit smoking, reduce fried foods and use sunscreen, most of us will live to a ripe old age.
In fact, in industrialized nations, life expectancy and life span are currently moving closer together, whereas before 1970, life expectancy was converging to a fixed life span of about 89, as predicted by theory. We discovered a means of slowing the body’s natural process of deterioration, a truly astonishing progress that no other species has accomplished. And who knows what else we might stumble upon in the journey? Perhaps one day we will be able to harness the power of telomerase safely and never age. In other words, we can create our own life span!