How Long Can You Live

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Why does a house cat live 20 year , but a similar-sized opossum live only 3 years. Why can a giant tortoise live 150, but an elephant only 70. Factors such as diet, body weight, brains size, or rate of living do not explain such diversity of life span.

I was reading a religious article called Awake May 2006, very similar to WatchTower, with the heading How Long Can You Live. It talks about much, even a little bit about DNA. It seems to leave answers incomplete of why some animals live longer then others.

The article has also come to the conclusion that humans unlike animals, never get to do all the thinks that they wanted to and never get to reach their full potentially. The article goes on to explain why it should be that we humans have so much to learn so much to grow, only if we had more time to live.

I have very little knowledge of biology, but with a little logical deduction I can easily come up with a logical answer.

Mice and giant tortoise live in different environments. Mice live relatively dangerous lives while giant tortoise relatively safe ones. For a mouse to have the ability to live as long as a tortoise would be rather a useless benefit because the majority of mousse gets killed by predators, killed by disease or injured by their own kind before they reach 3. It would be as useless as rust-proofing a tank , if you know that the majority of tanks age going to be destroyed long before any remote signs of rust appear in its bodywork.

I have come to the conclusion that a very few percentage of animals die from old age or age related illnesses. This includes human kind, until very recently in our evolution where modern medicine and a safe and clean lifestyle. Now that our environment is know safer and cleaner then that of the giant tortoise, nature will grant us a longer life then it.

Evolution takes a long time so this will take many generations to happen. When the percentage of humans dieing of old age equals that of most animals we would probably live to 500 to 700 years assuming that our environment does not change.

Well, I think we have proven one thing here--it is very easy to refute a science article published in Awake! Well done!

Actually, I think you will find that there is a big difference between the diet of a house cat and that of an opossum. The opossum has stresses like not knowing where or when it will find its next meal, and the physical stress of a less nutritious, more disease-laden diet. Similarly, there is a big difference in body mass between a tortoise and an elephant. The elephant does a lot more work moving around than the tortoise. How far does a tortoise have to walk to equal the physical labor of a single elephant step? Again, the difference in physical stress is significant.