Take a guess. How many people are at least 100 years old in the United States? Would you believe more than 84,000 and climbing at an astonishing rate? By the time America’s baby boomers reach that milestone, there could be more than a million centenarians.
By Baba Wawa of course.
Haven’t heard from her in years.
But maybe that’s ’cause I don’t own a TV.
Want to live to 150?
Try moving to one of [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7250675.stm]the three towns where people live the longest[/url].
Or better yet, try combining all three factors (pointed to in that article) which lead to a longer life: 1) a healthy diet, 2) a healthy spiritual life, 3) a little bit of inbreeding.
Come to think of it, the last person I know of who (probably) combined all three of these factors was the patriarch Abraham.
He lived to 180.
[size=1][color=red][url=http://resurrectioncommunitypersonal.blogspot.com/]The Rabbit[/url][/color][color=gray].[/color][/size]
thanks for the link brer rabbit-very interesting. i am not sure i agree that long life is necessarily a good thing for mankind in general. all sorts of issues come up that the ‘experts’ never want to talk about and doctors never plan for, are going to end up smacking us upside the head. i.e. outliving your money thereby becoming a burden to society; living long with chronic illness thereby being miserable for a very long time; consuming more of the earth’s resources thereby taking it away from future generations…until these answers are even discussed openly we cannot plan to deal with the unforseen consequences of living to 150.
Longevity might be overrated. She should have talked to my granny.
My great grandmother lived to the age of 106 on genetics alone. (Her sister made it to 105, her niece to 100+, and my grandmother to 96). No special diet involved but if squirrel brains and Garrett’s snuff are one day found to add years to your life, I hope they credit her with the discovery.
We young ‘uns often told her “Granny, we want to be as old you are!” and she would half angrily reply that no one would want to live as long as she had. She was teasing us, of course. She enjoyed life more than anyone else I’ve known and was grateful to see her great great grandchildren. However, we also knew she meant exactly what she said. No one wants to die. But as Granny told us, in her own way, we weren’t meant to live in this world forever, either.
This isn’t exclusively a Christian insight, as Tennyson knew:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Tithonus learned about sophrosyne the hard way. It looks like our culture’s going to have learn it all over again the hard way, too.
maybe eating 30% fewer calories might make one not only live longer, but [i]feel[/i] like it was longer!
I prefer to enjoy whatever number of years God will give me.
If you can live to be 100, why not live to be 150? Or 175? If you can keep your mind, why not? And what does this do to the rest of society?
Just consider for a moment the overwhelming effects of such longevity!
Why not defeat death in this world, our millenium development goal?
Oh Brave New World…. Larry
Beg pardon Anthony, but the social disruption would be enormous. If the birthrate remains unchanged, and every five years, the average life span increased by five years, what would the world population look like? The five year increments would yield a geometric food and water disaster, simply to cite the obvious effect. Larry