Human Longevity escape velocity
Everyone wants to live a long and healthy life. However, the average lifespan of humans remains around 79 years. And it gets challenging to live healthy as the age gets higher.
The quest to increase human longevity has inspired a lot of studies and inspired methodologies from time immemorial — some have even got entrenched as day-to-day healthy living habits. Early 1970 brought with it a discovery that gave of significant boost.
Humans like many other mammals have Telomeres at the end of each of their cells. Telomeres are like the plastic ends of shoelaces. Each time the cell divides as we age, our telomers keep getting shorter and shorter to a point where the length of the telomeres is almost zero. This causes cell death due to the exposure of cell ends since the protective case of Telomeres are absent.
Why can’t we live forever then?
When our telomeres shorten, our cell undergoes senescence (cell death). Cells that go through senescence are known as senescent cells. As we age, with the increasing proportional process of cell division these senescent cells accumulate. Thus, this is a major contributing factor to the normal aging process. So, what if we could keep out Telomeres intact — that would mean lesser or no senescent cells and no Ageing!
So just make our telomeres longer, that is it?
An enzyme called Telomerase can actually help Telomeres to grow its size. The challenge here is that telomerase is crucial for cancer cells — to keep them alive. Most of our normal somatic cells do not produce telomerase.
Does that mean we cannot leverage the benefits of an enduring Telomere and live forever?
As alluded, researchers have traversed in the study of longevity long enough and continue to do so ever so earnestly, from taking a more natural and traditional route to cutting edge medical interventions and such. But now let us take a step back and really think about how it is to live forever. Living forever might seem like a great fantasy. But if we live for a hundred years and are not healthy and fit it is not of any joy. There comes the concept of health span. Our health span refers to the time in our lives that we are relatively healthy. So, if we increase our health span, we have a better chance of living a proper, fulfilled and even a longer quality life than living forever frail and unhealthy.
Human longevity is still an area of ongoing research and whilst we work on to increase the heath span, hang on there — stay healthy and fit — ready to jump into the bandwagon of human escape velocity era that is around the corner.
