How old are you?

A month from now, I’m going to celebrate my 25^th birthday. That makes me officially a quarter of a century old! But how old can we really say that is? If I were a mouse, I would have outlived the oldest one ever recorded by a factor of more than five. As a dog, I’d be mightily close to the world record for the oldest, and as a cat I might still make it for about ten more years. As a human being, I’m about one third into my average expectancy, but about only one fifth of the oldest living human on record: Jeanne Calment, who died at a whopping 122 years old. That being said, I’d be even younger to a Galapagos tortoise, a tuatara or a bowhead whale, which can all live up to around 200 years old! That would be height times how old I am right now! Some molluscs have been known to live up to 400 years while some other animal species, such as the so-called “immortal jellyfish” could live indefinitely by reverting back to its immature stage, although this is very unlikely given the high predation they are subjected to.

On the plant spectrum, the oldest know tree, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine called Methuselah, is 4,846 years old and still kicking! That is almost 40 times as old as Jeanne Calment was when she died and 194 times as long as I’ve personally been alive! For even more mind boggling numbers, a clonal tree colony of quaking aspen called Pando, considered as a single super organism has been estimated to be 80 000 years old while some dormant bacteria have been revived after periods of dormancy of 34 000 years!

Clearly, from a living being point of view, it seems difficult to say how old I am. Furthermore, am I really going to be 25 years old when I blow my candle lights? After all, my conception actually happened nine months before I was born, meaning I will have been 25 years old for a little while when I celebrate my birthday. That being said, the cell that was going to be me was actually already there when my mother was in the womb of my grandmother, some 50 years ago. Should I say I’m going to enter my 50’s, then? If I look up the germ line, shouldn’t I go back all the way back to my first homo sapiens ancestor, some 250 000 years ago? That would put even Pando to shame! But why stop there? My immortal germ line can most likely be traced back to the very first living organism! Perhaps next time someone asks me how old I am, I should say I’m 3,6 billion years! And even then, it could date to an even older time, since there are some solid theories that life could have actually originated outside the solar system! My germ line could then be as old as the Milky Way, which is 13,2 billion years old.

All that being said, as a transhumanist, one of my main goals in life is to live for as long as I can. From that transhumanist perspective, just spreading my germline by reproducing doesn’t seem good enough because there one factor that I care about which isn’t taken into consideration by it: My consciousness. Since I want my consciousness to survive for as long as I can make it, it would make sense to actually start calculating how old I am from the point where my consciousness started existing: From my first memories as a child about 22 years ago. This would mean I’m actually younger than my birthday would make it seem. Furthermore, I could consider that my consciousness wasn’t actually developed until it matured into its adult stage, some five’ish years ago. We could even argue that a year ago, or a month ago, I wasn’t the person I am today and that every day brings something new to who I am! In that line, it would be very difficult for me to answer the question: How old are you?

Sources

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/oldest-known-living-organisms-world

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_evolutionary_history_of_life

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_life_span#In_other_animals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy