291 | Venki Ramakrishnan on the Biology of Death and Aging
episode
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
1h 25m
3 speakers
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It's better over here. Now at T-Mobile, get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade-ins. All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of four lines for $25 per line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without auto pay, plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge. Phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well-qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire accounts and continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due. Bill credits end if you pay off devices early. See T-Mobile.com. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Is it possible that listening to the Mindscape Podcast will help you live forever? As we like to say here at Mindscape, sure, it is possible. It is not especially likely.
But it's not necessarily unlikely that listening to a podcast like this, or more generally, just doing things to keep your mind active, not just active doing the same thing over and over again, but doing different kinds of things, thinking about things in new ways, being exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking— can help you live just a little bit longer, as well as of course more down-to-earth things like eating less food and exercising and stuff like that. It's a fascinating subject, right? We human beings, not only are we going to have only finite lifespans, but arguably we are the only species that knows that we have finite lifespans, that we are aware of our own mortality. So it's perfectly natural that we human beings would like to extend it, right? On the one hand, We have an instinct built in. We want to survive and live. On the other hand, we also have a death sentence built in. And of course, science has already done a lot to extend lifespans, mostly through better health and nutrition and safety and things like that. But it's interesting.
The average human lifespan has absolutely increased, but the maximum human lifespan has not increased very much. People live to be around 120 at most, and that's as true now as it was 100 or 200 years ago. And we think that we understand roughly why that's true. There's a lot going on in our bodies that is not only not meant to let us live forever, but is meant to not let us live forever. We basically have an expiration date on each of us. And we don't like to have that expiration date. So science and technology are trying to think about ways to make us live longer and longer. It's difficult because there's not a single switch inside. It's not like there's one thing going on that says, yeah, you're going to do this much stuff and then you're going to die.
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