Short Lifespan Quotes

We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.

In provincia i segreti hanno vita breve. (In the countryside, secrets have a short lifespan).

We are like fruitflies, measuring everything in terms of our own lifespan. But since our lifespans are so short, our perspective is entirely wrong. God, who inhabits eternity, sees things differently. He knows that our lives are just a mist. We should trust Him. It was not that long ago that Jesus came and it will not be that long before He returns.

Saying that “life is short” is such a cliche. And it’s true. In fact, we only have five minutes to be here. In the really big scheme of things, not even that long. We humans don’t even have the lifespan of fruit flies if you look at the bigger picture. In other words, we don’t have a second—not even a second—to waste on petty drama, on living fake, shallow lives, on swallowing our truth, or on hiding our light. We only dance around the flame of this gorgeous human existence for moments and the one thing important at all is loving beautifully.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.

... we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.

In today’s climate, it’s best to assume that most business models, even successful ones, will have a short lifespan.

Fake news have a short lifespan

It is sometimes argued that disbelief in a fearful and tempting heavenly despotism makes life into something arid and tedious and cynical: a mere existence without any consolation or any awareness of the numinous or the transcendent. What nonsense this is. In the first place, it commits an obvious error. It seems to say that we ought not to believe that we are an evolved animal species with faulty components and a short lifespan for ourselves and our globe, lest the consequences of the belief be unwelcome or discreditable to us. Could anything show more clearly the bad effects of wish-thinking? There can be no serious ethical position based on denial or a refusal to look the facts squarely in the face. But this does not mean that we must stare into the abyss all the time. (Only religion, oddly enough, has ever required that we obsessively do that.)

Our faulty memories and relatively short lifespans have made us unreliable witnesses. We are unable to truly grasp how much of the natural world has been altered and destroyed by our actions because the baseline shifts over time and generations have rendered us blind. Our standards have been lowered almost unnoticeably. What we might regard as pristine nature today is a shadow of what once existed. We can't seem to remember how things used to be.

The world – whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world – it is astonishing. But ‘astonishing’ is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events’ … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Just as Prometheus delivered stolen fire to man, so Eve, and the serpent, delivered man into self-consciousness, setting him up, were it not for his short lifespan, as rival to God. At the same time, man’s self-consciousness removed him from nature into a life of toil, doubt, fear, guilt, shame, blame, enmity, loneliness, and frailty—and the product of this separation, the fruit and flower of this exile, is, of course, culture. ‘God,’ said the writer Victor Hugo, ‘made only water, but man made wine.

of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us. “To a first approximation,” as David Raup of the University of Chicago likes to say, “all species are extinct.” For complex organisms, the average lifespan of a species is only about four million years—roughly about where we are now.

We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours that they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty. [...] But just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they're always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now so they needn't think about tomorrow... But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?

A double rainbow had changed the course of my relationship with the fox. I had been jogging when I realised that he would live only a few years in this harsh country. At the time I believed that making an emotional investment in a short-lived creature was a fool's game. Before the jog ended, a rainbow appeared in front of me. One end of the rainbow slipped through an island of tall dead poplars drowning in gray sky, their crowns splitting and spraying into each other. I stopped. A second rainbow arched over the poplars. How many rainbows had I seen in this one valley? A hundred easy, and I always paused to watch. I realised that a fox, like a rainbow and every other gift from Nature, had an intrinsic value that was quite independent of its longevity. After that, whenever I questioned devoting so much time to an animal whose lifespan barely exceeded the blink of an eye, I remembered rainbows.

This stubborn atavism conjured comical images from educational transdermals she had streamed. Miserly old men in primeval inorganic carapaces, clutching hand-held edged weapons, perched atop mounds of rudimentary “rare” metals and prize-gems, willing to fight to the death for the right to revel in a material wealth they could not possibly spend in their pitifully short life-spans.

The average human lifespan compared to the age of the universe is the same as comparing a blink of an eye to that human lifespan. Relatively speaking, short and long lifespans are the same. Both are non-existent compared to the infinite that’s ahead. Furthermore, we cannot change the past, and have no guarantees for the future. We are only in charge of the present. The present is nothing—and it is everything.

Almost the whole of modern medical research is dedicated to improving health in old age and extending the human life-span and we get more senility, not less. Extending it for what? We give them drugs to improve short-term memory, drugs to raise mood, drugs to increase appetite. They don’t need anything to make them sleep, that’s all they seem to do. What, I wonder, goes on in those senile minds during those long periods of half-consciousness. Memories, I suppose, prayers.

None of these men will bring about your death any time sooner, but rather they will teach you how to die. None of them will shorten your lifespan, but each will add the wisdom of his years to yours. In other words, there is nothing dangerous about talking to these people and it won’t cost you a penny. Take from them as much as you wish. It’s up to you to squeeze the most you can from their wisdom. What bliss, what a glorious old age awaits the man who has offered himself as a mate to these intellects! He will have mentors and colleagues from whom he may seek advice on the smallest of matters, companions ever ready with counsel for his daily life, from whom he may hear truth without judgment, praise without flattery, and after whose likeness he may fashion himself. They say ‘you can’t choose your parents,’ that they have been given to us by chance; but the good news is we can choose to be the sons of whomever we desire. There are many respectable fathers scattered across the centuries to choose from. Select a genius and make yourself their adopted son. You could even inherit their name and make claim to be a true descendant and then go forth and share this wealth of knowledge with others. These men will show you the way to immortality, and raise you to heights from which no man can be cast down. This is the only way to extend mortality – truly, by transforming time into immortality. Honors, statues and all other mighty monuments to man’s ambition carved in stone will crumble but the wisdom of the past is indestructible. Age cannot wither nor destroy philosophy which serves all generations. Its vitality is strengthened by each new generation’s contribution to it. The Philosopher alone is unfettered by the confines of humanity. He lives forever, like a god. He embraces memory, utilizes the present and anticipates with relish what is to come. He makes his time on Earth longer by merging past, present and future into one.

But following these Stone Age discoveries, progress was slow. It is estimated that in terms of the standard of living, things were pretty much the same for the next seven thousand years.1 People ate about the same amount, lived about the same lifespan, and buried about the same high percentage of their children. Even in the West, as recently as the seventeenth century life was hard and short. But then an era of immense and stunningly rapid progress began in Britain, with a wave of inventions and innovations transforming nearly every aspect of life. From 1750 to 1850 the standard of living of the average person in Britain doubled. And that was just the start.

Sexual reproduction is thus a costly investment that has to pay for itself in the short run. The details of theory and experiment on this topic are fascinating (see, e.g., Maynard Smith, 1978; Ridley, 1993), but for our purposes a few highlights from the currently front-running theory are most instructive: sex (in vertebrates like us, at least) pays for itself by making our offspring relatively inscrutable to the parasites we endow them with from birth. Parasites have short lifespans compared with their hosts, and typically reproduce many times during their host’s lifetime. Mammals, for instance, are hosts to trillions of parasites. (Yes, right now, no matter how healthy and clean you are, there are trillions of parasites of thousands of different species inhabiting your gut, your blood, your skin, your hair, your mouth, and every other part of your body. They have been rapidly evolving to survive against the onslaught of your defenses since the day you were born.) Before a female can mature to reproductive age, her parasites evolve to fit her better than any glove. (Meanwhile, her immune system evolves to combat them, a standoff—if she is healthy—in an ongoing arms race.) If she gave birth to a clone, her parasites would leap to it and find themselves at home from the outset. They would be already optimized to their new surroundings. If instead she uses sexual reproduction to endow her offspring with a mixed set of genes (half from her mate), many of these genes—or, more directly, their products, in the offspring’s internal defenses—will be alien or cryptic to the ship-jumping parasites. Instead of home sweet home, the parasites will find themselves in terra incognita. This gives the offspring a big head start in the arms race.

On the contrary, we absolutely mustn’t forget it. We mustn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these final hours that they ought to be making the most of? They’re spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn’t forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty. Colombe thinks you can “hurry up and forget” because it all seems so very far away to her, the prospect of old age, as if it were never going to happen to her. But just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they’re always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn’t think about tomorrow . . . But if you dread tomorrow, it’s because you don’t know how to build the present, and when you don’t know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it’s a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don’t you see? So, we mustn’t forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we’ll get old and that it won’t look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it’s now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there’s a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.

One possibility is that many of these universes are unstable and decay to our familiar universe. We recall that the vacuum, instead of being a boring, featureless thing, is actually teeming with bubble universes popping in and out of existence, like in a bubble bath. Hawking called this the space-time foam. Most of these tiny bubble universes are unstable, jumping out of the vacuum and then jumping back in. In the same way, once the final formulation of the theory is found, one might be able to show that most of these alternate universes are unstable and decay down to our universe. For example, the natural time scale for these bubble universes is the Planck time, which is 10−43 seconds, an incredibly short amount of time. Most universes only live for this brief instant. Yet the age of our universe, by comparison, is 13.8 billion years, which is astronomically longer than the lifespan of most universes in this formulation. In other words, perhaps our universe is special among the infinity of universes in the landscape. Ours has outlasted them all, and that is why we are here today to discuss this question. But what do we do if the final equation turns out to be so complex that it cannot be solved by hand? Then it seems impossible to show that our universe is special among the universes in the landscape. At that point I think we should put it in a computer. This is the path taken for the quark theory. We recall that the Yang-Mills particle acts like a glue to bind quarks into a proton. But after fifty years, no one has been able to rigorously prove this mathematically. In fact, many physicists have pretty much given up hope of ever accomplishing it. Instead, the Yang-Mills equations are solved on a computer. This is done by approximating space-time as a series of lattice points. Normally, we think of space-time being a smooth surface, with an infinite number of points. When objects move, they pass through this infinite sequence. But we can approximate this smooth surface with a grid or lattice, like a mesh. As we let the spacing between lattice points get smaller and smaller, it becomes ordinary space-time, and the final theory begins to emerge. Similarly, once we have the final equation for M-theory, we can put it on a lattice and do the computation on a computer. In this scenario, our universe emerges from the output of a supercomputer. (However, I am reminded of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when a gigantic supercomputer is built to find the meaning of life. After eons doing the calculation, the computer finally concluded that the meaning of the universe was “forty-two.”)

Saw-Scaled Viper     Alternative Names: Echis, Carpet viper, Little Indian viper Where in the world? Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Indian subcontinent Habitat: Desert, fields, towns and cities Common prey: Lizards, frogs, scorpions, centipedes and large insects Size: 40 to 60 cm (15 to 23 inches) Lifespan: 25 to 30 years Conservation status: Not classified   Description: The saw-scaled viper or carpet viper may be a small snake, only able to grow as long as 60 centimeters or a little less than two feet, but it is considered one of the deadliest snakes in the world. In fact, some scientists say that wherever this snake is found, it is responsible for about 80% of human deaths from snake bites.   There are three main reasons why the saw-scaled viper is so deadly. Firstly it is the saw-scaled viper’s aggressive behavior. It has a nasty temper and is easily provoked.   Secondly, it has a very quick strike, which when combined with a very defensive attitude, can be lethal to humans living nearby. The saw-scaled viper strikes so quickly that even the distinctive sawing sound it makes with its scales when agitated is not warning enough.   Thirdly, the saw-scaled viper’s venom is highly toxic to humans, with the venom from the females being two times more toxic than the venom from the male snakes. Its venom destroys red blood cells and the walls of the arteries, so within 24 hours, the victim can die of heart failure. There is an anti-venom available, and as long as this is administered very shortly after the bite, the victim can be saved.   Like other snakes, the saw-scaled viper’s diet consists of small animals like mice and lizards, as well as large insects. It hunts at night, hiding behind rocks and when it sees its prey, it coils and launches itself quickly and with accuracy, often biting its prey at the first attempt. The bite kills the prey within seconds, making it easy for the viper to drag it away or eat it on the spot.   Visit IPFactly.com to see footage of the saw scaled viper in action (Be Aware: your method of reading this kindle book may not support video)

There is not such a thing as a 'know it all' as human knowledge is immense and human lifespan pathetically short.

The quantum physicist Max Planck also knew this to be true. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” Planck wrote shortly before his death in 1947, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”26 Having witnessed a few different sorts of revolutions during my life—from the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe to the rise of LGBTQ rights in the United States to the strengthening of national gun laws in Australia and New Zealand—I can vouch for these insights. People can change their minds about things. Compassion and common sense can move nations. And yes, the market of ideas has certainly had an impact on the way we vote when it comes to issues such as civil rights, animal rights, the ways we treat the sick and people with special needs, and death with dignity. But it is the mortal attrition of those who steadfastly hold on to old views that most permits new values to flourish in a democratic world.

Bill Gates made a convincing argument for why improving human health is money well spent, and won’t lead to overpopulation, in his 2018 video “Does Saving More Lives Lead to Overpopulation?”56 The short answer is: No. If we were to stop all deaths—every single one around the globe—right now, we would add about 150,000 people to our planet each day. That would be 55 million people each year. That might sound like a lot, but it would be less than a single percentage point. At that rate, we would add a billion people to our ranks every eighteen years, which is still considerably slower than the rate at which the last few billion people have come along and easily countered by the global decline in family sizes. It’s still an increase, but it’s not the sort of exponential growth many people fret about when they first encounter the idea of slowing aging. Recall, these calculations are what we’d face if we ended all deaths right away. And although I’m very optimistic about the prospects for prolonged vitality, I’m not that optimistic. I don’t know any reputable scientist who is.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” Planck wrote shortly before his death in 1947, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

There are also some potential safety concerns with grafts derived from pluripotent cells. Although Parkinson’s disease is a distressing condition that causes much suffering, it does not greatly reduce lifespan, so the period of time available for the development of complications is quite long, perhaps about 20 years on average. For any cell therapy derived from pluripotent stem cells there is always an issue about the possibility of persistence of a few pluripotent cells in the graft which might give rise to teratomas. Although the animal experiments indicate that the teratoma risk is very low, the long survival time of Parkinson’s patients does make even a very small cancer risk seem significant. Moreover, the differentiation protocols for pluripotent stem cells never produce 100 per cent of the desired cell type. Even if all the pluripotent cells are gone there will certainly be other types of neuron and glial cell present and these may generate unwanted effects. For example, the uncontrolled movement problems seen in some of the foetal midbrain graft recipients has been ascribed to the presence of other types of neuron which make inappropriate connections.

Worse yet, scientific models, like people and cattle and insect species and mountains and all things known, have a lifespan. Mountains may survive geological eras, but scientific maps, like people and birds, have short lives. None has ever lasted more than a few hundred years, at present. To believe in any such mask with the fervor of Gross and Levitt contradicts all known facts of scientific history. Every theory they worship will someday get junked.

I lowered my gaze from the sky to the trees and caught sight of the cast-off skin of a cicada falling to the ground. I'd heard somewhere that cicadas only had a lifespan of a few weeks. Their precious, short life was spent braving the heat of summer, single-mindedly calling out for a mate, then, when they finally stopped singing, they slipped from that tree that had been their home and returned to the ground. They leave behind the only home they've ever known and die.

Life is short.” “Yeah, but it’s not that short. You don’t have the lifespan of an inchworm.

In all his years scorning humans for their lack of magic beyond a few magicians, short lifespans, quarrelsome nature, and undignified ways, he had somehow missed the fact that they had a sheer stubbornness that was almost a magic unto itself.

P3 - ten minutes of that movie, or indeed of any movie whose message is similarly dystopian about a post-aging world (Blade Runner), you will see that they set it up by insinuating, with exactly no justification and also no attempt at discussion (which is how they get away with not justifying it), that the defeat of aging will self-evidently bring about some new problem that we will be unable to solve without doing more harm than good. The most common such problem, of course, is overpopulation - and I refer you to literally about 1000 interviews and hundreds of talks I have given on stage and camera over the past 20 years, of which several dozen are online, for why such a concern is misplaced. The reason there are 1000, of course, is that most people WANT to believe that aging is a blessing in disguise - they find it expedient to put aging out of their minds and get on with their miserably short lives, however irrational must be the rationalizations by which they achieve that. Aubrey has been asked on numerous occasions whether humans should use future tech to extend their lifespans. Aubrey opines, "I believe that humans should (and will) use (and, as a prerequisite, develop) future technologies to extend their healthspan, i.e. their healthy lifespan. But before fearing that I have lost my mind, let me stress that that is no more nor less than I have always believed. The reason people call me an “immortalist” and such like is only that I recognize, and am not scared to say, two other things: one, that extended lifespan is a totally certain side-effect of extended healthspan, and two, that the desire (and the legitimacy of the desire) to further extend healthspan will not suddenly cease once we achieve such-and-such a number of years." On what people can do to advance longevity research, my answer to this question has radically changed in the past year. For the previous 20 years, my answer would have been “make a lot of money and give it to the best research”, as it was indisputable that the most important research could go at least 2 or 3x times faster if not funding-limited. But in the past year, with the influx of at least a few $B, much of it non-profit (and much of it coming from tech types who did exactly the above), the calculus has changed: the rate-limiter now is personnel. It’s more or less the case now that money is no longer the main rate-limiter, talent is: we desperately need more young scientists to see longevity as the best career choice. As for how much current cryopreservation technology will advance in the next 10-20 years, and whether it enough for future reanimation? No question about the timeframe for a given amount of progress in any pioneering tech can be answered other than probabilistically. Or, to put it more simply, I don’t know - but I think there's a very good chance that within five years we will have cryo technology that inflicts only very little damage on biological tissue, such that yes, other advances in rejuvenation medicine that will repair the damage that caused the cryonaut to be pronounced dead in the first place will not be overwhelmed by cryopreservation damage, hence reanimation will indeed be possible. As of now, the people who have been cryopreserved(frozen) the best (i.e. w/ vitrification, starting very shortly immediately after cardiac arrest) may, just possibly, be capable of revival by rewarming and repair of damage - but only just possibly. Thus, the priority needs to be to improve the quality of cryopreservation - in terms of the reliability of getting people the best preservation that is technologically possible, which means all manner of things like getting hospitals more comfortable with cryonics practice and getting people to wear alarms that will alert people if they undergo cardiac arrest when alone, but even more importantly in terms of the tech itself, to reduce (greatly) the damage that is done to cells and tissues by the cryopreservation process.

Some of what makes us human is our smallness. The brevity of our lifespans, the shortness of our memories, the narrowness of each person's field of vision. My Marian-ness is in the slender sample of the world that I am able to bring to my work. If we did not have this smallness, these limits, there would be no way to tell Ffarmer from Sappho, or Eliot, or anybody. So what was I to make of Charlotte--not small but all-devouring, ubiquitous, remembering? Anointed, in a way, by her magnitude. And at the same time, I am certain, diminished by it.

Exposure to short-term stress can actually strengthen your cellular response (i.e., “hormetic stress”). Hormetic stress promotes longevity by activating defense mechanisms in your body. However, prolonged and extended exposure to stress overwhelms your system, which then has to compensate and overwork (i.e., “toxic stress”), which shortens your lifespan.2 Put simply: if you’re continually stressed or upset, you’re wearing your physical body down.

All the things available at these discount stores are not just cheap, but cheaply made. They have a short lifespan and are often difficult to recycle. Which means they end up in the rubbish, part of the Boomer generation’s significant contribution to the environmental destruction of our age.

one of the key hallmarks of aging is the accumulation of senescent cells. These are cells that have permanently ceased reproduction. Young human cells taken out of the body and grown in a petri dish divide about forty to sixty times until their telomeres become critically short, a point discovered by the anatomist Leonard Hayflick that we now call the Hayflick limit. Although the enzyme known as telomerase can extend telomeres—the discovery of which afforded Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak a Nobel Prize in 2009—it is switched off to protect us from cancer, except in stem cells. In 1997, it was a remarkable finding that if you put telomerase into cultured skin cells, they don’t ever senesce.

In short, only about 15 to 30 percent106 or less107 of our lifespan appears determined by our genes, which means how we live our lives may determine the bulk of our destiny.

The quantum physicist Max Planck also knew this to be true. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,” Planck wrote shortly before his death in 1947, “but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”26

There’s power in knowledge and a little power feeds the desire for more of it. If the knowledge is something that few others have then it makes the power rare and especially seductive. The thing about knowledge and power is that there’s always more of both to be had and each increases the other. Suddenly a human lifespan begins to look ridiculously short compared to the amount of knowledge and power left to acquire.

What is it like to burn as the humans do? When one’s existence can be parcelled and measured in the units that the humans use, what was it? Time. Units of time. Ability to calculate, and live through countable units of time in motion. The physicality of time passing, when one’s lifespan is short enough to be able to tangibly experience the passage of time.

My mother says I had the airy beauty of something fleeting, features smeared hastily across a face soon to expire, and I waved my arms about in what seemed to her the hurried delight of a short lifespan.

I think maximum lifespan is about a hundred years. Compared to human history, a hundred years is quite short. So if we utilize that short period to create more problems on this planet, our life would be meaningless. ..., so we need to use our days wisely, to make our world a little better for everyone.

Dogs have such a limited lifespan to teach us about friendship and loyalty...perhaps they know we have a short span of attention.

To us, the second and the millimeter are short divisions of time and space, but to an enzyme about 10 nanometers across and vibrating every quadrillionth of a second, a millimeter is the size of a continent and a second is more than a year.

Young human cells taken out of the body and grown in a petri dish divide about forty to sixty times until their telomeres become critically short, a point discovered by the anatomist Leonard Hayflick that we now call the Hayflick limit.

She thought about how short a human lifespan was on a planet like this.  In a universe like this.  Seventy or eighty years against millions or even billions, making the span of a human life little more than a speck—at best, a momentary flash in time compared to things like a lake or an ocean, whose waves and ripples felt timeless, ambivalent of what floated on or within them.  It reminded Angela of the old saying that an ocean had no memory. In reality, the only true sense of time was born through human consciousness, with human lives being just a momentary flash within it.  So brief and so temporary, yet humans spent so much of their flash doing what?  Arguing and fighting.  Only to have their entire existence snuffed out seventy or eighty years later.  Sometimes sooner, sometimes later.  Everything they felt.  Everything they thought about or loved.  Gone into the ether.

The actual lifespan of a thought is very short…unless you believe it, trust it, or take direction from it.. Then it can last a lifetime. Be choosy. Pick the ones with which to do this.

The strains of the work are intense, the lifespan of the machines short. ‘When one of them reaches the end of its useful days,’ says Neil, ‘it’s not cost-effective to bring it back up. It’d take the place of ore in the upshaft, and that’s too expensive. So instead the machine gets driven into a worked-out tunnel of rock salt, and abandoned there. The halite will flow around it as the tunnel naturally closes up.’ It is an astonishing image: the translucent halite melting around this cybernetic dragon – the fossilization of this machine-relic in its burial shroud of salt. I remember the pit ponies about which Emile Zola had written, brought down as foals into France’s great nineteenth-century coal mines. The foals would not see daylight again. They grew in the mines, were fed there, were worked to death there, and their stunted bodies were left in side tunnels, awaiting the burial of collapse.

I don't ever want to lose sight of how short my time is here. And I don't ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward since resistance, at least within the lifespan of our resistors, almost always fails. I don't ever want to forget even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people, or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world, probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me. After all...if tragedy is to be proven wrong, if there really is hope out there, I think it can only be made manifest by remembering the cost of it being proven right. No one, not our fathers, not our police, and not our gods is coming to save us. The worst really is possible. My aim is to never be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can't happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy, and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves, just as my ancestors did.

Eco-romantics may fantasise about the pre-fossil fuels economy of the past, but the reality of pre-industrial agrarian society really was slavery, war, famine, disease and a short average lifespan for everyone except a very privileged aristocratic few.

prompting the United States in 1935 to join about twenty other countries that had already instituted a social insurance program. Social Security made moral sense. It made mathematical sense, too. At that time, just over half of men who reached their 21st birthday would also reach their 65th, the year at which most could begin to collect a supplemental income. Those who reached age 65 could count on about thirteen more years of life.32 And there were a lot of younger workers paying into the system to support that short retirement; at that time only about 7 percent of Americans were over the age of 65. As the economy began to boom again in the wake of World War II, there were forty-one workers paying into the system for every beneficiary. Those are the numbers that supported the system when its first beneficiary, a legal secretary from Vermont named Ida May Fuller, began collecting her checks. Fuller had worked for three years under Social Security and paid $24.75 into the system. She lived to the age of 100 and by the time of her death in 1975 had collected $22,888.92. At that point, the poverty rate among seniors had fallen to 15 percent, and it has continued to fall ever since, owing largely to social insurance.33 Now about three-quarters of Americans who reach the age of 21 also see 65. And changes to the laws that govern the US social insurance safety net have prompted many to retire—and begin collecting—earlier than that. New benefits have been added over the years. Of course, people are living longer, too; individuals who make it to the age of 65 can count on about twenty more years of life.34 And as just about every social insurance doomsdayer can tell you, the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is an unsustainable three to one.

Remember, the average human lifespan is tragically short. which averages around 4,000 weeks. But that doesn't mean you should live in fear of wasting time. It's a call to action to live life to the fullest and focus on what truly matters. Trying to master your time paradoxically leads to you being mastered by time.