I once read somewhere that the body ages much slower if you eat reduced calories. In the 1970s I also met a Japanese monk who was born in 1829, he had led a life of meditation and fasting. He knew many details of life in Japan in the Nineteenth Century. I don’t know if he still alive.
What was his name? Where did you meet? Anymore details? If this is true (1970-1829=141), he’s bound to be famous.
The oldest living human being is supposedly 124 years old.
They may be immortals among us. It’s possible that people alive today might live long enough to take advantage of future medical breakthroughs that would make people essentially immortal.
You and I might be among the lucky who never die.
I wouldn’t bet on it, but this seems at least possible.
His name was something like takashi or takashi-san, we met in Aoumori in northern Honshu around 1974.
I met someone recently who was alive at the battle of Sevastopol in 1855;
if you go to Powderham Castle in Devon you can meet him too.
Timothy has an unknown total age, but he was probably a year or three old when he became a ships mascot in the Royal Navy in 1854; he survived the Crimean war, retiring to Devon soon after.
If only we were all as long lived as tortoises.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
So far, so good!
The problem is that human beings aren’t “designed”. Even if the story is true it probably doesn’t mean much more than “humans can grow teeth back at a very advanced age”.
There are indeed Immortal Souls among us, but you have to go to Finland to find them.
And in Tibet, of course, there’s Father Perrault . . .
No, Keith Richards just can’t be killed by conventional weapons.
The 36 just men who spare the world from destruction are known as the lamed wufniks. Jorge Luis Borges included an entry about them in his reference work The Book of Imaginary Beings. According to it, they are not immortal. Rather, when one dies, a new person is automatically added to the rolls without being aware of what has happened.
The idea that the world is spared from God’s wrath because of a select group of truly righteous people seems reminiscent–to me at least–of the story of how Lot was told that the cities of the plain would be spared from destruction if he could find a sufficient number of just men.
Muslims speak in various ways of a figure known as El Mahdi, “the divinely inspired one”. He is a great leader to become known in the future. According to Shi’i teaching, he is the 12th Imam. During the war in the 9th century brought about by the schism of Islam between the Sunni and Shi’i branches, 11 Imams of the Shi’i movement–(I have variously seen this translated as “prophet” and as “saint”)–were killed.
The twelfth leader was never accounted for. It is said that he never died, and is still active in the world, concealing his identity. It has been reported that during his lifetime, a great many Iranians believed that the Ayatollah Khomenei might be El Mahdi, as information about his early life was unavailable, (possibly by design). The leader whom Gordon fought at Khartoum claimed that he was the immortal Mahdi.
Also of interest–and I’m surprised nobody has brought it up yet–is the tradition of The Wandering Jew.
This is a whole cluster of legends which say that a Jewish person who was alive at the time of Jesus Christ is still alive and traveling about the world. In some stories he is a heroic, Godly figure. In others he is the vilest villain imaginable. In some he seems to come across as mostly a sad loser.
There are several passages in The New Testament in which Jesus appears to say that he will make his Second Coming before all of the people alive in his time have died. Christian scholars have dealt with this in two ways.
One is to argue that the passages refer to some other event than the Second Coming. Some Catholic and Protestant theologians have interpreted the remarks as referring to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth; roughly, the network of people of goodwill who try to follow Jesus’ teachings about charity and decency. Mrs. White, founder of The Seven Day-Adventists, was among those who said it actually referred to The Transfiguration, an event where some of the apostles saw Jesus in the company of figures from the Old Testament. Still others have argued that he was referring to his bodily resurrection.
Alternatively, others have argued that the passage must mean that there is someone–probably a Jew–from the time of Jesus who is still alive.
The legend has been the basis for everything from operas to science fiction novels to a story by Hans Christian Andersen.
The legend seems to have grown up–or at least taken root–in Europe in the Middle Ages. There are even instances recorded from those time where a Jew would step forward to say he was The Wandering Jew. One gets the impression that some of these people were like the unfortunates who confess with all sincerity to widely reported murders which they could not possibly have committed.
In addition, there is a sort-of cryptic passage in the 21st Chapter of the Gospel According to St. John. St. Peter asks Jesus why St. John the Divine is tagging along behind them, and Jesus (quoting from the King James Version here) says: If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" The passage goes on to say that “(t)hen went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him He shall not die; but If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”
Out of this grew a tradition that The Wandering Jew was St. John Divine. In one version of the story, he is buried in a kind of suspended animation, in which his heart beats only once an hour.
Conversely, there are a number of anti-Semitic legends in which The Wandering Jew is behind a vast Satanic conspiracy of Jews.
In many stories, The Wandering Jew is a man who jeered at Jesus while he was carrying his cross to Calvary. A common version says that he snatched a stool or bench away from Chirst when he tried to rest from his burden, and then Jesus, in what sounds like a cruel joke, said something like “wait here till I get back”.
In some stories The Wandering Jew never ages. In others he has continued to age and looks incredibly, unspeakably old. In yet others he grows to a great physical age, then becomes young again, only to age once more in an endlessly repeating cycle.
There are stories where he is still an observant Jew, and ones where he is a Christian, and ones where he has abandoned all faith. For variety’s sake, there are even stories which suggest he may never have been Jewish at all, as he is said to have been the Centurion who stabbed Jesus with a spear as he hung on the cross.
There are also stories in which there are a Wandering Jew and a Wandering Jewess. In a poignant Italian folk tale, there is just a Wandering Jewess The Magi had stopped by her house on her way to see Christ, and asked her to come along. She had said she was too busy, and her callousness doomed her to walk the earth until the Second Coming.
In the mean time, she serves the purpose of Santa Claus, and comes down the chimney on a broomstick on Christmas Eve to leave presents for children. It is said that before leaving she always looks in on the sleeping children, in the hope that one day she will see the baby Jesus.
During the 70s there was a flurry of excitement over people in villages in Armenia and Soviet Georgia who were said to be living to incredibly advanced ages. I recall Parade magazine did an enthusiastically credulous cover story on a man who was (IIRC) supposedly over 160 years old, and looking remarkably spry as he worked on his farm. Just a few years ago a yogurt company did a commercial about the incredibly long-lived yogurt-eating natives of those parts.
It eventually came out (in fact, well before the commercial), that during World War II a great many farmers and small town folk in this part of the Soviet Union conspired to scam the draft system. Producing old documents, men would pass themselves off as being their own fathers or, in extreme cases, even their own grandfathers, so that the draft authorities would list them as being too old for service in the military.
These stories of incredible longevity gave rise to a joke:
A government official went to visit a 150-year-old man in Armenia. He was a farmer who lived in a simple shack on top of a remote mountain in the backwoods. He found him sunning himself in a chair on the front porch, and asked him the secret of his longevity.
The old man said: “well, I’ve never had a drink of alcohol in my life. I’ve always eaten a simple, spartan diet. And I’ve never had sex.”
Just then there was the sound of furniture being knocked over inside the house, and a couple of women laughing.
“What’s that?” asked the official.
“Oh”, said the man, “that’s must my older brother–drunk as usual”.
:eek: Slipster, that’s not a “reference work”. While much is based on actual folklore and literature, a great deal was also made up entirely by Borges, such as the entry on “Baldanders” and possibly “Fauna of Mirrors”. There’s a reason it gets catalogued in fiction along with other Borges works. Borges was infamous for inventing citations which didn’t exist just to invent his own history.
UnuMondo
I have read a very interesting Science Fiction novel that talks about Immortals living among us. While it doesn’t really go into the mechanics of how they managed to live for so long (other than a vague reference to a genetic mutation) it is still a fascinating look at how a person copes with the mental strain of outliving all your partners, friends, acquaintances and any children produced from such a union between mortal and immortal.
IIRC the title of the book was ‘The Boat of A Million Years’ by Poul Anderson.
Planck-unit volume of the universe…that’s so cool. I tried to calculate it for fun a couple years ago, and got 10[sup]120[/sup]. I thought I was so original. 
Turns out Renfro beat me to it…he gets 10[sup]123[/sup]…so I was only off by 3 orders of magnitude! yeesh.
There was a recent news piece about work being done on the Methuselah gene, among others.
In the classic Sci-Fi novel “A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ”.the mysterious old jew scratched two hebrew charcters on a rock-“lanmedh sadah”=what does this hebrew word mean?
In the novel. the old jew is around forever…read the novel!
Slightly off-topic, but:
This was one of the major plot points of Alfred Bester’s novel The Computer Connection (1973), which concerns a number of people who have spontaneously “developed” immortality through, as one character theorizes, near-death experiences; the trauma of dying somehow triggers a survival mechanism altering their cell structure and halting the ageing process. (The main character, following this logic, sees as his task to track down other potential immortals by picking promising candidates and then killing them; he is not particularly successful at this, however.) While these immortals don’t age, they may contract a leprosy-like (and possibly also cancer-related, I don’t remember) disease that eventually kills them. Great book.
slipster:
That’s merely Hebrew/Yiddish for “the thirty-six.” Lamed Vav (or, in the spelling of your work, “wuf”), is how the number 36 is expressed in Hebrew lettering.
ralph124c:
I haven’t read the novel, but the letters “lamed tzadi” (probably what your book refers to) spell the word “Letz”…which means “scoffer” or perhaps “clown” or “fool.” Does that make any sense in the context of the novel?
Otherwise, I suppose it could be an abbreviation for something, but I don’t have a guess as to what.
scew being imortal I just want to feel infinite.