Along the same lines, I always found it odd that until Ronald Reagan, the only US president to each the age of 90 was an 18th-century president, John Adams.
But then I served with John Adams, I knew John Adams, John Adams was a friend of mine. Ronald Reagan was no John Adams.
A young whippersnapper, compared to Galadriel.
There’s a Sidney Harris cartoon with an oldster in a mountain village talking to a visitor: “Our reputation for longevity is based on several factors: Hard work, simple food, lack of stress, and the inability to count correctly.” Oddly, I seem to be one of only two people on the Internet to have ever referred to that cartoon, but I know it exists, since I have it in a book right here in front of me.
Let’s calculate just how rarely one could expect even one person to live to 153. Here’s a list of every known person who has lived to 115:
So in the past 24 years, only 26 people have lived to be 115. So on the average, one can expect about one person who will live to 115 or greater to be born each year. According to the following, about 134,000,000 babies are born each year:
So one person in about 134,000,000 will live to 115. Now go back and look at the first entry I posted. You can see that a person who is 115 has, on average, perhaps one year to live. (That is, one half of them will live for a year or more, but one half of them will live for a year or less.) The expected remaining lifespan may be even shorter than that. It may be on average less than six months. So if we have a population of 115-year-olds, we can expect half of them to live to 116, one quarter of them to live to 117, one eighth of them to live to 118.
This means that we can expect 1/ (2**38) of those who live to 115 to then live to 153. This is one person in about 275,000,000,000. So only one person in 134,000,000 will live to 115, and only one person in 36,850,000,000,000,000,000 will live to 153. There have been less than 100,000,000,000 people in the entire history of humanity. So we would have to have 368,500,000 times as many people who have ever lived to be able to expect even one person to live to 153.
Service in the Napoleonic Wars? I can describe my sevice in WWII. Just take all my grandfather told me and reproduce.
I’ll give you LL. But c’mon–Methuselah? Obviously a fictional character. Please.