My husband asked me a question last night that totally stumped me: If you go to a different planet, where the lengths of day and year are different than that of earth, will your life expectancy change? For example, let’s say you (an Earthling) move to a planet named Quaggle, where 1 Quaggle year is the equivalent of 10 Earth years. Does your 70-year life expectancy on Earth then become a 7-year life expectancy on Quaggle? As far as I could figure out, there are four possibilities:
Yes, your life expectancy is the same, just with “ten years” now renamed as “one year”. This was my gut answer, since (as I understand it), natural death occurs because of stuff like cell decay and has nothing to do with the Earth’s revolutions.
No, your life expectancy changes, because it does in fact have something to do with planetary revolutions.
It’s impossible to answer this question because of the relativistic nature of time.
Something else I thought of last night but now cannot remember for the life of me.
I’m presuming that, for the purposes of control, Quaggle has a 24-hour day cycle, and is relatively the same in climate and vegetation than Earth, yes?
Would you age slower on Mars? In Mar’s weak gravity field (35% of the Earth’s), your heart only has to pump at 35% capacity. You also expend less muscular energy.
Would this translate to a longer lifespan?
Unless there’s something about the environment of planet Quaggle that will tend to kill you off (or otherwise modify your physical ability to survive), no, your life expectancy will not change. Why on earth (heh) would it? The only possible difference would be the unit that you use to measure it. And your height doesn’t change just because you switch from measuring with feet to measuring with meters, does it?
Sorry, I meant to specify this in my original question. You’re correct in that the only difference we’re positing between Earth and Quaggle is the length of the year. (Although I suppose it would also be worthwhile to ask whether a difference in the day-length would matter).
That was my gut answer, but we were talking about this late at night, and I started to doubt myself. Thanks for the reassurance
All things being equal, it should be the same, assuming that Quaggle has the same pollutants in the air and water, the same McDonalds, the same ozone layer, the same amount of solar radiation, etc.
However, would you live the same life? Let’s say you are a smoker, and the first thing you do when you wake up is light up. Will you smoke 10X as many cigarettes on Quaggle? Drink 10X as many morning cups of coffee? If you live your life 10X faster the bad things will kill you faster, e.g. cholesterol. Also, would you only sleep 1/10 of the usual time? A lack of sleep can lead to an earlier death as well.
edit: Regarding your last post, your lifespan should be the same in Earth years, if only the unit of measurement changed.
Many science fiction writers have speculated that humans would live longer in lower gravity, but I don’t think anyone’s ever done any experiments on that.
But time runs slower for things experiencing higher gravity, right? Not that that would matter to the person experiencing it, but to outside observers you’d live longer.
Edit: I know the effect is minute. Just, everything else being equal.
Time runs slower for things deeper in a gravity well. That’s not necessarily the same thing. But things like swinging pendula, falling projectiles, etc., will all go slower in a weaker field.
Yeah, I think this is where my husband and I were tying ourselves in knots last night - we were talking about faster than light travel and the effect of gravity on time & lots of other stuff. Which I think is part of what option 4 was originally intended to address. Obviously, in the real world there would be so many variables it would be impossible to compare.
That was my first thought, suranyi, and Venus or Jupiter would be about the same.
However, back on the OP’s planet, the only effect I can think of is Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) or winter depression. If you get depressed after a few months of winter, how would you feel after several years? Even if you don’t kill yourself, the stress could make a difference in life span.
I would have expected the opposite, considering that lower gravity means either smaller size or lower density and the magnetic field from our iron core is the main blocker of solar radiation. Without that we’d be in the same boat as Mars, which isn’t such a great place to be.
All else being equal, I meant. I don’t think it’s safe to say that a smaller planet must necessarily have a weaker magnetic field: We just don’t have enough data to say.
And the relativistic effects from any world that could exist in our Universe and that a human could survive on would be completely negligible. And even if they weren’t, relativistic effects still wouldn’t change your lifespan in any relevant way, since they’ll effect your clocks and your perceptions in exactly the same way as they’d effect your metabolic processes.
There have been experiments with raising rats in centrifuges; turns out they live longer under higher effective gravity than they do on Earth. Whether that would apply to humans living on a heavier world isn’t known.
