'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth

> The results revealed that Jonathan has “unique gene variants in most aging pathways” including DNA repair, insulin regulation, mitochondrial function, and “low entropy” methylation, reports the study. min-maxing longevity vs speed and charisma

• luipugs · 16 hours ago

  I dunno, I think he's pretty charismatic. He has all these researchers wanting to spend time with him.

  • scun · 16 hours ago

    Sure but biologists will talk to anything. You know what happened to the other tortoises? Bored to death.

  • PalmPilotProMax · 13 hours ago

    Yeah, but is he more charismatic than Bryan Johnson? Wait till he gets his hands on turtle semen and peptides

    • ElProlactin · 8 hours ago

      My supplement company has a product, PeptiShell Vital Peak, that has been selling in volume to a mystery buyer for the past few months. Things that make you go hmmm .

  • DrMandalay · 11 hours ago

    The oldest gay tortoise there is. You can hear the grunts when he and Frederick are fucking from the other side of the valley.

  • SwtCyber · 10 hours ago

    He's basically been networking for 194 years without ever leaving the garden

• kspacewalk2 · 13 hours ago

  The hare really ought to take notes

• SwtCyber · 10 hours ago

  To be fair, he's had 194 years to work on his charisma. At this point it's a choice

He doesn't look a day over 90!

• F3nd0 · 14 hours ago

  > He doesn't look a day over 90! He still has quite a ways to go to 1485715964481761497309522733620825737885569961284688766942216863704985393094065876545992131370884059645617234469978112000000000000000000000. :-)

• SwtCyber · 10 hours ago

  194 is the new 90 apparently

Can't we just appreciate that exceptionality as it is? Somehow, I wish we would leave that creature alone. For once.

• fnordpiglet · 15 hours ago

  They did opt to swab his mouth rather than draw blood to minimize his discomfort. That seems like a pretty reasonable compromise for the value of learning and science

• KylerAce · 15 hours ago

  Because a spit swab is so invasive?

In the Leftovers people think living in Jarden is why they were left. Maybe St Helena is the new Jarden.

Interesting so the oldest land animal hasn’t cracked 200 but stuff that lives in the sea can go for five or 600 years or more.

• epolanski · 16 hours ago

  There's sharks out there that are much older than the United States. And sponges older than pyramids.

  • loloquwowndueo · 15 hours ago

    Older than the United States hahaha. Remember the saying : in the US, 100 years is a long time; in Europe, 100km is a long distance.

    • autoexec · 14 hours ago

      It's still pretty long in the US. Over an hour by car, and even for people who bicycle regularly riding a century is no joke.

      • rootusrootus · 14 hours ago

        By that same sort of metric, 100 years is a long time in Europe, too. Not too many people live that long.

    • rootusrootus · 14 hours ago

      How pedantic can we be? There are a number of countries in Europe younger than the United States...

      • skrebbel · 11 hours ago

        It’s more like US people look at a couple 100yo buildings and say stuff like “wow this place has a lot of history!”

        • lifestyleguru · 6 hours ago

          > It’s more like US people look at a couple 100yo buildings and say stuff like “wow this place has a lot of history!” You are overgeneralizing. In much of Europe plenty of architecture was erected after 1945, and most of architecture around and after 1900.

          • loloquwowndueo · 6 hours ago

            And then you have things like the “new bridge” in Paris which is 420 years old.

          • pablobaz · 5 hours ago

            Or the New River in London - an artificial waterway opened in 1613.

      • otherme123 · 11 hours ago

        And we europeans consider them young. What we are pointing is that people in US (and America in general) talks about pre-1776 stuff as they were prehistoric, and pre-1900 stuff as they were comparable to Roman ruins. Add to that that we love to bomb each other to a ruble, and buildings and countries younger than 200 years are viewed as temporary stuff. Nothing pedantic or snobby here, just pointing that we live in different scenarios that affected our views.

      • vidarh · 8 hours ago

        But far fewer than modern nation states that are younger. E.g. Norway as a modern nation state is typically dated to either 1814 (constitution), or 1905 (independence), but the country is considered to have been united between 872 and ~1130 depending on exactly how consolidated control you're willing to count.

    • tick_tock_tick · 14 hours ago

      Isn't the USA older then pretty much every country in Europe? Maybe the UK could be considered older depending on how you count it and San Marino is there but all the other major ones like Germany, Italy, France, Spain, etc aren't even 100.

      • bmitc · 14 hours ago

        It's interesting how arrogant Europeans can be towards the U.S. when they themselves seeded the U.S.!

      • bdangubic · 14 hours ago

        My Dad has a vacuum cleaner that is older than USA

      • Scandiravian · 13 hours ago

        How in the world can you claim that France is not even 100? The German empire was established in 1857, which is definitely more than 100 years ago; it's also not unreasonable to say that the HRE could be equated to the German state, that Spain is the continuation of Castille, and that the Roman empire can be considered the direct precursor to Italy There's a cultural through line for all these countries, often stretching back thousands of years, which means that they reach further back than the definition of the modern state

        • higginsniggins · 12 hours ago

          If you're gonna give them credit for stuff like that, then you need to at least give credit to the United States as far back as the Pilgrims in the 1600s.

          • Scandiravian · 10 hours ago

            Perhaps, they were certainly foundational in establishing traditions that are now part of American culture, but even 1600 is young compared to many, if not most, European countries The Franks made Paris their capital in the 5th century, so that still ~1100 years earlier The Germanic people exists in records from the 1st century Whether you can consider Spain as originating from Hispania of the Roman Empire, which would place it in the BCs, or you are more conservative and say that it doesn't count until after the reconquista from the Umayyad, we're still around the 10th or 11th century As for Italy, we're again in BCs with the Roman empire So yes, in comparison to many European countries, the US is a very young country

          • loloquwowndueo · 1 hour ago

            By your metric Canada is older than the USA, first colony (Champlain was founding permanent trading posts in 1608 some of those settlements turned into cities that exist today)

        • BuyMyBitcoins · 12 hours ago

          Perhaps they referenced a source that only considers the French Fifth Republic as “France”? That would give it an age of 68.

          • Scandiravian · 10 hours ago

            Perhaps, but that would by all accounts still be a pretty silly thing to do. It's not like another group of people with a different cultural background invaded France and displaced/killed everyone already living there A person with a French citizenship from the fourth republic was still a French citizen when the fifth republic was established

            • cdot2 · 1 hour ago

              By that logic "People with a different cultural background invaded France and displaced everyone already living there" Paris is a very young city.

      • jbarberu · 11 hours ago

        Sweden would like a word...

    • epolanski · 7 hours ago

      Didn't expect folks to take a fact statement as an attack. The point was to emphasize the longevity of some animals, as for us humans the US constitution is 8/9 generations away.

    • nancyminusone · 51 minutes ago

      well at least there are no 100km long sharks

  • stubish · 13 hours ago

    And Orange Roughy, available in Australian fish and chip shops, spawned around the same time as the first British colony there.

• mrheosuper · 14 hours ago

  Maybe leaving the water is a mistake...

  • bmitc · 14 hours ago

    Whales seemed to have figured that out.

    • altmanaltman · 11 hours ago

      I mean their ancestor was a land mamal that decided to go live in water so they kind of did figure it out.

      • bmitc · 3 hours ago

        That's the point ...

• SwtCyber · 10 hours ago

  Apparently the secret to living 500 years is to move somewhere cold, avoid sunlight, and never be in a hurry

  • TiredOfLife · 7 hours ago

    But what if I already live somewhere cold, avoid sunlight and am never in a hurry?

    • lifestyleguru · 7 hours ago

      If you are a human this will make you a depressed alcoholic.

      • TiredOfLife · 4 hours ago

        I also don't drink

        • _zoltan_ · 4 hours ago

          Cold, no sun AND no alcohol? Man that must suck. :)

    • dyauspitr · 1 hour ago

      Then short of living in a war ravaged country, or somewhere that is poverty stricken with malnutrition, you are living one of the least desirable forms of human life. For your sake, I hope you’re at least watching good TV, playing some nice video games, are working on an interesting problem and have someone to have sex with.

  • red-iron-pine · 3 hours ago

    I do IT, poorly, in a basement in Canada. I will live to 500.

  • dyauspitr · 1 hour ago

    As a person that absolutely loves hundred plus degree weather and is constantly outdoors I’ll take 20 years of a hot, sunny life over 500 years of that.

• adrian_b · 7 hours ago

  This is the oldest land animal currently living and whose age is known with certainty. It is believed that other tortoises may have lived close to 300 years. The greater age reached by animals living in an environment that is cold and with a constant temperature and which need a much lower average power for living (i.e. a lower energy consumption and a slower metabolism) is very much expected.

> the samples were delivered from Saint Helena to Florida by the U.S. Space Force. ...why space force?

• sublinear · 16 hours ago

  It's a remote area and USSF has operations in nearby Ascension Island.

  • DrMandalay · 11 hours ago

    St Helena is where the minimum wage workers on Ascension come from. It only exists to provide cheap labour to Britain's Atlantic territories.

• fnordpiglet · 15 hours ago

  Because Trump, Musk, et al are hoping to live forever but their lifestyle is not very forgiving - hence all haste.

  • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · 15 hours ago

    Y'all see Trump and Elon in everything .

he's so old, he's completely lost the hare /j

• a96 · 7 hours ago

  Hare dropped out ages ago. He won the long game.

> Stephen Clark, an aging researcher Shouldn’t they find a younger researcher?

• fahrvrgnugen · 12 hours ago

  To be fair, all researchers are aging.

  • lifestyleguru · 7 hours ago

    Then why they are they picking on Stephen?

• aix1 · 12 hours ago

  Ideally one called Jonathan?

Every couple Summers Me and a couple hunters Like to row in from the Isle of Astonishing M* erf* ers

Why was the us space force involved?

• gumby · 15 hours ago

  He has a pm unusually large volume and has been around an unusually long time and they are the group responsible for anomalies in space-time.

• poooogles · 9 hours ago

  I'd guess that the samples got flown through RAF Ascension Island which the Space Force operate at.

https://archive.ph/jHHYp

Hell yeah I’m down to become a turtle. Lay by the beach. Eat kelp. Awesome

• saidnooneever · 11 hours ago

  it kinda looks like he was taken from his home as a toddler and put in jail for like... 180 years or so?. very romantic indeed.

• ElProlactin · 8 hours ago

  You can already do that in Bali without tortoise conversion therapy.

• 1659447091 · 7 hours ago

  https://xkcd.com/889/

ok

> He Could Hold the Secrets to Defying Death The struggles for limited resources among humans marooned in a finite ecosystem will not allow us to defy death. When natural causes no longer reduce our numbers sufficiently, we will be winnowed through an unceasing epidemic of violence. So long as there are births, there will be deaths. If you thought the carnival of dementia brought about by modern medicine's gradual reduction of quick death was grim, just wait until medicine solves natural death entirely. Tortoises who give up their secrets to humans won't survive the cataclysm.

No point staying alive if you're not healthy. This is a great podcast about the difference between lifespan and healthspan: "To start our new series about what it means to live in a world of ageing populations, David talks to geneticist Adam Rutherford about the benefits and pitfalls of increasing longevity. Are GLP-1s – drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro – miracle cures that will extend human lifespans? What happens if longer lives do not coincide with better health? How far can life extension be pushed? And who wants to live forever anyway?" https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/an-ageing-world-lifespan-v...

• varjag · 10 hours ago

  Luxury problems.

  • frereubu · 4 hours ago

    And?

• dataflow · 9 hours ago

  > No point staying alive if you're not healthy. Maybe not for you, but others would beg to differ? Darwin apparently had debilitating illnesses at 72 (one year before his death) when he published a book on earthworms and their role in forming soil. And Pasteur was apparently paralyzed at 63 when he developed the rabies vaccine. Etc. Should they have just kicked the bucket when they lost their health, because of the pointlessness of living past that?

  • lifestyleguru · 6 hours ago

    Chopin had tuberculosis most of his life and died at 39 weighing only 45kg. Euler became almost blind before 60. Give a chance to sick and feeble, folks.

  • _heimdall · 5 hours ago

    A bit more charitable read on the GP is that people should focus on having as many healthy days as possible rather than as many total days as possible. That doesn't mean those already I'll should just give up, it means those looking to their future should consider whether living 20 more healthy years is better than living 40 more years if 30 of those are increasingly focused on just treating symptoms to wake up tomorrow.

  • frereubu · 4 hours ago

    That's an uncharitable reading of what I mean, but I suppose I could have been clearer. Perhaps "no point staying alive if you're so unhealthy that you're perpetually miserable" would be closer to what I meant, particularly having seen a number of elderly relatives living through their last years in unrelenting misery, impatient for death. One in particular sticks with me, an uncle who had been a doctor and knew exactly what was coming because he'd seen plenty of it in his career, but without the means to end it in a dignified way. These people absolutely didn't want to be kept alive longer - which is the point of the distinction between lifespan and healthspan in the podcast.

  • Ensorceled · 2 hours ago

    My paternal grandfather starved himself death because of health issues. My paternal grandmother died in agony from colorectal cancer. My maternal grandfather faded away and died not recognizing most of his children. My maternal grandmother was trapped in a noisy ICU where she couldn't sleep until her heart finally failed. We can all come up with shitty anecdotes.

I wonder where else the oldest land animal could be, if not on Earth?

• rpozarickij · 8 hours ago

  English isn't my native language, but to my eyes it looks like writing "'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal" lacks context/completeness for an article title. Perhaps "'Jonathan' is the oldest known land animal" could add some mystery, but "'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth" sounds more attention-grabbing.

• Razengan · 8 hours ago

  There might be older land animals on other planets… (writing that just gave me mini goosebumps)

• _joel · 7 hours ago

  A greenland shark, just with lots of water on top of the land too.

We don’t need to cure death. Just hair loss and old skin, it will create $50T market cap in new companies.

• pelagicAustral · 7 hours ago

  The hair one is a fascinating one to me... We have some many examples of people like Bezos, Jobs, Ballmer, Brin, Slim... I mean, if the ultra rich have not figured it out, I don't think there much hope for anyone else really... haha of they can pull a Musk, but that's not the point, the point is to reverse balding...

  • lifestyleguru · 7 hours ago

    > can pull a Musk, but that's not the point, the point is to reverse balding How much such hairline can cost, $10?

    • pelagicAustral · 7 hours ago

      nah, but I mean, the guy went trough the same instant pipeline as Steven Seagal where he was definitely all thin in Above the Law and a film later his hairline had won the battle. Come on!

  • johnwalkr · 5 hours ago

    It's not what you meant but toupees have gotten really good, the only problem is you can't be a public figure and have pattern baldness one day and a full head of hair the next. There's actually something called "the toupee fallacy" which means assuming an entire category of something is bad based on only noticing bad examples.

    • hbn · 3 hours ago

      I Think You Should Leave had a sketch that's a fake ad for bald men who have been wearing toupees and want to stop but don't want to show up to work one day bald, making everyone think you've been lying to them. So the service is they send you a new toupee every week, each one balder than the last over the span of 52 weeks, so you can look like you're progressively going bald.

      • chrisweekly · 2 hours ago

        I'm not usually into cringe humor, but IMHO "I Think You Should Leave" is its own category. Episodes like Hat and Hot Dog Car ... I almost hurt myself laughing.

  • tencentshill · 3 hours ago

    Trump, the most vain of them all, has tried pretty much every way for the last 40 years. It's likely mostly glue at this point.

• Meleagris · 6 hours ago

  I’m actually more interested in hair removal. There should be better methods than what we have now. If I’m going bald, then I’d love to shortcut the process. Shaving is awful no matter where it is on your body. It takes time, it’s irritating and you never look fresh for more than a day.

  • jester997 · 4 hours ago

    Just grow a scraggly and comb it down. Venture capitalists wear t-shirts that show their nipples on stage, so what’s the shame in a long scraggly.

    • wolvoleo · 36 minutes ago

      There's nothing shameful about nipples anyway.

  • Larrikin · 4 hours ago

    Isn't this solved with laser hair removal?

    • jghn · 4 hours ago

      Sort of. It's often not perfect, and often not permanent.

    • acidx · 4 hours ago

      Laser hair removal only works if there's contrast between the skin and the hair. So if you have white or blonde hair and white skin, it doesn't work; or if you have brown skin and brown hair, it also doesn't work. For cases where laser hair removal won't work, there's electrolysis, which involves inserting an acupuncture needle in each and every hair follicle, but it's expensive, slow, and can be pretty painful.

      • AmazingEveryDay · 2 hours ago

        But, hair can be dyed?

        • vablings · 2 hours ago

          When you have laser hair removal, the laser flash pumps a ton of energy into the hair follicle which essentially roasts the shit out of the hair follicle so it dies, usually it will re-product hair at some point but very thin, wispy white hair if any at all. You need to shave your hair for laser hair removal since you don't want a long melting chunk of hair on your body that will cause serious burns. Hair dye will not color the root base of the hair meaning that heat energy will not travel down to the base as well and probably just destroy the pigment dye instead of the hair itself.

      • wolvoleo · 39 minutes ago

        Laser is painful too even when it does work :(

    • red-iron-pine · 3 hours ago

      mostly, but not always, and it's harder if there is less contrast between hair color and skin color.

Proof that rucking is good for your health

• red-iron-pine · 3 hours ago

  only if you go very slowly

The goal is to lengthen human lifespan? Like the planet doesn't have enough humans already.

• uiautrb · 7 hours ago

  The problem is not with the number of human but with our lifestyle...

  • jhbadger · 5 hours ago

    It's both, though. Yes, the Earth can support more humans with a lifestyle closer to that of the West in the 19th century than with a lifestyle closer to the the West in the 21st, but even in the 19th (and earlier) deforestation and the like were happening. And it's just reality that as societies prosper they use more resources per person. 50 years ago the vast majority of Chinese didn't use cars but walked and and bicycled. Now they are quite car dependent.

  • _heimdall · 5 hours ago

    I'm not sure that's an easy argument to hold up. Where would you draw the line on lifestyle that can and should reasonably change? We've populated large portions of the planet that we really have no business living in without climate controlled indoor environments. HVAC is also a huge energy suck with all the externalities that come along with it. If we were to really want to cut energy use, for example, and climate control had to go we almost certainly couldn't continue to sustain as many people as we have today.

    • jfyi · 2 hours ago

      > Where would you draw the line on lifestyle that can and should reasonably change? I'm with you, but let's just say it. People, as a whole, don't want to make the changes we all know would make the world better. People, as individuals? While there are exceptions, the reality is a classic tragedy of the commons. Individuals generally won't accept a short-term drop in their standard of living while watching their neighbors refuse to do the same. It is what it is, frankly. We can and will change our lifestyles at the very last possible moment. Let's hope it's enough.

    • wolvoleo · 31 minutes ago

      People have lived all over the planet without these things, I don't think you can say we have no business living there. Think of the aboriginals and nomads roaming the deserts and the inuit in the icy north. All before hvac. And hvac isn't really as much of an energy problem as heating is. Because when hvac is needed it is during a time of abundance of sunlight.

  • pyrale · 1 hour ago

    It's usually not the most frugal humans that want to defeat death.

  • fearmerchant · 1 hour ago

    And the type of humans.

• smallstepforman · 6 hours ago

  Well, they dont want more for you, but more for “them”.

• tokai · 6 hours ago

  Wake up grandpa, human population is on the cusp of beginning to decline.

  • dirkc · 6 hours ago

    Wouldn't a decline be good? Or is the theory that we can only do collapse, not decline?

    • Tade0 · 5 hours ago

      Depends how it's done I guess. France has a decent population tower, for lack of a better expression: https://www.populationpyramid.net/france/2026/ If they keep it up, their population will remain stable up to the 22nd century. There will be no further noticeable ageing and thus no threat to anyone's retirement.

    • jfyi · 2 hours ago

      Decline fails to uphold the prevailing world economic ideology. That's the real problem with population decline the way I see it. We will need to adjust in ways that don't support the idea of "unlimited growth".

  • close04 · 5 hours ago

    > Wake up grandpa Just imagine how many more grandpas and great grandpas will be around for you to shout this at. The problem with the population isn't (yet? only?) the absolute number of individuals but the age distribution. Most societies rely on young people to support themselves and the old, and this only works if there's a good balance between the numbers of each. Living longer isn't guaranteed to offer a longer productive period. We might just end up with more old people in need of support and not necessarily more children. This is already a major problem today in most developed countries. There are probably so many more factors to consider. Like the psychological impact of living substantially longer. Even things like that crappy boss who won't retire from another 60 years, the dictator who won't die for another hundred years, or any number of the many society destroying tech CEOs getting to entrench themselves for decades more.

  • nancyminusone · 3 hours ago

    "on the cusp of beginning to" This will happen no earlier than the 2080s. The world population is expected to increase every year until then. We will add nearly 2 billion people in that time. Consider that the entire world population was less than 1 billion for all but the last 221 years. I continue to not worry.

oldest known animal

Reminds me of one of my favourite SNL sketches: https://youtu.be/kq8Xlbb3bOw?is=ymUnd9aG6B1kE_NJ

• freediver · 32 minutes ago

  Very good!

What's the use of living longer, all we do is leech, kill. I am glad and sad at the same time that humans are mortals. [I am being sarcastic here, XD]

No one wants to live forever. Except maybe Trump, Musk and co

• toephu2 · 16 minutes ago

  You can hate Elon Musk all you want, but lets not perpetuate lies okay? Musk believes death is actually beneficial to society, "There is some benefit to death, by the way." he said. He believes some people never change their minds (usually old people), so generational turnover allows new ideas to replace old ones and is good for society.

heartrate of 10bpm is cra-cra but explains a lot

I misread that as the first animal that was on earth, not the oldest LIVING animal as the 404media articles title would suggest

• GRBurst · 1 hour ago

  same :-)

Maybe he's just really good at chess.