The human life span seems to be about one century. A few individuals manage to go beyond that, while many fall far short for all sorts of reasons.<\/p>\n
But 100 is usually thought of as the upper limit of “a ripe old age.” And as far as we know, nobody has ever managed to live to, say, 130.<\/p>\n
100 is also the square of 10, which is how many fingers we have. The latter is important, because it has led to our decimal number system.<\/p>\n
This means that anything which is a power of ten seems to take on almost mystical significance in peoples’ minds. For example, it takes 1000 seconds for light to travel from one side to the other of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This otherwise arbitrary value seems significant only because it happens to be ten raised to the third power.<\/p>\n
So is the relationship between fingers and age just a coincidence? Or is there an actual connection between the fact that we have ten fingers and the fact that we can live to about a hundred?<\/p>\n
Let me put it another way. If we had six fingers on each hand, would we be able to live to 144?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The human life span seems to be about one century. A few individuals manage to go beyond that, while many fall far short for all sorts of reasons. But 100 is usually thought of as the upper limit of “a ripe old age.” And as far as we know, nobody has ever managed to live … Continue reading “About 100”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27035"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27036,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27035\/revisions\/27036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}