People are scurrying hither and yon to make their lives more vigorous, healthy, longer.
The fact is, however, that do what you might, the average heart has just so many beats built into it. All animal hearts, in fact, have about the same number of potential beats: somewhat under three billion. A fly, on the one hand, has a heart that beats like a buzz saw, and the beats are used up in three or four days. A whale’s heart beats like a metronome set on slow, so the whale lives a long, hearty life. A human heart, beating an average of 68 beats a minute, uses up the allotted heart beats in an average of 75 years.
With a few deft moves, however, perhaps you can stretch your life expectancy.
SLOW YOUR HEART RATE
Everyone has an at rest heart rate – the rate at which your heart beats at rest (logic), while you’re sitting around, having your morning juice. Let’s say it’s 68 beats per minute. By a regimen of aerobic exercise that gets your heart really pumping, (brisk walking is sufficient), you can actually slow your heart rate a couple of beats a minute.
Now let’s say you walk a brisk mile walk 3 times a week, and succeed in slowing your heart rate to 64. Those 4 beats per minute, shall result – over 25 years – in 52 million less beats of the heart, which translate into a potential of 553 extra days of life, 18 months – just by brisk walking.
It may not be all the time in the world, but give yourself the opportunity as you’re 10 breaths from immortality, and see if you don’t jump on an extra 553 days.
THE WORLD IS SLOWING ANYWAY
Scientists believe that roughly 4.5 millions years ago, the earth rotated once every five hours, rather than the 24 hours it now takes. Which means, from sun-up to the next sun- up, a day was only five hours long.
The slowing down of the earth’s rotation has resulted from something called tidal braking the gravitational force of the moon, affecting the motion of the sea, which causes a tidal bulge, and a continual backward tug between earth and moon, that actually has slowed the earth. And this process shall continue. In about 50 million years more, the day should be 47 hours long.
So think about the combination of slowing your heart rate and the earth’s rotation slowing down. If you can get to live long enough, you’ll have 30 hour days, your life, already extended almost 2 years by way of your slowed heart rate, shall now be extended, say, another 6 years because of the slowing of the earth’s rotation.
Hey, we’re really making progress here.
KEEP GOING WEST
If you really want to make time stand still, at least theoretically, or psychosomatically, that is – and a little in the future when you’re heart rate has slowed, and so has the moon, and you’ve saved enough cash to buy a jet plane, well, then, all you have to do is fly west at, say, 1200 mph. Now, since the present rate of earth rotation is slightly less than a thousand miles an hour, if you fly west at a speed faster than the earth’s rotation, why you’ll get to Denver before the time that you left New York (counting Central time, of course). Let’s say you start on April 15, at 9 AM. You fly to Denver. It’s April 15, 7:45 AM. You can set down, have breakfast – preferably near the airport – and take off again, on your odyssey west. If you get yourself a faster airplane, you can set down longer. Just keep going west and time’ll never catch up to you. It’ll never be later than 9 AM, April 15.
You’ll never get old.
Don’t Listen to anyone tell you about that International Date Line stuff. That’s only an artificial gizmo that won’t mean a thing to the reality of the young you.