This sounds good, but it can't be right. There are animals that live centuries. Greenland sharks may live up to 500 years, for example. There are trees that live millenia.
But they aren't human. We don't survive being dessicated and heavily irradiated like a tardigrade or regrow severed limbs like starfish, and we aren't as good at avoiding cancer as some other animals.
not just higher cancer rates, but higher rates of all kinds of aging-related deaths
the advantage of being warm-blooded is that your metabolism is more precise and much faster, but, as james dean quoted willard motley saying, 'live fast, die young'
(being old is a more important risk factor for cancer than anything else i can think of, even smoking and radioactive fallout)
small sharks around greenland, to take an extreme example, are at essentially the temperature of the seawater, about -1.8°. larger sharks could conceivably raise their internal body temperature, but greenland sharks swim very slowly to avoid this even when they are large. so their metabolism is about 16× slower than yours is—both healing and aging processes happen slower. their gestational period is about 8–18 years
Thank you. This is the kind of thing I was looking for. After posting, I also found out that plants are even further in the other direction because their strong cell walls prevent metasticization.
