Much current-day wealth in the United States has been created by optimized engineering to miniaturize computer chips in combination with elaborate programming to yield ChatGPT/DeepSeek, for example, that may soon replace many cognitively-demanding tasks such as the professorial training of the next generation of intellectuals to lead the citizenry. Now that the billionaire class has amassed extraordinary wealth (e.g., Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.), extending longevity has become their focus, even believing that by altering the genetics (using Crispr) one may soon be able to double or triple life-span. That longevity is regulated by genetics is well appreciated (Tyshovsky et al. 2023). Much of this regulation is to ensure that an organism achieves full size before procreation, which requires an extended period of cell division. Based on Figure 1A of Tyshkovsky et al. (2023) which compares the size (in grams) of mammals (from the mouse to the bowhead whale) with their longevity (in years), the following function has been derived to predict longevity from the size of an organism, such that Longevity (in years) is equal to 6.92 times Body Weight (in grams) to the O.2 power (R^2 = 0.57, Tehovnik, Hasanbegovic, and Chen 2025):

Longevity (years) =  6.92 x Body Weight (grams) ^ 0.2

Using this equation, a rodent of 10 grams would be expected to live for 11 years (on average) and a large mammal such as a bowhead whale would be expected to live for 276 years (on average). After the last great extinction (64 Mya), which caused the end of the dinosaurs, the environmental void created by this event was filled in by mammals as well as birds, both of which are warm blooded and have a highly regulated growth process, as suggested by the Longevity-Body-Weight algorithm for mammals.  The challenge for longevity enthusiasts is to see if they can alter their genetics to extend their longevity without introducing unforeseen morbidities that may accompany any genetic alteration. If it turns out that the Longevity-Body-Weight relationship is in fact a law of evolution by generalizing across all animal species, I would put my money on evolution beating out the wishes of the billionaires.

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