How old is old?
News stories earlier this year covered the 175th birthday of Harry, one of three Giant Tortoises taken, along with two others, from the Galapagos islands by Charles Darwin on his famous expedition in 1853. This story really caught my imagination - imagine the changes that tortoise has seen, the history it was part of!
Then yesterday came the news that Awaita,a tortoise that was allegedly the pet of Clive of India, had died! The estimates bandied around here are that Awaita was 250 years old. There are going to be attempts to carbon date the remains of this veteran creature, but even if he wasn’t that old it is still a tale that stops you dead in your tracks.
Think about the consequences if humans could live that long. Would it affect the way we behave, knowing that the things we do, fully aware of thier destructive implications, would take affect in our lifetimes? Would fuel-guzzling cars fall out of fashion overnight when we realised it was us, not our children or grandchildren who will face the true effects of global warming? Would fleets of fishing vessels begin to regulate themselves as the industry recognized that it wasn’t a working life of 30 or 40 years they needed to survive, buy one of 200 years?
How about the size of families? Would they reduce so that the planet’s population stabilised, fearful of the overload that would happen within lifetimes as 7 or 8 generations needed to co-exist?
Maybe it would just be a good idea if we all imagined we could live that long - if we developed the ability to empathise with future genreations instead of just looking out for our own? After all, who really wants to work for 200 years?
