i downloaded a film the other night called: the man from earth. he claimed that he lived for 14.000yrs and he was in fact christ, has anyone else seen this film? it got me thinking, why couldnt it be possible? and why did all his friends dissmis the idea? and why oh why try and kill him for it? As a group of friends gather for an impromptu farewell party for a youthful-looking Professor John Oldman (David Lee Smith), questions arise as to why he resigned his tenure and more importantly, why the sudden departure. Those present include Harry (John Billingsley), Edith (Ellen Crawford), Art (William Katt), Sandy (Annika Peterson), Gruber (Richard Riehle), Dan (Tony Todd) and Linda (Alexis Thorpe), a graduate student. Most of these people gathered at Oldman's home are fellow professors themselves, with expertise ranging from anthropology, biology, philosophy and psychology. This sets the stage for some rigorous and passionate debates that are about to ensue when Oldman piques everyone's interest with a hypothetical question, what if a man from the Stone Age was able to survive for thousands of years and lived to the present? What would such a man be like? What started out as an interesting theoretical discussion among intellectuals takes a strange turn when out of the blue, Oldman reveals that he is that man, a Cro-Magnon from the Paleolithic era who has lived for an amazing 14,000 years. Obviously, such a fantastic revelation would not be taken lightly, especially among this group of intellectuals. In fact, most of them do not really believe Oldman for one second (who would?) but they decided to play along anyway, if only to see if they can find a crack in Oldman's story. Oldman is able to detail his travels and some of the more famous historical icons whom he had met in his many lifetimes--people like Van Gogh and even the Buddha. Things eventually heat up when the discussion inexplicably turns to the question of religion (as it always does) and Oldman reveals some things that some people might not be willing to hear. http://uk.dvd.ign.com/articles/833/833098p1.html who else has seen this?
No one has ever lived to be 140 and we are increasingly aware of the myriad biological details that are the reason for that. I think for a person to say he is not merely 160 or 200 years old, but fourteen thousand, qualifes as an "extraordinary assertion" and in accordance with the scientific method the speaker is required do present extraordinary substantiation before I or anyone else has the slightest obligation to treat the assertion with respect. A collection of anecdotes about famous people (notice how they always knew famous people? how did they get so lucky?) is not substantiation, anyone can make up a good story about historical figures. It is not possible for anyone to be fourteen thousand years old because fourteen thousand years ago it was 12000BCE, the waning millennia of the Mesolithic Era. (Depending on location, the Paleolithic was tens of thousands of years earlier, although in some parts of lately-settled Europe it didn't end until 5000BCE).) Humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers. The first permanent settlements were two thousand years in the future and the first cities were even further off. There was no technology for life extension. "Medicine" men and women had developed herbal remedies by trial and error, but they didn't know how they worked. The way the human body worked was a mystery. No one could have provided the medical miracles necessary for a 120-year-old human body to avoid dying. They couldn't even do it for a seventy-year-old body. Most people died in infancy but those who survived to adulthood typically made it into their fifties. Tissue degeneration and loss of organ function happen to all of us. This is not a matter of fate or chance or clean living. It doesn't matter who you are or what you've done or not done; your body is going to be a delicate assembly of parts that barely work at all when you hit 120, if you haven't already died from illness or accident. Your odds of keeping that body working for another twenty years are zero. Not almost zero, but zero. Your odds of keeping it working for another thirteen thousand eight hundred eighty years are exactly the same: zero. If you want to postulate a more believable scenario, or at least one that's not a howler, the man would have to be born during the era of civilization, which began around 8000BCE in Mesopotamia and a little later in five other places. You could hypothesize that a genius scholar in one of the ancient civilizations, in a single lifetime, invented science and somehow performed research that has taken us several centuries. Or perhaps a cabal of these genius scholars did it over a period of time--and oh yeah they managed to keep it secret from the rest of the population, not something scientists have ever been very good at. So this guy is maybe six thousand years old, and he's been taking his elixir and his radiation treatments or whatever it is, continuously, to avoid death by old age or pestilence, and he's also had the good fortune to not starve to death or be killed in a war. So in addition to being a scientific genius he is also a prosperous tradesman with enough political savvy to keep migrating to peaceful places. That would be at least a decent premise for a movie, because it only requires a suspension of disbelief. Making him fourteen thousand years old requires surgically removing our disbelief. ^_^ Okay, that's a more reasonable question because we're now talking about the movie as a work of art rather than speculative biology. It's really tough to get old and watch the world change so much that most of what you know is no longer useful to younger people. This is something the last few generations have had to cope with. Certainly going as far back as mine (born during WWII) but I'm certain my parents felt it too (born around 1910) and I suspect even my grandparents (born in the 1860s, 70s and 80s). In earlier times life did not change rapidly (except for political reasons), so people felt a sense of comfort with their surroundings. But a person who lived for thousands of years would have the same experience we're having now: The world he knew, loved and adapted to kept changing into something unfamiliar. Would he be able to acclimate to it? I can't stand cell phones, they utterly destroy my familiar concepts of "my space" and "the rest of the world." What would it have been like to see entire paradigm-shifting technologies arise, take hold, be perfected, and finally remake the world? Farming, animal husbandry, permanent settlements, cities, the wheel, riding and draft animals, bronze metallurgy, written language, steel metallurgy, sailing ships, gunpowder, industry, modern medicine, electronics...? With so many parallel social changes, from clans to villages to tribes to cities to states to nations to whatever we have today...? The rise of monetheism, its splintering into rival sects and their periodic attempts to exterminate each other...? The rest of human culture, including the invention of music and the permanent recording of literature, the rise of the arts as legitimate, salaried occupations, the status of entertainment today as a major industry...? The increased contact among people, eventually with regular trade routes, then traveling scholars, electronic communication keeping people in touch all over the world, airplanes carrying them there physically...? Government, from a patriarch everyone respected until he got too old to do the job, then village elders, then city officials, then royalty, aristocracy, democracy, despotism, dictatorship, an attempt at United Nations...? The concept of work--your Mesolithic hunter-gatherer worked a 25-hour week and felt a very personal stake in his "career" because he was providing himself and his family with food. How would this guy feel about the division of labor and economy of scale that makes this prosperous civilization possible, yet disconnects us all from most of the processes that keep our lives in order?
