Bonus: the Buddha, on how to age gracefully.

Trick question: You, your hamster + an elephant will probably all have lifespans of about one billion heartbeats.

But:

You’ll likely get somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.21 billion Heartbeats. “Humans have the honour of the top spot, due to modern medicine. If you use the typical paleolithic lifespan of 33 years, we return to the middle of the pack.”

Via imgur:

via Reddit:

The logarithmic scale appears to be extremely misleading. Let’s just look at the two columns/u/Prooffreader provides data for (indirectly):

Hamster: 450 beats/minute for 3 years.

450 (bpm) * 525949 (minutes in a year) * 3 (years alive) = 710,031,150 heartbeats in a lifetime

Whale: 25 beats/minute for 80 years.

20 (bpm) * 525949 (minutes in a year) * 80 (years alive) = 841,518,400 heartbeats in a lifetime

That’s a difference of 131.5 million heartbeats, made to look like an insignificant difference with the log scale.

Here’s what the graph would look like on an arithmetic scale: link

How to live a long life:

Drink Beer, Eat Chocolate, Live to 100. ~ Jolee McBreen

Living a Long & Healthy Life is not a Mystery—It’s a Choice. ~ Michelle Brunetti