Are there things that can make natural lifespan in other planets inherently longer?

Question

How would things like gravity, air composition and density affect the lifespan of the biological protein based life that inhabits the planet, or would they have any significant effect at all?

Honestly I have no idea because In other similar questions about lifespan there's some people that say bigger and slower things live longer, but then with humans, the taller you are the shorter your lifespan and the more active and fast you are the more you live.

But there's horses who are incredibly fast and don't live as much as humans.

Then there's also the oxygen thing that damages cells, but a lot of animals avoid the problem in one way or another.

Then there's other chemical things, like stress is supposed to release chemicals that kills us but allegedly humans who are more stressed age faster but at the same time live longer.

Yeah so I'm totally lost there.

Question : (same question as above but rephrased)

Are there actually any factors in a planets composition that make NATURAL lifespan shorter or longer? Natural means that an aestoroid rain/Volcano/Tsunami aren't natural, but diseases are.

Answer 1

Cold.

On our little blue planet, there seems to be but a single environmental factor that promotes longevity, cold. Many animals in the Arctic circle have extended lifespans, such as the Greenland Shark, not reaching sexual maturity and its reproductive potential until between 100-150 years old and living 500 years, perhaps longer.

Various sea-urchins, anemones and large crabs follow a similar pattern. The obvious basis for this is the lowered metabolism at these lower temperatures - chemical reactions still happen in the creature's bodies, but at a slower rate - hence longer lifespan.

Note: this precludes warm-blooded creatures as the energy and metabolic requirements would be higher than in warm regions, and their lifespans would be the same or shorter than their warm-terrain counterparts.

Answer 2

Evolution has little drive to increase lifespan much long after the next generation can stand on its own, and we see it with all the degenerative diseases related to ageing.

Reproduction takes a good amount of resource: if you want to keep any culture vital, you need to supply it with plenty of nutrients, and the culture will reproduce at full pace. You can see this with yeast and fruit flies for example.

From those two points it looks like, in order to prolong the life span you should delay as much as possible the moment of reproduction, and to do so you should limit as much as possible access to the resources needed for the reproduction to happen.

This will likely result in life forms which spend most of their life in a quiescent state, like lichens or desert plants, until the resources are available and they can reproduce.

Answer 3

They are older than Earth so they have less background radiation.

The largest exposure of humans to background radiation comes from one of the isotopes of potassium, K-40. By contrast, K-39 is completely stable. We can't do without potassium because all our cells need it for electrical activity, such as in neurons sending signals or muscles twitching.

Its half life is 1.2 billion years. So wait a few billion years longer, and it is much less of a factor.

The consequence individually, in terms of cancer, is pretty small. But as a collective, members of a species need to undergo purifying selection (which indirectly more or less means they die) at a rate to match the introduction of new mutations by radiation. Otherwise there is a "genetic catastrophe" in which the organisms accumulate harmful mutations until they can't survive.

Therefore, species moved to these worlds will, over thousands of years, come to have a longer lifespan as natural aging is gradually tuned down.

Caveat: this is a hypothesis, and the contrast between 'long-term' evolution to have a lifespan versus 'short-term ' evolution to become immortal is, to put it gently, not generally considered. Nonetheless I think it would be interesting to wade into.

Answer 4

Unfortunately, there probably isn't much about any given planet that makes the life it supports live for a greater or lesser time. About the only thing that might have some effect is temperature: the higher the temperature, the faster that chemical reactions tend to take place, and as the saying goes, live fast, die young.

However, if we were to discover a number of planets with native life, all with the same temperature ranges, I would not expect there to be a high degree of correlation between the lifespans of their life forms.

What I would expect to have a bearing on lifespans of life forms is their metabolic rate, i.e. the rate at which their chemical reactions take place. Creatures with a low metabolic rate tend to live longer than creatures with a high metabolic rate. Homeothermic creatures tend to have a higher metabolic rate than poikilothermic creatures, and so the cold-bloods tend to live longer than warm-bloods of the same mass. However, even if you took several species with the same metabolic rates, they are all likely to have different natural lifespans, whether due to their evolved life history, or simply random factors, even on the same world, let alone different worlds.

Answer 5

Paradise

Your planet plays a key role in this. When you want a living creature to age longer, that is slow down cell division because cells are damaged less, you should take care of these cells, while they have to perform their functions longer. Your body cells should be well fed, better protected and encounter less threads from the outside.

Suppose climate is very agreeable, not too warm, nor too cold. When your planet has no pollution, no relevant radiation sources, an abundant variation of healthy foods, clean water, people don't have to work too hard.. time to swim every day.. and no infectious viruses or human disease bacteria have yet developed on the planet, you'll be very safe there. Just go there and enjoy the fruits of paradise.

Human telomeres get lengthened by eating certain plants

The question is about the planet's composition. In terms of elements, or molecules, your planet could also provide good circumstances. Suppose, you'd have a certain substance in your planet's nature (edible plant), that extends the telomeres of the human genome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

Also in this case, above constraint still counts: you can extend these telomeres, but the genome will have to be able to remain functional, stay intact for a longer period of time. When you have little radiation, the telomeres maybe extend already, by evolution. Individuals with longer telomeres MAY extend their fertile age, causing them to survive.

Oxigen level 23% ?

As indicated elsewhere already, activity won't hurt, and oxigen won't hurt. Now suppose the planet has just a little more oxigen than Earth, say 10% more.. it would enable older people to run more often. Keep fit. Aside life expectancy, there is also a factor of life value. People in a better condition will enjoy their lives longer.