Heartbeats

Apparently almost every mammal’s heart beats about two-and-a-half  billion times during its natural lifetime.

An elephant lives for about 60 years and has heart rate of about 30 beats a minute. A mouse lives for around 2 - 3years and has a heart rate of 500-600 beats per minute. And us humans? 60 each minute – but we live about 75 years. An anomaly? Not really. Life expectancy ‘in the wild’, without modern medicine, would be about 30.

An interesting aside on this modern longevity is the pension age. The first state pension was pioneered by Bismarck – who set the pension age at 60. The life expectancy of  German male at that time was 45. If you set the pension age at the same level in relation to modern life expectancy it would be at 90.

And the French civil servants go on strike against the proposal to raise the entitlement age to 66? Smell the coffee……