Life span is one of the most important parameters of any living organism.

Plants generally live longer than animals though this is not always the case. For instance, a turtle lives longer than rice.

Some typical life spans:

• Homo sapiens sapiens live on average 37 years in Zambia and on average 85 years in Japan. The oldest age recorded for any human is 122 years, though some people in Asia are reported to have lived over 150 years.

The following information is derived from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1961:

Humans by Era Average Lifespan (in years) Human, Neanderthal 20 Human, Neolithic 20 Human, Classical Greece 28 Human, Classical Rome 28 Human, Medieval England 33* Human, end of 18th Century 37 Human, early 20th Century 50 Human, circa 1940 65 Human, current 77-79 (varies by region)

• Blue whales can live from 40 to 80 years.

• Dogs live up to 25 years.

• Turtles live up to 150 years.

• A virus does not have a limited life span. Since it gets copied and reproduced whenever it is not just a particle, some biologists argue that its living span is much greater than that of a typical bacterium, and even greater than that of a multicellular organism.

• The baobab can live 4000 years. It outlives olive trees, domesticated in the Mediterranean. It is interesting to note that many olive trees were alive and nurtured by ancient Greeks - a stunning fact which illustrates the differences in the life spans.

• Many corals live over 100,000 years. However, there is no consensus among marine biologists how to determine age of a coral, and whether or not it is really a single organism.