Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff works. Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Christian Sager here. So as far as aging goes, humans
Speaker 1: have it pretty good. I mean, we're no giant tortoises,
Speaker 1: but we're generally capable of living for decades, some of
Speaker 1: us for more than a century. Here at brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: it got us thinking, what is the world's oldest living thing? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a tricky question, and the answer depends on how
Speaker 1: we define living and thing. First, let's tackle what we
Speaker 1: mean by thing. If we say a thing could also
Speaker 1: be a clonal colony, then the competition heats up quickly.
Speaker 1: There are numerous plant and fungal clone colonies that have
Speaker 1: been around for tens of thousands of years, and they're
Speaker 1: still barreling along. There's King Clone, the creosote bush in
Speaker 1: the Mojave, almost twelve thousand years old. And we can't
Speaker 1: forget Pando, the gigantic male quaking aspen clonal colony in Utah.
Speaker 1: He is about eighty thousand years old. Incidentally, he's also
Speaker 1: the heaviest living thing, weighing in around six million kilograms.
Speaker 1: But what if we stick to single organisms. If so,
Speaker 1: then the tiny end a liths are strong contenders. These
Speaker 1: extreme aphile methuselahs like to kick back and take it easy.
Speaker 1: For millions of years, they've lived a mile and a
Speaker 1: half below the ocean floor, with metabolism slower, the molasses
Speaker 1: only reproducing once every few centuries or millennia. I mean
Speaker 1: that makes pandas look like rabbits. There's a big, let's
Speaker 1: call it loophole in the definition of living dormancy. What
Speaker 1: if something was frozen in time, trapped in stasis, and
Speaker 1: then revived like Captain America or the Alien and the Thing.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eleven, professor Brian Schubert published a
Speaker 1: paper on just that he discovered bacteria in what he
Speaker 1: called a kind of hibernation state inside tiny bubbles of
Speaker 1: thirty four thousand year old salt crystals. Their scientists have
Speaker 1: claimed to find older organisms, such as the two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million year old bacteria in southeast New Mexico,
Speaker 1: but Schubert's work was independently reproduced. So if we allow
Speaker 1: an organism to take a time out and spend thousands
Speaker 1: of years in stasis, there are loads of competitors for
Speaker 1: the title of oldest living thing, many of which may
Speaker 1: still lurk undiscovered in the isolated hinter lands of Earth.
Speaker 1: You know, deep oceans, remote mountains, endless Arctic wastes. Now
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of HP Lovecraft. Well, moving on, there's one
Speaker 1: other important thing. Some organisms might be immortal. Now, don't
Speaker 1: get jealous. We're not talking about some super sexy vampire
Speaker 1: type immortality. No, we're talking about jellyfish, specifically hydra and
Speaker 1: the tour autopsis story. The tour autopsis is only four
Speaker 1: point five millimeters large, but capable of something that may
Speaker 1: be unique in the animal world. After reaching sexual maturity,
Speaker 1: it can revert to its polyp stage, it can reverse
Speaker 1: and reset its aging cycle, rendering it biologically immortal, and
Speaker 1: the hydra doesn't seem to age at all. That means
Speaker 1: that potentially the oldest living organism could one day be
Speaker 1: a jellyfish. But for now, even counting states of dormancy,
Speaker 1: the oldest living, continually active things on Earth appear to
Speaker 1: be the extreme file organisms collectively called endoliths. But of
Speaker 1: course there may be something older, buried in time, dormant,
Speaker 1: waiting for intrepid humans to wake it from its deathless slumber.
Speaker 1: Check out the Brainstuff channel on YouTube and for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com.