Jean Calment lived to be 122, the oldest human being we know of… when she was 13, she met
Vincent Van Gogh. By the time she died, we had the internet.
But even the longest human life is nothing to this tree. This guy was just a sapling
around the beginning of the Mayan calendar. By the time Stonehenge had been constructed,
he was already hundreds of years old. Today, you can take a picture of this still-living
alongside a shadow universe, where age is measured in thousands of years, and where
organisms of every shape and size redefine what it means to live.
For nearly a decade, artist and photographer Rachel Sussman has been seeking out these
organisms all over the world.
Scientists have yet to solve the mystery of how Bristlecones and other long-living organisms
get to be so old, and we have no idea how many of nature’s senior citizens remain
undiscovered. Even their ages are often estimates
What we do know is most of them are plants.
You only have to look at one baobab to realize that longevity is not a beauty contest.
Old things are often ugly, because every living thing has a finite amount of energy with which
to grow, reproduce, and do… LIFE stuff. In other words, if you’ve got limited resources,
you’re better off taking care of your kids than fixing up the house.
Pando, an 80,000 year-old forest of quaking aspen, is really 47,000 or so genetically
identical trees, one single organism growing from the same roots. Instead of putting your
genetically diverse eggs in one basket, many of Earth’s oldest living things use this
kind of clonal strategy to survive.
We can take a lesson from the trees: survival takes cooperation.
Many of Earth’s oldest residents are found in places where you or I wouldn’t last a
day—let alone 2,000 years.
It takes these map lichens, from frigid Greenland, a century to grow a single centimeter. And
in the Mojave desert, yucca and creosote bushes may go two years without rain.
Even though some parts of the Atacama desert have been without rain since records began,
the llareta, a relative of parsley, survives.
This black coral… this barrel sponge, the oldest animal on Earth… or this meadow of
sea grass.
Who knows how many long-living species might Earth’s unexplored oceans hold?
Even for the longest living, death can happen in an instant.
The Senator, one of the oldest cypress trees in the world, burned to the ground in 2012,
thanks to two rather young humans who lit a fire in its hollow trunk.
This Swedish spruce survived as a low shrub for 9,500 years, but as this mountaintop climate
has become warmer, a single trunk has risen above the rest.
We don’t yet know the effects of our changing climate, or whether these ancient species
will be able to adapt. But we can hope. They’ve proven that they know a thing or two about
survival.
These senior species might also hold clues to how life started in the first place. In
2007, those map lichens survived atmospheric re-entry on a simulated meteorite. Lichen
or not, life could have arrived from another planet, at least in theory.
And billions of years ago, these stromatolites, ancient communities of photosynthetic bacteria
that are equal parts biology and geology, may have exhaled the first breaths of life-giving
oxygen.
Finally, these bacteria take the cake for oldest living thing in the world. Buried in
Siberian permafrost, not growing or dividing, they’re not in suspended animation.
They’ve been actively repairing their cells for half a million years. What do you think
they’re waiting for?
Like it or not, most of us live for the moment, for the day, or the month. Look back at your
life. Think of everything that you’ve forgotten. How aware are we of passing years, or decades?
Without an awareness of the past, and our connection to it, we are doomed to repeat
today’s problems tomorrow. Maybe by looking wide-eyed into deep time, we can understand
what it really means to live beyond this blink of an eye. Stay Curious.
Special thanks to Rachel Sussman, whose decade-long journey to photograph Earth’s most ancient
living things is chronicled in her book, The Oldest Living Things