I've thought about this now and then also, I share your belief that life could be much longer for humans.
What got me wondering and speculating about it is the general perception of immortality of gods, and the apparent longevity of some human figures believed to be close to "God". The one I wonder most about is Noah. Apparently it took him 400 years to decide to build the ark, and another 400 odd years to complete it and sail in it. And nobody in those biblical days seems to have thought that strange. It seems like in biblical accounts, this was nothing unusual, for humans to live many hundreds of years. It wasn't particularly remarked on, and this is conspicuous to me.
How true that is, is obviously very subjective. But it does make me wonder if life isn't artificially limited in modern humanity. Actually now it's more than wonder, I am 100 percent certain.
So I am not on board with the idea that modern humans have longer lifetimes now than in ancient times.
To me there has to be something fundamentally different in the way we do life as a species, from the way we did back then, which now prevents anyone living more than the three score and ten odd years, the average (moderately priveliged) human gets now.
Notice I said priveliged.
The longer I've lived, the more it's become apparent that we live in an age of slavery. Specifically energy slavery.
When I became relatively more priveliged in my life, relative firstly to less priveliged, to average priveliged, and then more priveliged, and now back to near poverty, I had least view of this when I was most priveliged.
I gave less thought to those less priveliged than me.
As I got more priveliged, I saw less and less of what obviously limits life - poverty.
That gives us a very artificial view of how good or bad life is, for modern humans.
And being a Systems Engineer, I've naturally connected energy to all things.
Poverty is lack of energy availability.
We can be sure that whatever was done to prolong the life of the five year methusela mouse, it served to maximise availability of energy to every cell of the body of the mouse.
In other words it energy-enriched the mouse.
What artificially shortens life, is lack of availability of energy.
So we have to question what it is we are doing, that causes this shortage of energy, relative to what it might have been in history, what are we doing now that affects availability of energy to all humans?
It looks to me like it's profit, at the root of the problem, and this results in slavery, energy slavery.
How energy slavery works, is every human depending on other humans supplying at least the energy that we each need to metabolise, about 3 KWhrs each per day, from other humans. We do it essentially by deceit, we each con the energy that we need to live on, from others. We do it by controlling the energy supply of those other, less priveliged humans such that they are forced to supply our energy. The higher up the tree of privelige / hierarchy / power we get, the better we get at doing it, and incredibly, none of us seem to be aware of it, despite the inhumanity of it to those less priveliged than us.
We have to be ripping out a piece of our heart, to not see this.
I don't believe profit has always been something we've practiced, because it's physically unsustainable. I know this for sure because it's energy ultimately extracted from the planet. I've done the numerical analysis, using my multidisciplinary systems Engineering skills, gained over thirty odd years of academic and industrial experience. Profit is the real reason the planet is heating, and look, it has created a system of energy slavery that we've completely lost sight of, because of the insidious way it works to deceive us, only the priveliged, into believing the world is very different from the way it really is physically.
I call this imaginary world that we, the relatively priveliged live in, oblivious to reality; Enshittopia.
Indigenous people and indigenous minded people can see this reality but it looks like modern people can't, though this might be changing a little now.
It's a completely false illusion that modern humans enjoy longer lifetimes than humans ever had before. The truth is we live a small fraction of the lifetimes we once routinely lived in.
Its also completely false that we've had great technological progress - the actual progress seen has been in spite of profit, not something assisted by profit, profit is anti-technology, but so insidious it makes us blame technology for all the problems, when it's profit to blame for all the problems.
It seems we mostly choose to live relatively short priveliged lives, than much longer lives unpriveliged.
Its a little late for me personally realising this to make much difference affecting my own life, as it is for any "Boomer" but we might make a difference that could help gen Z, and younger.
The basic rule of thumb has to be that profit has to end, otherwise life, all life will be denied of all humans.
This is the rule imposed by nature.
The reward for going with what nature dictates, is more or less unlimited life, for those young enough to benefit by that, if it changed tomorrow.
Hence why my writing in Medium has become all about this now, how to break the system of energy slavery, by ending profit, thus freeing up energy for all, how to get energy independence for all, at least energy independence for all humans, from all humans, by putting in effectively a direct energy transmission line from the sun to all humans.
It gets complicated after that, I can only scratch the surface here, but not so complicated we can't understand it, it involves Ai, specifically the solar powered Ai.
What we should realise is that we need to empower all humans, to maximise the power of all humanity, maximum energy availabilty has to come to all humans, it can't be done by enriching / empowering only a few, all humans need to be fully empowered to their full creative capability so that we all get energy rich, no poverty.
It starts, when solar indexed stimulus starts to be issued.