First, the comment that if they couldn’t predict their own passing, what good are they. I don’t see how that is a point which disproves that their calendars can’t predict anything. You don’t know whether they predicted their own demise or not, or whether their own demise was even important to the continued “prediction” of events in the calendar after their passing. Seems really unimportant to whether or not there is any use in them as predictors of anything. What is important is that they don’t predict anything at all. They’re just calendars.

Secondly, that comment about them getting wiped out by disease. You said that very definitively, but there isn’t a known answer to why they disappeared. Disease is one hypothesis, so are drought, overthrow, other environmental disaster, and economic collapse.

As I said, quibble points.

J Rearden, I haven’t done any research on claims of Chinese Qi, or Egyptian and Druid “supernatural” powers, but since you said it’s just plain silly, I wanted to make sure you weren’t summarily dismissing claims.

I understand why claiming that someone lived for more than 10 times the current human life expectancy would sound preposterous, especially given current common-sense evidence that life spans, due to advances in science and medicine, should be getting longer, not shorter.

There are a couple of things that seem interesting about Noah’s case. According to the genealogies accounted in the book of Genesis, Noah wasn’t the only one to live so long, but all people before him, and after his time, the age spans gradually curve along a path that is mathematically expected. Also that the text, rather than making a big deal out of how unnaturally long a person’s age is, and attributing it to miraculous wonders, seems to actually instead handle it in a very “matter of fact” manner. Not typically what would be expected of writings from over 3000 years ago.

Since today, we know that conditions like Down Syndrome and Progeria exist that cause rapid aging, by inverse the notion of the possibility for long life spans in the past is not entirely absurd and could warrant additional investigation as opposed to being summarily dismissed.

What do scientists do when faced with these questions? Well, if following with the scientific method, they make models and hypotheses and predictions. And conduct tests that should see how accurate their models predictions predict the reality of the tests.

There have been many studies into Reactive Oxygen Species, Telomere Loss, Caloric Restriction, Genome Size, and studies based on what effects cosmic radiation has on life expectancy from the Vela Supernova , so far, what I’ve read in peer reviewed articles seems to indicate scientific plausibility, but I admit, I am not a scientist, I just try to keep up on it in my spare time.

What I’m trying to say is that a scientist who believes something works one way, and thus builds a testable model on established principles and then formulates hypotheses and experiments is just as much a scientist as another scientist who believes something works another way and goes through the same process to test his or her model and hypotheses. The best approach to finding truth is to not summarily dismiss things until they have been well investigated, thus withholding judgment until being finished with investigating through testing hypotheses and critical thinking. And of course keeping an open frame of reference where you will continue to weigh new data as it comes in against your existing models and discard models that no longer work and build new ones.