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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Can't they make different studies to determine age?

We know that some turtles, sharks and whales can live way more than a century if not multiple centuries, but we don't know that because we have been following them from centuries.

There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet.

We have a picture of it dating 1886: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan...

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> There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet.

Is this just a fancy way to say that the tortoise is alive, and whoever was governor in 1882 is dead?

No, actually it is saying that every governor since 1882 (except, by implication of “yet”, the current one implied to exist) is also dead, not just that the 1882 governor is dead. Of course, in the limit case if there were no governors after 1882 (except the current one, if any) it would just say the one in 1882 was dead, but there were, in fact, 24 or 25, depending on exactly when in 1882 the tortoise arrived (not sure on that), subsequent governors before the position was abolished with home rule which quickly transitioned into independence.

Which makes the “yet” weird, but I suppose it admits the possibility that the office might be restored before the tortoise dies, and the tortoise might not outlive the potential future governor.

Sure, the "yet" seemed to imply that one governor has taken over. There's no further information regarding the number of governors, and I refrained from speculation. All I could deduce was that the 1882 governor is dead, the current one is alive, and there is a nonnegative whole number of intervening governors (zero or more).

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