With increasing advances in lifespans, health, and medicine, how old will the oldest person who is already alive today live to be?
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No actual advances in life span yet (Score:4, Insightful)
There may one day be some medical invention that can fundamentally slow aging and increase lifespan, but no such invention exists to-date in any sort of proven form. What medical technology can do is allow more people to live to what is essentially their genetic limit. Fewer people may drop dead of a heart attack or die of cancer at 75 instead of living to 90. But medical technology hasn't been able to stop the advancing frailty that comes with old age. An infection that might be a nuisance at age 60 becomes life threatening at 90. Supposing medicine can cure the 90 year old of the infection, it doesn't change the fact that they are fundamentally weaker and more prone to dying from such infections. For the elderly, health conditions can be an increasingly difficult game of whack-a-mole that is fundamentally unwinnable.
I'd also point out that until there is a cure for aging and frailty, living past 125 doesn't sound like a great deal. Even the very few people who have made it past 110 don't have a great quality of life in their final decade. Being mostly deaf/blind and in a wheelchair for a decade while you wait to die isn't particularly appealing. Heck, my grandfather who died in his mid 90s spent the last 5 years of his life wondering why he was still alive (sometimes out loud).
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Virus (Score:1)
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Aging problem is caused by old people who consume, but don't produce. If we can reverse aging, old people will become working adults again or at least they don't need so much care taking. At that point, it is just politics, how we share the workload and resources among people. Overpopulation is problem because of food and waste, but both can be solved if we get a lot of cheap and green energy and recycle waste.
Re:Virus (Score:4, Interesting)
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Lets say that 1 person can make food for 100 people. Now we need 1% of people making food or some will die hunger. If we have 200 old sick people who can't make food for every 1 person who can, we have a serious problem.
Our problems are not quite that bad, but we have so many old people that it affects the budget of a country. We have to feed and take care of these people, but that takes money from the budget. So we now need to loan money, increase taxes or cut expenses e.g. from schools or road maintenance
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According to the USDA, more than 34 million people, including 9 million children, in the United States are food insecure.
Those "surpluses" come from damaging the land, draining aquifers , killing off pollinating species, etc. You can not keep doing that and not expect some consequences.
Lake Mead is 182ft below its full capacity.
China's rivers are drying up, glaciers are retreating world wide, the Arctic/Antarctic ice sheets are bec
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Aging problem is caused by old people who consume, but don't produce. If we can reverse aging, old people will become working adults again or at least they don't need so much care taking. At that point, it is just politics, how we share the workload and resources among people. Overpopulation is problem because of food and waste, but both can be solved if we get a lot of cheap and green energy and recycle waste.
Your assumption is, to put it bluntly, full of shit.
First, there are plenty of people under 65 who have never, in their entire life, worked, and never will produce anything.
Second, there is no reason to stop being productive past the age of 65, and the physical and mental benefits of continuing to work past that age are pretty apparent.
There's all those seniors who do volunteer work to make the world a better place - often doing work for free that people wouldn't do if you paid them to.
Then there's
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> Your assumption is, to put it bluntly, full of shit.
Lets see what we wrote.
I said "caused by old people who consume, but don't produce."
You say "there is no reason to stop being productive past the age of 65"
If you read carefully my text, you will notice that I did never mention age 65 nor retirement, not did I assume anything about individual old people nor did I say that all old people are unproductive. I Only talked about old people who don't produce. There are a lot of old and sick people who need
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Aging problem is caused by old people who consume, but don't produce. If we can reverse aging, old people will become working adults again or at least they don't need so much care taking.
Or did you forget about the bolded part - that you believe old people aren't working adults?
As for care taking - it's falling more and more to old people to do the care-taking, not just for people their age, but children and grandchildren.
Don't try to reword it - not only was the intent clear, but the idea that old people cannot be work
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Nice FP branch [until the stink of AC's brain fart], but the aspect I'd focus on is the lack of documented cases above the current record holders. There have been claims that certain people lived longer, but I doubt them. I think the current record holder is around 122, and there is some doubt about the birth date in that case.
However I don't think the poll is worded well. Definitely a poorly worded question. It sounds like they are asking only about old people, but I'm pretty sure the actual intention was
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Nice FP branch [until the stink of AC's brain fart], but the aspect I'd focus on is the lack of documented cases above the current record holders. There have been claims that certain people lived longer, but I doubt them. I think the current record holder is around 122, and there is some doubt about the birth date in that case.
Some doubt? It was a simple case of identity theft and economic fraud. Mother sold the property with the right to reside in it until her death; her daughter assumed her identity.
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Not sure which case you're referring to, but my fuzzy recollection is that the case I was thinking of involved a man?
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Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know about that case, though I've heard of others like it.
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my grandfather who died in his mid 90s spent the last 5 years of his life wondering why he was still alive (sometimes out loud).
I read that Lucille Randon who passed away few days ago aged 118 as the oldest human, commented some years ago she only "hoped for the Lord to come by", as she had "lived too long already".
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I remember an episode in the Lazarus Long series where the protagonist had hidden from the Howards and reached his "normal" aged lifespan, only to be discovered by his children and "de-aged".
Initially, he was terribly resentful and wanted them to just let him die, but eventually he came around and developed a keener interest in living as the anti-aging treatments took effect.
Pushing an old body around can really take a toll on you mentally, and i suspect that any person, finding themselves in a younger body
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Oh, yeah, he milked the product into several more books. Which were generally not worth the effort of remembering, which is why I forgot them. So yes, there was a series, of sorts. But this was the main book for something upwards of a decade, accompanied only by "Methusaleh's Children", which was much less introspective, particularly on the subject of extreme long life.
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Sometimes it is better to remain silent and thought to be an idiot than to open your mouth and erase all doubt - Lazarus long
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In "recent times" this quote goes back to Abraham Lincoln, although it is likely from much earlier. A slightly different worded form, but having the same meaning, appears in the book of Proverbs, 17:28.
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Given the context, it seems acceptable to cite it to Lazarus Long.
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That was about 5 years after he started going caving, in his mid-70s and he was spending several weeks a year camping and exploring the underground of Yorkshire. And the Mendips. And South Wales.
That was only a few years before he died. He went downhill
Re: No actual advances in life span yet (Score:2)
Just keep in mind the gulf of time in this question. A few 1 year olds Alice right now will live to around 120 with no advances. So this is like asking the people of 1900 about highways, computers, jet planes, spacecraft, or nuclear energy.
They won't know shit and might say each of these things sounds like fantasy.
I don't know future technology but can imagine that preventing death from aging will be a high priority effort.
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The precursors to all of these things were present in 1900. Someone in 1900 already knew what a highway was- it just wasn't as wide and straight as todays. Locomotives had already traveled highway speeds in 1900. Cars also existed then (albiet crude ones). The precursors to computers (and the basic idea of a "thinking" machine) was a 19th century invention (Charles Babbage). Jet engines were just around the corner (first gas turbine was in 1903) and the first patent for an airplane powered by one was in 19
Re: No actual advances in life span yet (Score:3)
You are ignoring several things
1. Nobody in 1900 had an inkling that chain reaction fission was possible. They didn't know about the nucleus
2. Cellular reprogramming is at the point of people trying to deage rats with some positive results
3. Lab grown organs would fix aging for sure, by growing a new body (from deaged cells) part by part.
All this exists now. I will leave out the possibilities of superintelligent AI because if it works as expected it either trivializes the problem or kills everyone.
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There are two big problems with "just the replace organs" strategy:
1) You can't replace your brain, and the brain is one of the biggest victims of aging. It does no good to have the body of a 20 year old if you have the brain of the average 90 year old.
2) Every single eventually ages to failure. Plus, the ability to heal from organ replacement declines with age. Few people would go through complete replacement of every major organ as a young person just for the prospect of potentially living longer.
I wouldn
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1. You can add neural stem cells and use various genetic hacks to make the brain age slower or not at all. Finding which genes you need to hack, you have 120 years to do it. You might have seen the articles - 20 years after sequencing the human genome, we now basically know how to fold most proteins, and AI knows enough to design custom proteins.
2. Suit yourself. There doesn't need to be any pain. If you want to be a corpse rather than get regular surgery every 20 years or whatever, I'm sure you'll ha
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Most of your cells are replaced every 7 years. Are you still the same person? Of course you are, just older and hopefully wiser.
You get a bone graft, tendon replacement from a dead donor, organ transplant - you're still the same person.
You lose an arm or a leg - you're still the same person. The essential "you" - that which resided in your brain, is still in residence. Unlike Elvis, "you" haven't left the building.
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Roman roads were easily as straight as anything built today. They definitely weren't as wide though.
The rail network was also pretty well established by then.
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> There may one day be some medical invention that can fundamentally slow aging and increase lifespan, but no such invention exists to-date in any sort of proven form.
There are inventions that have been proven with mice and worms, but not with humans. My favorite is that rats who ate only once a day lived longer.
It is likely that one of the babies born now live over 100 years old. So we have over 100 years of time to fix aging. 100 years is a long time, even if you think about how much we invented in the
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The current record is 122, based on that getting to 125 seems very likely. Getting to 150 seems much less likely. And 175 seems right out.
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I know a few people (immigrants from Russia and Sri Lanka) who have faked their ages by adding a decade or two so they can collect a larger welfare payment (at the time those under 30 were entitled to less than those over 30); there's one woman I keep running into who has admitted her birth certific
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Most of that "frailty" is because of lifestyle diseases. Get plenty of exercise, eat properly, don't be a fatty, don't abuse your body with drugs or smoking or vaping, have at least one dog (gets you out of the house and socializing with other dog owners - and if it's small, also non-dog-owners), keep active mentally, and you'll have more fun and be in way better shape as a senior than the average 40-year-old.
Of course if you've been abusing your mind and body for most of your life (being a sloth, etc.)
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A healthy lifestyle will keep the frailty at bay until your 80s, but the 80s is just the witching decade as far as human longevity is concerned. Look at things like weightlifting and marathon records in masters competition. The records for people in their 70s would be very respectable for a fit 25 year old. For 85 year olds, there is an enormous step down. For 90 year olds, another massive step down. Only one 100 year old has ever completed a marathon, and he did not run it- only walked.
I've watched this wi
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We don't know what's in store for any us us in the future, but the odds are, if you take care of yourself, you'll live a lot longer. We just don't know what advances are coming down the pike to make 80 the new 50, and 90 the new 60. But there's one astrophysicist who, past 100, kept teaching daily, so hey, there's something to shoot for.
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If a call came, he was to make himself a cup of tea, walk to where my grandfather lived, made sure he was comfortable, and let him pass.
He ws 96.
Most of his "friends" were kids he taught at school who were also in retirement
Life is for living, existing is not living.
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Let's keep it between us, but I hear tinfoil hats are the key to immortality.
Curious wording (Score:2)
Very curious wording. There is only one person who is the oldest person already alive today, and I don't see how guessing when they're gonna die is valuable.
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No they specifically talk about the oldest person alive today
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Right. The wording is wrong, but it is clear what the question is actually asking. (i.e. the "oldest" age of death among people currently alive)
Wrong Wording (Score:2)
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They should be asking how long will a baby born today live for on average. The oldest person alive today is unlikely to be many years away from death so there is almost no chance for medical advancements to have any impact on their already incredibly long lifespan. Asking about the average life expectancy of a new infant means you are not looking at statistical anomalies and are also leaving plenty of time for some new medical advance to come along...although I suspect that like everyone else they are likely to go through their life hearing that a cure for aging is "just around the corner" with nothing ever being produced!
How is that as interesting to current posters as "people alive today going to live?" There are plenty of medical advancements, as well as economic and social advancements, that are adding to everyone's lives on an ongoing basis.
We're already around the theoretical limit (Score:2)
As Woody Allen once said,
However, barring consciousness transfer (and the question of whether that's really you), it's theorized that the limit to human age is somewhere around where we are already (the oldest people [wikipedia.org] on record died in their eleventies, though the eldest did make it to 122.4.
While there is exciting res
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...the oldest people [wikipedia.org] on record died in their eleventies, though the eldest did make it to 122.4.
It is likely that people supposedly living to extreme ages aren't as old at they think they are. Either they forgot or they're carrying around someone else's identity (which is common in the 3rd world countries where a lot of these super-old people are). There was an article on Slashdot a while back about this (but I don't remember when... lol).
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Of the 50 oldest people in the world listed here (ranging in age from 111 to 115):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... [wikipedia.org]
Only a handful are in developing countries. The vast majority are from Western Europe, the U.S., or Japan.
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The link you quoted from my post specifies that it's only looking at verified ages (otherwise you'd be looking at biblical Adam's purported 930 years of age). The oldest three on record, as cited in the first table on that page, are Jeanne Calment (France, died age 122 in 1997), Kane Tanaka (Japan, died age 119 in 2002), and Sarah Knauss (USA, died age 119 in 1999).
Taking somebody else's identity for immigration purposes was common world-wide, including in the USA, until immigration reform tightened that
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OP could be referring that someone speculated that the Jeanne Calment we know could be a younger daughter Yvonne (reportedly passed away in 1934) who would have taken over her mother Jeanne's identity (maybe to keep receiving the retirement pension) https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... [wikipedia.org] The claims were based only on statistical analysis of old age people. The hypothesis was not taken seriously for several reasons (not mathematically rigorous evidence, existence of documents and photographs attesting Jeanne's ac
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FTFY
The "first" world was America, Europe and their various colonies ; the "second" world was Russia, China and their various colonies and satellite states. The "third" world was the rest of the world, outside those two power blocks - which sort of morphed into the "non-aligned" movement [wikipedia.org]. Or, as Bush Jr considered them, the enemy.
People tacked an economic aspect onto the political intention pretty much form the start, but that remains a mis-use of
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This was my thought as well. We've already seen examples of the aging limits of human physiology through accidental brute-force testing, just due to the human population size. Improvements in health care will allow more people to approach those limits but not exceed them. More radical procedures will be needed to extend human lifespan into the 130s and beyond, most specifically combining de-aging technology with anti-cancer treatments.
It's too bad our society is not nearly mature enough for this though, com
Life Span versus longevity. (Score:5, Informative)
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Statistics are no less complicated than computers. It stands to reason that respective literacy among the populace is similar.
Most people think statistics is done when you get a mean value. Which is basically the problem in this example.
They might have heard of a median but must will give you a blank look when you start talking about spread.
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I believe this to be true; however, since more people now have the opportunity to live longer, is that larger population of older folks more likely to have some members that will live longer? IE a larger population size may experience more outliers?
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Agreed. If you read Plato's Republic (written approximately 375 BCE), it assumes a human lifespan of roughly 80 when he talks about how men's roles in society should change as they age. 0-20 is to be devoted to childhood/training, 20-40 military service, 40-60 raising a family, 60-80 elder statesmen. Lifespans of the upper class were fairly well documented in ancient civilizations like Greece/Rome/China and there are plenty of such figures who lived into old age by modern standards. Even pre-modern archeolo
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Even that's not true. It's not that "people rarely lived past 50", it's just that your chances of an untimely death from accident or disease was much higher and infant mortality was off the charts. But plenty of people lived past 50- even industrial workers.
Outliers vs liars. (Score:1)
Impossible to say (Score:2)
With new medicine and technology, lifespan may eventually be unbounded, and that may well happen within the next couple of decades. Or it may stall, and we find out that lifespan has a fairly hard limit. Neither would surprise me. A more important question might be the quality of life beyond 80. If you are blind, de
The Truly Old Folks (Score:3)
So Enoch wins for oldest person still alive, but Elijah is way up there as well. They will eventually die after serving as God's two witnesses in Revelation and then be resurrected after a similar period to how long Christ was in the tomb.
So no escaping death except for those who are ready when the rapture comes. And really, like "The Old Guard", who would want to live for an extremely long life unless everyone else did. You'd see all the people you know and love die, along with all their offspring.
Really good at reaching 100, crap at going over (Score:3)
Medicine has gotten really good at negating the common early causes of death. Things like surviving pregnancy, child mortality, surgery, fixing trauma (bullets, car crashes), and delaying heart disease and diabetes we got down.
Actually extending human life beyond 100 is yet to truly happen. That said, we have lots of ideas about how to do that. But we have not made real progress in them.
Things that we are thinking about and working on include:
1) Growing replacement organs in animals. If we can just switch out a new heart, lung, etc. then anything short of brain damage will just go away.
2) teleomeres modificiation. We start out with so much teleomeres and they get shorter and shorter. When we run out, the cells stop reproducing. This probably evolved as an anti-cancer mechanism, but it causes some of what we call aging. If we can stop/reverse this it may stop/reverse some aging. Note, does not stop arterial clogging and similar issues.
If we can ever actually do these things we think we can do, well, I can easily see max human lifespan going to 150 or even 200. Note, even in that case, most humans will die younger. Before Covid approximately 20% of men died before reaching 65. This includes bad luck and stupidity - shot, car accident, drinking lead, etc. I would expect that at least 40% of the male population to die from similar causes before age 130, even if life expectancy was 200.
Most "super-centenarian" are liars (Score:3)
Two interesting things that most "super-centenarian" have in common is a pension and to have outlived one of their kids.
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A given person who was born 110 years ago had a roughly 1 in 5 million chance of being alive today (based on the world population of roughly 2 billion at that time and the roughly 400 people who are currently that age or older). But only 16% of men and 34% of women make it to age 90. So, absent strong heritability of longevity, as assuming most people have their children in their 20s or 30s, the odds are in favor of anybody who is 110 outliving their children.
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Right.... And the fact that a high percentage of those people also happen to have life pensions is irrelevant and stop asking questions.
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Fraudulent claims of old age used to be a lot more common in the days prior to good public records and DNA testing. There are so few people alive older than 110 that it would be rather difficult to fly under the radar as a child claiming to be their parent.
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Who the heck do you think is going around taking DNA samples of old people as confirmation of their identity?
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I don't think you realize how rare and how well-studied people older than 110 are. To put it in perspective, there are ZERO men in the United States who are older than 110 and only 10 women. If you make it to that age, you better believe people are going to verify your identity (not necessarily by DNA test). Your very continued existence is cause for medical study.
Also, the difference in appearance and capabilities between a 110 year old and an 80 year old is enormous (the age of a putative child of a 110 y
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Small but significant increases are reasonable (Score:2)
The oldest reliably documented person, I believe, lived to about 122. A great deal of research conducted in multiple disciplines is starting to produce results. We know caloric restriction can add up to 20% or so. Many nutrition improvements are on the horizon. Various medical interventions have been discussed in the research. Based on the research I have read about, I have some belief that my grandkids (ages 14-20) have a moderate chance of making it to 120 or so, with outliers in the 125-140 range. I thus
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If caloric restriction just gave everyone a 20% boost over today's lifespan, there would have been plenty of 120 year olds running around in the past. People have lived on a low calorie diet as long as there have been people. Plus, I don't think you are going to find many takers on people willing to live on 1500 calories for the rest of their lives. We can't even stop people from eating 3,000 calories a day.
I believe those studies were done by just cutting the rations of lab mice. There's a big difference b
Re: Small but significant increases are reasonable (Score:2)
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You are talking about hunter-gatherer lifestyles. We've had some form of civilization in various parts of the world for 4,000+ years. Relatively reliable records on births and deaths (at least for the wealth) exist from ancient Rome. The ancient Greeks and Romans all had commentary on lifespan that mirrors what we experience today. I don't think your chance of being eaten by a wild animal or getting into some sort of accident was any higher as someone living in Rome in 0CE than some today. In fact, your ri
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Caloric restriction can add up to 20% IN MICE.
One big difference between animals with longer lifespans and those with short lifespans is the production of free radicals as a byproduct of metabolism. Free radicals are thought to be a large contributor to aging. Long-lived animals, like humans, are good at controlling those free radicals. Short-lived animals tend to not control free radicals as well. The theory is that by reducing calories there are fewer free radicals produced, therefore slower aging. B
missing option (Score:3)
Woodrow Wilson Smith AKA Lazarus Long
Obligatory Poll Choice (Score:2)
X -- Until CowboyNeal dies
Why am I having to add these poll options???
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If I had mod points I would have marked this Informative.
How do you have a poll on /. for longevity and not represent the demographic that even remembers Cowboy Neil?
Bah! Why do the polls no longer have the obvious Cowboy Neil option?
medical safety (Score:2)
The oldest person will be no older than 125. Why? Because for medical advances to trickle to the general populace takes forever, and with good reason.
Diabetes Meds (Score:2)
I chose 125-200 on the basis of looking into my recently prescribed diabetes medication, alone. Metformin, in addition to be being helpful in controlling blood sugar, is also being studied because it apparently reduces some aging factors and potentially extends lifespan (and not just the sucky degenerative end part of that lifespan, either). I figure if I accidentally stumbled across ONE drug being realistically looked into for that, we're probably not far off from having something like Prolong from David W
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The End of Diabetes: The Eat to Live Plan (Score:2)
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FEnd-Dia... [amazon.com]
"The New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Live and Super Immunity and one of the country's leading experts on preventive medicine offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse [Type 2] diabetes--without drugs.
At last, a breakthrough program to combat the rising diabetes epidemic and help millions of diabetics, as well as those suffering with high blood pressure and heart disease. Joel Fuhrman, M.D. Research director of the Nut
Even 125 years is a bit optimistic (Score:2)
As asked in the poll the 125 year limit may be achieved by one or two lucky (or unlucky, depending on the point of view) individuals for purely statistical reasons. For all we know lifespan is genetically encoded. All advances so far improve on the quality of life, aka healthy aging, but don't move the goal post. I can see two paths to move the limit: genetically modifying humans, or finding a way to replace cells, tissues or organs with fresh ones. The second path will be a bit hard to implement with the b
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Yeah... most people don't really take care of themselves all that well. Even in the near future, I'd imagine that most people over 100 will have weak enough immune systems that they'll get wiped out by whatever the next pandemic will be called.
Badly written question (Score:3)
The oldest person alive today, is 115 years old. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... [wikipedia.org]
Unless you are expecting a giant revolution in medical tech in the next year or two, it's not going to help them.
Better question, "What is the maximum age that someone alive today will reach"
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Mod up and I wish I'd seen it before I wrote my comment.
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Unless you are expecting a giant revolution in medical tech in the next year or two, it's not going to help them.
It doesn't have to help them, in order to meet the criterion of the poll. If that innovation helps a newborn (someone who is alive today) then that works for them.
Look at the development of open heart surgery as an example. For a long time it was thought to be impossible - until it wasn't. So can we expect something similar to address the factors that cause death today? No we can't expect them. But we can hope.
And in that respect it is likely that life-extending treatments of some form (even if it is just
Wrongly-worded question (Score:2)
I think you meant "How old will the YOUNGEST person alive today live to be?"
The 114 year-old Russian peasant woman has another six months tops, but a baby born today may on average live to be 100+ years old.
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No, you're not quite correct there.
Eg, of all the people currently alive right now, the one that lives to be the oldest may live to be 145 years old. However at this very moment they might be a newborn OR they might be 23 years old (or really I should say she - females more or less consistently live longer than males on average). Hell they might already be 100 years old (unlikely, but possible).
In that regard whoever is youngest right now is irrelevant - it's whoever is alive today that will live to be th
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That might not work as well as you think. Depending on where that baby was born, life expectancy can vary wildly. Plus there's any number of chance things that can cut that way short. I think it's just weirdly worded because English grammar is ambiguous in many instances. The way I interpreted the *intent* of the poll is more like:
"Of the universe represented by all humans in existence at the time of posting of this poll, and given rapid advances in medical care and technology, what do you believe will
The cohort born in 2022, let's say (Score:2)
The question is, of the cohort of people born in 2022, how long do you expect the longest lived person in that cohort to live?
So the task is to forecast developments in aging science which will have effects from 2023 on.
It not really plausible that if such discoveries are made they will materially affect people in their eighties or nineties, so we should be looking at what advances are plausible by about 2260-70, that will be applicable to people who are then 40 or 50 years old
This is about 50 years from no
carousel (Score:2)
Old enough that the next generations will need to get rid of the old folks just to keep fed.
Flawed poll (Score:2)
This pool's ranges are WAY too broad.
I went for category #2, because it was 125 to 175, but I think we'll just barely be breaking that 125 mark. Maybe 130-135 tops - and even then, it'll be the exception rather than the norm just as 100+ year old people are now.
All the choice above 200 years I think are just wholly unrealistic. We need a small max and categories spread out over smaller spans - eg, "less than 125", '125 to 150", "150 to 175", and "175 to 200".
Re: (Score:2)
125 doesn't seem like much since the longevity record is 122, but these 3 years matter a lot since the likelihood of living passed 100+ decreases exponentially. Jeanne Calment was an extreme outlier, so much that many people suspect fraud for that reason alone: it is so improbable that even though nothing was found against her, it is more likely that it is a "perfect crime" than an actual record. Assuming that it is indeed real, scientists have no idea on how it was possible, besides some genetic roulette g
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah that's kinda my point. 122 has already been (probably) achieved - and even though likely through genetic lottery, its quite likely that someone else will just happen to hit that lottery for an even better result.
Records are made to be broken - so long as humanity doesn't' go extinct I'd expect we'll continually eventually get a person to break the age record - with increasingly long timespans between those records being achieved, but each time the record is broken it'll likely be only by small amounts
Medical advnces? (Score:2)
The answer is 1000 (Score:2)
Better question... (Score:2)
Less than 70 should be an option (Score:2)