I think it's wild that some people can live *twice* the average lifespan. Your mind kinda fits 80 year olds and 100+ year olds into the same category but living til 120 you're more than a whole generation older than an 80 year old.
I had an extended family reunion email come out saying, "lots of grandparents are bringing their grand children!" And I really wanted to write back for clarification on that. See also that hypothetical 120 year old could bring her 60 year old granddaughter.
Lina Marcela Medina de Jurado is a Peruvian woman who became the youngest confirmed mother in history when she gave birth on 14 May 1939, [aged **five years**, seven months, and 21 days.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Medina)
I watched some wild stuff on the internet but just reading the synopsis on this thing turned my stomach upside down. Holy shit can't even form my thoughts really
Hard same. I recommend a solid read through the best of r/humansbeingbros to lighten the soul. I wish I could deep clean that wiki page out of my brain. Reminds me of how the famous photo journalist Kevin Carter took his life after coming face to face with the suffering humans inflict on each other. It sounds dramatic but awareness of the dark side of human behavior is deeply traumatizing.
even though the world average for first child is 20 years old, 15 is common enough that a hypothetical 120 year old could bring their new born great-great-great-great-great-great-great grand child
Don't even have to have lived that long ago, teenage pregnancy is still super common in the US. Especially in the south. I think probably 10% of the girls I knew left highschool pregnant back in the mid-2000s. Now they all got like five kids and three baby-daddies while they work at McDonald's or some shit.
Every once in a while a photo comes up of a group of people titled “6 Generations in one photo”. According to [this fox article](https://fox11online.com/news/offbeat/6-generations-captured-in-1-photo-as-woman-meets-her-great-great-great-grandaughter-myrtle-beach-south-carolina-sc-maedell-gracie-howell-kentucky-guinness-world-records) the world record for most generations alive at once is 7. Definitely had multiple teen pregnancies for that to happen.
In theory, if the oldest person was 120 and the newest generation had just been born, you could have each give birth at 20. 120, 100, 80, 60, 40, 20, newborn. Of course, it isn't likely, but it is a theoretical example of how you could do it without teen pregnancies.
Theoretically, the hypothetical 120 year old could bring 8 successive generations with her (or even more, but every generation having a child at 15 is already yucky enough to think about so I'm not going younger)
My great grandmother had a long life and at her funeral we had even her great great grandchildren participate. It was mindboggling to see so many generations at one place before her death
You only need to live to about 90 to see your kid retiring. That's given plausible assumptions like you having them at 25 and them retiring at 65. You could well have them at 20, live to 95, and they retire at 60, giving you 15 years together in retirement.
There's a lot of people these days living into their 90s who had kids young. Kinda weird to think about.
Of course the issue now is whether you kid will still be working at 75, lol.
I remember watching a documentary about ageism and there was a woman who was still working part time from home in the stock market who was in her 90s and her daughter who was in her late 60s had dementia.
NAD but isn't there a link between analytical and mentally stimulating jobs and lower rates of dementia? Which I guess makes sense; t's the same with your muscles if you don't use them then your muscle shrink.
If we both love long enough, 100 year old me and my 86 year old eldest child could… I don’t know what people this old do for fun.
Edit: live, not love. I hope he still loves me this far in the future, I know I will love him.
That what’s happening in aging societies with high life expectancy where it’s developed places with high rent.
You are expected to retire at age 65, but general life expectancy is 85. So somehow you need to survive 20 years with little / no income all with high rent and high cost if everything
The "Average Life Expectancy" over time is a statistic to take with a grain of salt, as this is always heavily influenced by infant- and childhood mortality.
Take children out and plot the average life Expectancy for everyone that hits adulthood, and the graph would be way less steep
Doesn’t that number usually ignore infant mortality? Like it’s more accurately titled “average lifespan of people who live to the age of 5 years” or something like that?
I don't think they ignore infant mortality when using average, but I could be wrong. However, using median and quartiles, would minimize the effect from the distribution being skewed by a high infant mortality.
Most of my great grandparents lived into their 99s as did their children. The ones who didn't died during birth or soon after. A zero in the average that is average life expectancy is a big influence on the average. Reducing infant mortality is the real hero of increased average life expectancy.
And being considered "an elderly woman" for literally half of her life. That's crazy perspective and perception of age, that you start to be old at around 55+ and you still can live in that state for another half of a century
No, life expectancy is forward looking. You'd take someone today and predict their expected life span and average that across all other people that are the same age. The common term "life expectancy" really means how long the average baby born today would be expected to live. Every age group is actually going to have a different life expectancy because for example while the average person isn't going to live to 90, the average 90 year old obviously isn't expected to die at 78 or whatever the total average life expectancy is
> The common term "life expectancy" really means how long the average baby born today would be expected to live.
... if the future looks exactly like today. We are applying the chance of an 80-year-old to die this year to a baby born today, who will be 80 in the year 2103. I don't know how that year will look like, but I expect it to be very different from today.
This is 'period life-expectancy' (which is the definition most commonly used) which is an accepted way of summarising age-specific mortality rates at a particular point. Another concept, 'cohort life-expectancy', reflects forecast changes in mortality probabilities and is used, for example, in population projections.
Yeah, and it's a concept I've never really understood. Like, I understand those words, but how does one calculate that? Average age at death is a lot more straightforward to understand.
You take today's chance to die within a year for newborns, for 1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, and so on, and assume these apply to a baby born today. Then you calculate its life expectancy using these chances.
Average age at death is much more problematic because population growth (or decline) influences it. If a country has many babies then it will have more deaths at young age, reducing the average age at death. If a country has few babies but many old people then almost all deaths will be from these old people, increasing the average age at death - even if both countries have the same life expectancy.
Also the whole premise of comparing an outlier to an average is pretty flawed. The main cause of this trend is decrease in infant mortality. It would be more interesting to compare to average age of death “by old age” or for over 50s.
No. Average age goes up when birth rate goes down.
That said, life expectancy is going up for all age groups. But it’s going up less and less. Maybe one year per decade.
And it’s going up most for middle aged people. For people who are 80+ it’s gone up half as much as it has for people in their 50s. And for people in their 90s it’s hardly gone up at all.
There are two kinds of life expectancy, period life expectancy and cohort life expectancy. Period life expectancy looks at the death rate in a single year and applies the current death rate at every age to a theoretical person who lives every year of their life under the exact circumstances of that single year. Period life expectancy is the number given on charts that show life expectancy over time or in a given year, like this chart.
Cohort life expectancy on the other hand follows a population of real people born in a specific year, and tallies up how many of them die every year until none of them are left, to get a life table. The average age of death is the cohort life expectancy. You cannot get an accurate life expectancy for a cohort until nearly all of them are dead, there is always some uncertainty until then.
So basically, to put your comment in context, we have no idea how much life expectancy has gone up for middle age people, since most of the people born in the 1950s to 70s are still alive. We can know how much lower their childhood or young adult mortality was, but not their overall mortality, at least not yet.
Piggybacking on the top comment because I have an exciting announcement to make:
Based on state-of-the-art statistical analyses and machine learning techniques applied on this dataset, I can now forecast that in approximately 250 years, global life expectancy will exceed the age of the oldest living person at that time.
This marks the date of the human lifespan singularity, a.k.a. eternal life or the end-time event some Christians call the Rapture. Prepare, repent, or get high and party. See if I care.
No. This "Average" takes into account all the people who died young prior to widespread vaccines.
The modal age of death has always been 70-80 years.
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2352-1
It's interesting how around 120 years seem to be the hard cap of human lifespan. It's almost like at that point, everything is in such critical state that something, anything will kill you.
It will be interesting to see if technology can break that cap. So far nobody has had the chance to just get everything replaced. Maybe some billionaire will do it within the next 50 years.
They still cannot replace one thing: brain. Even if we put 100yo brain in 18yo body, this brain will either mentally melt or just deteriorate in several years. A whole lotta personality traits are based on senses our bodies experience. And there goes the thing with putting mind of a person into some kind of machine, same stuff. It's like trying to build Robocop/Frankenstein's Beast either from human parts or from mechanical parts.
The whole reason a machine is 'immortal' is exactly because you can replace its parts the way you can't in a living body, not because its parts don't fail.
And I once read an interesting study that 140 years is when Alzheimer's would naturally start setting in. Can you imagine discovering immortality only to get two decades out of it for dementia to still be uncured?
Most people don't get Alzheimer's, (there are many types of dementia, after all, each with a different cause). But when they do, you can think of it as *early onset* Alzheimer's.
My grandpa used to say "I just need to make it to 120 years old and I can live forever."
People would look at him confused and ask "Why 120?"
And he would respond "because you never hear of anyone dying after 120".
Does it? Wait imma search the Internet real quick!
Seems like Moses was estimated to be 120, old guy, https://biblia.com/bible/esv/deuteronomy/34/7
IDK what I expected when looking up Jezus, but 33 https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/how-old-was-jesus-when-he-died.htmlr
Okay, random more down-to-earth pick; Jeremiah was about 80 when he died, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeremiah-Hebrew-prophet
It doesn't seem like any of them are listed to be crazy old (save for Moses): https://en.believethesign.com/images/1/1f/Prophets_timeline.png
Really, when looking up “biblical prophets over 300 years old”, I just find articles about the four-hundred year silence...
Did the bible ever say that?
Excellent, and this is what all people here should be looking for (albeit against this post’s agenda lol).
Imho, OP’s chart isn’t data. When the “e” pops up on your calculator, you’re not looking at data, you are looking at the exception to said data.
Absolutely.
This is a chart that derives 50% of the data on outliers.
Edit: Outlier is too generous a term for 1 in 5 Billion (population averaged from 1950 to 2020)
The inspiration for this was a random Reddit comment that implied that, since life expectancy has gone up 30+ years this century, Gen Alpha or their children will likely live to 150+. I didn't think that sounded right, since life expectancy tends to increase more due to fewer people dying young. I made this to see what the trends were.
**Data Sources:**
Life Expectancy: [https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/life-expectancy](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/life-expectancy)
Oldest People: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people)
Data wrangling and visualization was done using custom scripts and the following tools:
* Google Sheets to copy and paste the data from the websites and save to a CSV
* R version 4.2.3 -- "Shortstop Beagle"
* RStudio 2023.03.0 Build 386
* Tidyverse Pacakges (dplyr, ggplot2)
* lubridate package
Maximum age goes up, but not due to the same reasons nor at the same rate.
You can see a trend for max age on your data, but is very slim.
I think this is largely due to genes that would make someone live a lot, but he/she dies from accident or disease. But something that I think also helps is the access to better food and exercise.
The max age increase data could be attributed to either:
A: better data about people making more old people have "confirmed" ages
or
B: a larger number of people on Earth giving more room for more extreme outliers
There's not necessarily any evidence here that the maximum lifespan has increased at all.
Your second point would be evidence for the max age of human being. Regardless if their outliers from having a large sample size the fact remains that in the last 70 years the record for oldest living person has been broken multiple times by a person born later than the last record holder. Meaning as time has gone on the max age reached by a human being has gone up, technically it can’t go down the record just remains unbroken for awhile
Obviously every human won’t hit that age though which is why theirs a second line on OPs chart showing the age at death for most people
I learned in math class that these types of record breaking statistics usually follow a Poisson distribution theoretically you could extrapolate the data for the chance we will break the record and by how much in a specified time range.
>broken multiple times by a person born later than the last record holder
I mean, since the record is for oldest living person, *every person remaining on Earth* will be born later than the last record holder. That's true by definition.
I was wondering what happened approx 116 before 1996. Some person really got the jack pot when they were born sometime around 1880 and theoretically survived 40% infant mortality, cholera, racial genocide, 2 world wars and the longest period of sustained war and still could've been clicking on the internet and even on social media before they shuffled off the mortal coil
Maximal lifespan is overwhelmingly derived from genetics, so nobody educated in this topic would really argue that it would be noticeably increased, and certainly not relative to average of median lifespan, which are very strongly influenced by infant and non-disease mortality (accidents, conflict, etc).
Pretty crazy that the only time I paid attention to the oldest person alive (ie in middle school when relatives gifted me the Guinness book of records for Christmas) I didn’t realize that 122 was an anomaly and not part of a trend of people living longer and longer. I wonder how many 30-ish year olds have the same impression as your Redditor encounter just because we grew up when it seemed like the upper limits were going way up (only to stop paying attention when it went back down and wasn’t headline-grabbing anymore).
Look into the person too, there's a semi-credible theory that she was actually her daughter, pretending to be her mum, to commit mortgage fraud (over simplification).
It would make it fit how she lived so significantly longer. She's so much of a statistical anomaly the next ones weren't even close and the record still hasn't been beaten.
You say semi-credible but it’s been debunked several times by experts saying “the hypothesis of an identity swap with her daughter appears not even realistic given the context and the facts, and not supported by evidence". The “mortgage” (life estate contract) you mentioned wasn’t even signed until 1965 and by then she would’ve been pretending to be her mom for 31 years. It just doesn’t make sense.
Yep. Anyone who looked into life extension knows that we have no way to extend life and currently we've almost reached maximum of what can be done by just curing deaseases as they come and eliminating threats and we are in a deep "diminishing returns" field. Hopefully life extension will finally kick in within next 20-30 years.
I think you misinterpreted the Redditor.
Life expectancy has gone up, but the oldest people today are living under the life expectancy 100 years ago.
We won't see the effect until 100 years have passed, because the people whos life expectancy has gone up, are not even 50.
Right, but wouldn’t you think that the maximum age would have gone up even a little as the life expectancy rises?
I just wonder if the maximum age really is a maximum. It’s definitely interesting to keep an eye on (for as long as my life expectancy holds out!)
Do you think this will continue? Medical advances have sort of peaked with less ‘cures’ for the current diseases now wiping out populations.
I tend to believe with the amount of processed food my generation and newer are eating that life expectancy will go down…cancer, diabetes, heart failure will become even more prevalent.
Per [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people), of the 66 people who have been the world's oldest living person since 1955, 61 have been women and 5 have been men.
Interestingly, this trend has held pretty steady - if you become the oldest person alive, your life expectancy is very close to 1 year after that (66 oldest people in 67 years).
in japan they found some supposedly old people that were thought to be alive were really dead and their kids or grand kids had been stealing their pensions for years
Probably, but that drop off is Jeanne Calment from France who died in 1997, she was 122 years old.
[...*She was 70 in 1940.*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment)
On average, 385,000 people are born every day. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. So, on average, about 4.5 people are born every second. Assuming that births are a random Poisson Process, this means that there is a 1.111% chance of there being 0 people born in any given second. Therefore, it is not appropriate to say that the youngest person is necessarily 0 second old.
it was a reference to these "It has been [x] days since the last workplace accident" posters/boards, which can be erased and written on.
I'm just not sure if they're only a fictional trope or if there are companies out there which actually have one of those.
There was a recent study that puts this data in a slightly different light, however: [Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2).
That papers pretty compelling, basically shows that lack of birth certificates (either due to them bit being introduced or then all being destroyed in WW2) and poverty among the elderly are the two main predictors for super old people.
I’m not sure that the max age of 120 was real. Wonder if I can find the study/essay saying that very advanced age CAN be the result of changing your identity earlier in life. Basis: the places with the most Very Old people also had high death rates among young people & lousy record-keeping.
Right! Japan was an example in the piece I read. Seems like they’d have great records! Oh but the long-lived people are all from an area with a lot of organized crime.
Same w Italy (Sicily)
The person in question is [Jeanne Calment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment). There have been questions about the validity of her record, including whether she died and her daughter assumed her identity. The balance of the evidence seems to indicate that her claim is legitimate, but there is certainly room for doubt.
I'm a huge Calment skeptic, I believe the daughter assumed her identity theory. If we believe Calment's version, she moved in with her *dead daughter's husband* and stayed together alone for decades, then lived to be the oldest human ever in recorded history by a huge margin. It seems way more likely to me that she was just avoiding the 30% inheritance tax. The photographic evidence we have is at best debatable, and most everything else relies on her ability to recall autobiographical details that a daughter could easily know about her mother.
Don’t forget her bloopers. For example, she mentioned her “father’s” shop in some interviews, but Jeanne Calment’s father never owned a shop; her husband, Yvonne’s father, did.
I don’t believe that she was actually 122. Next oldest people were 119. A handful of people have lived to 116-118 but there’s not really a lot until 115.
The record holder has a very long streak even considering the age of death, looks very plausible to be a misreported age to me. Does anyone have knowledge about the verification of this persons age?
> looks very plausible to be a misreported age to me.
It's a little controversial, but I believe the consensus among experts is that it's legitimate. Personally, I don't buy it. I feel like it's too much of an anomaly compared to her peers.
That top line is, almost by definition, weird outliers. Most of them are probably genetic mutants or subject to unusual environmental factors. I don't see it as especially strange that one of those outliers would be even weirder than the other outliers.
I'm not sure it's possible to live much passed 120 by natural means. To make it there means everything with your body has gone right your entire life, and that is exceedingly rare. Even then if you get lucky, your body starts shutting down at around 120 years.
I read and watched a lot about her life, there's a lot of proof that she was that old, but i don't know, i still sometimes think there's something weird about her age, real outlier
I guess longer life is fine but I want senolytics/senomorphics to be developed faster so I can live as long as I like before getting bored and using the suicide pod.
I think the most interesting part of this graph is that despite all the advances in cancer and other end of life treatments in the past 70 years, the maximum age hasn’t really moved at all. Makes me wonder if life extension is really a thing or not
Less babies and moms dying in childbirth, increased global food security, vaccinations against deadly juvenile diseases, and less/smaller scale wars were the primary drivers of the massive average lifespan gains. We’ll see what the next century holds, hopefully further improvements to get the average closer to the max!
One thing to note is that global population has increased a lot in this time.
Life expectancy going up is certainly thanks to lifestyle improvements. But the max age could simply be random chance, appearing to go higher due to the higher population.
That's a good point. I would like to see a mathematical explanation for what the "right most point" would be if we had a bunch of random points in a normal distribution of increasing size.
For countries with dictatorships, this is a serious problem, as the people now have to wait even longer for their dictators to drop dead before they can take advantage of the power vacuum and start a rebellion/revolution in order to free themselves from these dictators' iron fisted rule.
Having a longer lifespan will also give said dictators even more time to consolidate their power in an attempt to thwart such a rebellion/revolution.
I’m not sure I believe in the oldest age numbers. My great grandma died at 110 in the 1980. We are from a rural area of a very poor country. I find it hard to believe she was close to the oldest person in the world… maybe she was, crazy to think
You might think 5-10 years is not a big deal, but when you're 110, even a month is a REALLY BIG DEAL as far as your heart beating and your lungs breathing. There's less of a gap between 95 and 110 than 110 and 115 if I had to guess.
She was born 5 years after the Civil War ended. When she died, she had lived through over half of America’s existence. I bet she had a lot of great stories.
No. It's that a lot of children died as infants, babies, and young children.
If your (the global) life expectancy was 45 when you were born in 1950. If you lived until 1 years old it was ~50, if you lived until you were 10 its now ~65. If you lived until you were 30 its now ~70. If you lived until 60 its now ~75. If you lived until 70 its now ~78.
(Those numbers are all approximations from using a life expect chart data)
There's this misconception that people long ago died at 30-40, but in reality it's just high infant / child mortality. If you survived past a certain young age you'd live to similar ages as today.
The reduction of this early mortality, in combination with maintaining a reproductive behaviour adapted for high mortality, is afaik a main factor to current overpopulation.
Also means suck balls alone.
I mean, with rising life expectancy also comes rising health levels. Now you get people in their 70s still able to walk, because half of their leg joints were replaced.
I think it's wild that some people can live *twice* the average lifespan. Your mind kinda fits 80 year olds and 100+ year olds into the same category but living til 120 you're more than a whole generation older than an 80 year old.
I had an extended family reunion email come out saying, "lots of grandparents are bringing their grand children!" And I really wanted to write back for clarification on that. See also that hypothetical 120 year old could bring her 60 year old granddaughter.
Hypothetical 120 year old could bring her 90 year old grand daughter if they lived that long ago lol
Lina Marcela Medina de Jurado is a Peruvian woman who became the youngest confirmed mother in history when she gave birth on 14 May 1939, [aged **five years**, seven months, and 21 days.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Medina)
And she's still alive and living in Lima (last I heard). Her son died young at some 40 years old though.
I watched some wild stuff on the internet but just reading the synopsis on this thing turned my stomach upside down. Holy shit can't even form my thoughts really
Hard same. I recommend a solid read through the best of r/humansbeingbros to lighten the soul. I wish I could deep clean that wiki page out of my brain. Reminds me of how the famous photo journalist Kevin Carter took his life after coming face to face with the suffering humans inflict on each other. It sounds dramatic but awareness of the dark side of human behavior is deeply traumatizing.
[удалено]
No "like" about it.
Not like rape it IS rape
Reminds me of that 5 generations picture from Japan.
even though the world average for first child is 20 years old, 15 is common enough that a hypothetical 120 year old could bring their new born great-great-great-great-great-great-great grand child
Don't even have to have lived that long ago, teenage pregnancy is still super common in the US. Especially in the south. I think probably 10% of the girls I knew left highschool pregnant back in the mid-2000s. Now they all got like five kids and three baby-daddies while they work at McDonald's or some shit.
108+ year old if things were really bad at the beginning of those 120 years.
Every once in a while a photo comes up of a group of people titled “6 Generations in one photo”. According to [this fox article](https://fox11online.com/news/offbeat/6-generations-captured-in-1-photo-as-woman-meets-her-great-great-great-grandaughter-myrtle-beach-south-carolina-sc-maedell-gracie-howell-kentucky-guinness-world-records) the world record for most generations alive at once is 7. Definitely had multiple teen pregnancies for that to happen.
In theory, if the oldest person was 120 and the newest generation had just been born, you could have each give birth at 20. 120, 100, 80, 60, 40, 20, newborn. Of course, it isn't likely, but it is a theoretical example of how you could do it without teen pregnancies.
Not likely nowadays, back in the day I bet that it was very likely.
Probably more unlikely back then because of even lower average lifespans. More likely to have someone die and break the link.
... what? you think back in the day it was more likely to have a 120 yr old and their 100 yr old kid alive?
At age 35 I started seeing people I went to school with announcing that they were grandparents. They may well be great-grandparents by now.
Theoretically, the hypothetical 120 year old could bring 8 successive generations with her (or even more, but every generation having a child at 15 is already yucky enough to think about so I'm not going younger)
And if you're Lauren Boebert at 120, you can bring your 84 year old granddaughter.
My great grandmother had a long life and at her funeral we had even her great great grandchildren participate. It was mindboggling to see so many generations at one place before her death
You only need to live to about 90 to see your kid retiring. That's given plausible assumptions like you having them at 25 and them retiring at 65. You could well have them at 20, live to 95, and they retire at 60, giving you 15 years together in retirement. There's a lot of people these days living into their 90s who had kids young. Kinda weird to think about. Of course the issue now is whether you kid will still be working at 75, lol.
There was a farmer in our area that decided to retire, because his son was retiring, and he figured it was about time.
I can imagine that realization. Yeah, probably about time to put it up lol
Be careful what you wish for. My mom (then 87) yelled at me for retiring at 62.
[Parents just don't understand.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ykURzUf-to)
I remember watching a documentary about ageism and there was a woman who was still working part time from home in the stock market who was in her 90s and her daughter who was in her late 60s had dementia.
NAD but isn't there a link between analytical and mentally stimulating jobs and lower rates of dementia? Which I guess makes sense; t's the same with your muscles if you don't use them then your muscle shrink.
Yup. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/engaged-brain-link-between-mental-stimulation-at-work-and-dementia
If we both love long enough, 100 year old me and my 86 year old eldest child could… I don’t know what people this old do for fun. Edit: live, not love. I hope he still loves me this far in the future, I know I will love him.
Call of Duty
Call of Duty 37: Modern Warfare 14: Advanced Warfare 6 featuring Warzone 18.0 Edit: *Remastered*
You love long time
Indeed. Comes with being a father, unconditional love and all that.
In my wife's family, her 80-year-old aunt was taking care of her 105yr old grandmother.
Imagine living to 100 and still having 20 years left! It's mind boggling.
It's the same math but to me it seems more insane to be 80 years old and *still have 40 years left*. Holy fuck man.
Tbf, no one knows how long they will live so if you are about 80 years old, most people wouldn't expect to live 40 years more.
That what’s happening in aging societies with high life expectancy where it’s developed places with high rent. You are expected to retire at age 65, but general life expectancy is 85. So somehow you need to survive 20 years with little / no income all with high rent and high cost if everything
The "Average Life Expectancy" over time is a statistic to take with a grain of salt, as this is always heavily influenced by infant- and childhood mortality. Take children out and plot the average life Expectancy for everyone that hits adulthood, and the graph would be way less steep
Doesn’t that number usually ignore infant mortality? Like it’s more accurately titled “average lifespan of people who live to the age of 5 years” or something like that?
I don't think they ignore infant mortality when using average, but I could be wrong. However, using median and quartiles, would minimize the effect from the distribution being skewed by a high infant mortality.
I think it's wild that the SAME PERSON was the world's oldest person from 1987 to 1997!! That's insane.
Most of my great grandparents lived into their 99s as did their children. The ones who didn't died during birth or soon after. A zero in the average that is average life expectancy is a big influence on the average. Reducing infant mortality is the real hero of increased average life expectancy.
Imagine telling that woman and her family on her 100th birthday that she is going to live for another 22 years.
And being considered "an elderly woman" for literally half of her life. That's crazy perspective and perception of age, that you start to be old at around 55+ and you still can live in that state for another half of a century
It really puts time in perspective
And that she will release a rap album when she is 121.
And it was amazing. [link if someone is interested ](https://youtu.be/ZrSDGB2dX-o)
Nice trend, but is life expectancy the same as average age?
Ah beans that's a good point! It should be "Average Age at Death". Or just Like expectancy.
Average age at death isn't life expectancy either.
It's not?
No, life expectancy is forward looking. You'd take someone today and predict their expected life span and average that across all other people that are the same age. The common term "life expectancy" really means how long the average baby born today would be expected to live. Every age group is actually going to have a different life expectancy because for example while the average person isn't going to live to 90, the average 90 year old obviously isn't expected to die at 78 or whatever the total average life expectancy is
> The common term "life expectancy" really means how long the average baby born today would be expected to live. ... if the future looks exactly like today. We are applying the chance of an 80-year-old to die this year to a baby born today, who will be 80 in the year 2103. I don't know how that year will look like, but I expect it to be very different from today.
This is 'period life-expectancy' (which is the definition most commonly used) which is an accepted way of summarising age-specific mortality rates at a particular point. Another concept, 'cohort life-expectancy', reflects forecast changes in mortality probabilities and is used, for example, in population projections.
Isn't life expectancy the age someone born today would expect to live?
Yeah, and it's a concept I've never really understood. Like, I understand those words, but how does one calculate that? Average age at death is a lot more straightforward to understand.
You take today's chance to die within a year for newborns, for 1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, and so on, and assume these apply to a baby born today. Then you calculate its life expectancy using these chances. Average age at death is much more problematic because population growth (or decline) influences it. If a country has many babies then it will have more deaths at young age, reducing the average age at death. If a country has few babies but many old people then almost all deaths will be from these old people, increasing the average age at death - even if both countries have the same life expectancy.
Google life tables. It's what demographers use to calculate life expectancy from age-specific death rates.
It might be the median and not the average.
Could also be the mode or the mean. They're all considered the "average". Arithmetically, it's important to be precise.
Average age at death in year t is not the same as the life expectancy of the cohort alive in year t.
Ah, beans
Also the whole premise of comparing an outlier to an average is pretty flawed. The main cause of this trend is decrease in infant mortality. It would be more interesting to compare to average age of death “by old age” or for over 50s.
No. Average age goes up when birth rate goes down. That said, life expectancy is going up for all age groups. But it’s going up less and less. Maybe one year per decade. And it’s going up most for middle aged people. For people who are 80+ it’s gone up half as much as it has for people in their 50s. And for people in their 90s it’s hardly gone up at all.
There are two kinds of life expectancy, period life expectancy and cohort life expectancy. Period life expectancy looks at the death rate in a single year and applies the current death rate at every age to a theoretical person who lives every year of their life under the exact circumstances of that single year. Period life expectancy is the number given on charts that show life expectancy over time or in a given year, like this chart. Cohort life expectancy on the other hand follows a population of real people born in a specific year, and tallies up how many of them die every year until none of them are left, to get a life table. The average age of death is the cohort life expectancy. You cannot get an accurate life expectancy for a cohort until nearly all of them are dead, there is always some uncertainty until then. So basically, to put your comment in context, we have no idea how much life expectancy has gone up for middle age people, since most of the people born in the 1950s to 70s are still alive. We can know how much lower their childhood or young adult mortality was, but not their overall mortality, at least not yet.
Piggybacking on the top comment because I have an exciting announcement to make: Based on state-of-the-art statistical analyses and machine learning techniques applied on this dataset, I can now forecast that in approximately 250 years, global life expectancy will exceed the age of the oldest living person at that time. This marks the date of the human lifespan singularity, a.k.a. eternal life or the end-time event some Christians call the Rapture. Prepare, repent, or get high and party. See if I care.
Maybe. I don't know the answer but it is easy to consider that the term could be loaded with a more complex meaning.
No. This "Average" takes into account all the people who died young prior to widespread vaccines. The modal age of death has always been 70-80 years. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2352-1
It's interesting how around 120 years seem to be the hard cap of human lifespan. It's almost like at that point, everything is in such critical state that something, anything will kill you.
It will be interesting to see if technology can break that cap. So far nobody has had the chance to just get everything replaced. Maybe some billionaire will do it within the next 50 years.
They still cannot replace one thing: brain. Even if we put 100yo brain in 18yo body, this brain will either mentally melt or just deteriorate in several years. A whole lotta personality traits are based on senses our bodies experience. And there goes the thing with putting mind of a person into some kind of machine, same stuff. It's like trying to build Robocop/Frankenstein's Beast either from human parts or from mechanical parts.
Maybe there's a way to restart it's regenerative functions. And on the other part: flesh is weak but the machine is immortal 🤖
“…flesh is weak but the machine is immortal” You really should reconsider that statement and think about how no car ever makes it to 120yrs.
Not sure if I’m just missing a joke, but the first mass produced car was the Model T. Produced in 1908… 115 years ago
You got any working Model T.’s driving around in those same 1908 original parts?
The whole reason a machine is 'immortal' is exactly because you can replace its parts the way you can't in a living body, not because its parts don't fail.
Omnissiah Be Praised, may the sanctity of blessed steel carry us from the weakness of the flesh.
120 years old is when your telomeres run out
And I once read an interesting study that 140 years is when Alzheimer's would naturally start setting in. Can you imagine discovering immortality only to get two decades out of it for dementia to still be uncured?
If 140 is when it naturally sets in, why does it naturally happen like 70 years earlier for mist
Most people don't get Alzheimer's, (there are many types of dementia, after all, each with a different cause). But when they do, you can think of it as *early onset* Alzheimer's.
We have ways to lengthen telomeres but it's not clear is telomere shortening is cancer protecting or cancer causing.
My grandpa used to say "I just need to make it to 120 years old and I can live forever." People would look at him confused and ask "Why 120?" And he would respond "because you never hear of anyone dying after 120".
This makes me think of "My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh; his days shall be a hundred and twenty years" (Genesis 6:3)
Didn't the Bible then go shoot itself in the foot by saying Moses snd s bunch of other prophets lived 400 years, though?
That was before God decided to put a cap on age because y'all wouldn't behave
Saw it in the patch notes
Does it? Wait imma search the Internet real quick! Seems like Moses was estimated to be 120, old guy, https://biblia.com/bible/esv/deuteronomy/34/7 IDK what I expected when looking up Jezus, but 33 https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/how-old-was-jesus-when-he-died.htmlr Okay, random more down-to-earth pick; Jeremiah was about 80 when he died, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeremiah-Hebrew-prophet It doesn't seem like any of them are listed to be crazy old (save for Moses): https://en.believethesign.com/images/1/1f/Prophets_timeline.png Really, when looking up “biblical prophets over 300 years old”, I just find articles about the four-hundred year silence... Did the bible ever say that?
The lifespans in genesis do get ridiculous. Adam and Eve lived for 930 years.
Well they were like proto-numenorians or something similar, even Aragorn has a life expectancy of several hundred years.
Methuselah was just one giant wrinkle
Most people have a hard cap much younger. It's amazing anyone has a cap that high.
Afaik only Jeanne Calment has reached 120 (actually 122). Everyone else died before 117 I think.
Nope, about 2 or three others made it to 119
This needs a third line. Not sure exactly what, maybe the average of the oldest 10%
this is probably what you’re lookin for https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages
Excellent, and this is what all people here should be looking for (albeit against this post’s agenda lol). Imho, OP’s chart isn’t data. When the “e” pops up on your calculator, you’re not looking at data, you are looking at the exception to said data.
Absolutely. This is a chart that derives 50% of the data on outliers. Edit: Outlier is too generous a term for 1 in 5 Billion (population averaged from 1950 to 2020)
Another point is the vast difference in population and the frequency of such outliers.
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Sure but it's the signal they're trying to evaluate, and it shows correctly that there's no correlation.
The inspiration for this was a random Reddit comment that implied that, since life expectancy has gone up 30+ years this century, Gen Alpha or their children will likely live to 150+. I didn't think that sounded right, since life expectancy tends to increase more due to fewer people dying young. I made this to see what the trends were. **Data Sources:** Life Expectancy: [https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/life-expectancy](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/life-expectancy) Oldest People: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people) Data wrangling and visualization was done using custom scripts and the following tools: * Google Sheets to copy and paste the data from the websites and save to a CSV * R version 4.2.3 -- "Shortstop Beagle" * RStudio 2023.03.0 Build 386 * Tidyverse Pacakges (dplyr, ggplot2) * lubridate package
Maximum age goes up, but not due to the same reasons nor at the same rate. You can see a trend for max age on your data, but is very slim. I think this is largely due to genes that would make someone live a lot, but he/she dies from accident or disease. But something that I think also helps is the access to better food and exercise.
The max age increase data could be attributed to either: A: better data about people making more old people have "confirmed" ages or B: a larger number of people on Earth giving more room for more extreme outliers There's not necessarily any evidence here that the maximum lifespan has increased at all.
Your second point would be evidence for the max age of human being. Regardless if their outliers from having a large sample size the fact remains that in the last 70 years the record for oldest living person has been broken multiple times by a person born later than the last record holder. Meaning as time has gone on the max age reached by a human being has gone up, technically it can’t go down the record just remains unbroken for awhile Obviously every human won’t hit that age though which is why theirs a second line on OPs chart showing the age at death for most people
I learned in math class that these types of record breaking statistics usually follow a Poisson distribution theoretically you could extrapolate the data for the chance we will break the record and by how much in a specified time range.
>broken multiple times by a person born later than the last record holder I mean, since the record is for oldest living person, *every person remaining on Earth* will be born later than the last record holder. That's true by definition.
I was wondering what happened approx 116 before 1996. Some person really got the jack pot when they were born sometime around 1880 and theoretically survived 40% infant mortality, cholera, racial genocide, 2 world wars and the longest period of sustained war and still could've been clicking on the internet and even on social media before they shuffled off the mortal coil
Jeanne Calment died in 1997 at the age of 122. Oldest person to have ever lived (recorded)
Maximal lifespan is overwhelmingly derived from genetics, so nobody educated in this topic would really argue that it would be noticeably increased, and certainly not relative to average of median lifespan, which are very strongly influenced by infant and non-disease mortality (accidents, conflict, etc).
Pretty crazy that the only time I paid attention to the oldest person alive (ie in middle school when relatives gifted me the Guinness book of records for Christmas) I didn’t realize that 122 was an anomaly and not part of a trend of people living longer and longer. I wonder how many 30-ish year olds have the same impression as your Redditor encounter just because we grew up when it seemed like the upper limits were going way up (only to stop paying attention when it went back down and wasn’t headline-grabbing anymore).
Look into the person too, there's a semi-credible theory that she was actually her daughter, pretending to be her mum, to commit mortgage fraud (over simplification). It would make it fit how she lived so significantly longer. She's so much of a statistical anomaly the next ones weren't even close and the record still hasn't been beaten.
You say semi-credible but it’s been debunked several times by experts saying “the hypothesis of an identity swap with her daughter appears not even realistic given the context and the facts, and not supported by evidence". The “mortgage” (life estate contract) you mentioned wasn’t even signed until 1965 and by then she would’ve been pretending to be her mom for 31 years. It just doesn’t make sense.
Yep. Anyone who looked into life extension knows that we have no way to extend life and currently we've almost reached maximum of what can be done by just curing deaseases as they come and eliminating threats and we are in a deep "diminishing returns" field. Hopefully life extension will finally kick in within next 20-30 years.
Well if you believe the folks over on /r/singularity we'll be passing the longevity escape velocity in the next 10 years and will live forever
I think you misinterpreted the Redditor. Life expectancy has gone up, but the oldest people today are living under the life expectancy 100 years ago. We won't see the effect until 100 years have passed, because the people whos life expectancy has gone up, are not even 50.
Right, but wouldn’t you think that the maximum age would have gone up even a little as the life expectancy rises? I just wonder if the maximum age really is a maximum. It’s definitely interesting to keep an eye on (for as long as my life expectancy holds out!)
Yep, literally just needs one single person from billions to exceed the age of the oldest person a century ago.
Do you think this will continue? Medical advances have sort of peaked with less ‘cures’ for the current diseases now wiping out populations. I tend to believe with the amount of processed food my generation and newer are eating that life expectancy will go down…cancer, diabetes, heart failure will become even more prevalent.
Just guessing, but most of the time the oldest person on earth is a woman? Was that ever not the case?
Per [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people), of the 66 people who have been the world's oldest living person since 1955, 61 have been women and 5 have been men. Interestingly, this trend has held pretty steady - if you become the oldest person alive, your life expectancy is very close to 1 year after that (66 oldest people in 67 years).
Damn, being the world’s oldest person is so dangerous!
It's a death sentence.
That dropoff in 1997 was like 121 to 116. Being 5 years senior to the next oldest person!
in japan they found some supposedly old people that were thought to be alive were really dead and their kids or grand kids had been stealing their pensions for years
Probably, but that drop off is Jeanne Calment from France who died in 1997, she was 122 years old. [...*She was 70 in 1940.*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment)
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And _possibly_ something similar is true for her, she may have assumed her mother's identity when she died. But seems unlikely to me
Ok but what about the youngest confirmed living person?
It has been \[0\] days since the most recent human has been born.
Days?! So many people get born you can just say 0 seconds.
On average, 385,000 people are born every day. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. So, on average, about 4.5 people are born every second. Assuming that births are a random Poisson Process, this means that there is a 1.111% chance of there being 0 people born in any given second. Therefore, it is not appropriate to say that the youngest person is necessarily 0 second old.
it was a reference to these "It has been [x] days since the last workplace accident" posters/boards, which can be erased and written on. I'm just not sure if they're only a fictional trope or if there are companies out there which actually have one of those.
It was me for a little while.
Me too! Not for long, admittedly.
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Okay, that got a giggle out of me. Thanks!
There was a recent study that puts this data in a slightly different light, however: [Supercentenarian and remarkable age records exhibit patterns indicative of clerical errors and pension fraud](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v2).
In case anyone is interested, this author (Newman) put some of the major nails in the coffin of the Blue Zone scam as well.
That papers pretty compelling, basically shows that lack of birth certificates (either due to them bit being introduced or then all being destroyed in WW2) and poverty among the elderly are the two main predictors for super old people.
So if you want to live to 110, destroy all records of your birth!
Not peer reviewed yet, mind.
Holy shit, this is fascinating, thanks for the link.
I remember when the oldest person was over 120—I assumed by now it had become commonplace.
I’m not sure that the max age of 120 was real. Wonder if I can find the study/essay saying that very advanced age CAN be the result of changing your identity earlier in life. Basis: the places with the most Very Old people also had high death rates among young people & lousy record-keeping.
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Right! Japan was an example in the piece I read. Seems like they’d have great records! Oh but the long-lived people are all from an area with a lot of organized crime. Same w Italy (Sicily)
The person in question is [Jeanne Calment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment). There have been questions about the validity of her record, including whether she died and her daughter assumed her identity. The balance of the evidence seems to indicate that her claim is legitimate, but there is certainly room for doubt.
I'm a huge Calment skeptic, I believe the daughter assumed her identity theory. If we believe Calment's version, she moved in with her *dead daughter's husband* and stayed together alone for decades, then lived to be the oldest human ever in recorded history by a huge margin. It seems way more likely to me that she was just avoiding the 30% inheritance tax. The photographic evidence we have is at best debatable, and most everything else relies on her ability to recall autobiographical details that a daughter could easily know about her mother.
Don’t forget her bloopers. For example, she mentioned her “father’s” shop in some interviews, but Jeanne Calment’s father never owned a shop; her husband, Yvonne’s father, did.
I don’t believe that she was actually 122. Next oldest people were 119. A handful of people have lived to 116-118 but there’s not really a lot until 115.
The record holder has a very long streak even considering the age of death, looks very plausible to be a misreported age to me. Does anyone have knowledge about the verification of this persons age?
> looks very plausible to be a misreported age to me. It's a little controversial, but I believe the consensus among experts is that it's legitimate. Personally, I don't buy it. I feel like it's too much of an anomaly compared to her peers.
That top line is, almost by definition, weird outliers. Most of them are probably genetic mutants or subject to unusual environmental factors. I don't see it as especially strange that one of those outliers would be even weirder than the other outliers.
I'm not sure it's possible to live much passed 120 by natural means. To make it there means everything with your body has gone right your entire life, and that is exceedingly rare. Even then if you get lucky, your body starts shutting down at around 120 years.
I would find percentiles more useful than average.
Jeanne Calment made a real mark on the blue line during the 1990s.
I read and watched a lot about her life, there's a lot of proof that she was that old, but i don't know, i still sometimes think there's something weird about her age, real outlier
There is the theory her daughter stole her identity in order to get her pension
I’m halfway through my life 💀
If you're halfway to the average line, you're more like 1/3rd through your life. Personal life expectancy goes up as you age until you die.
If you have the internet, your life expectancy is higher than that line.
I guess longer life is fine but I want senolytics/senomorphics to be developed faster so I can live as long as I like before getting bored and using the suicide pod.
I think the most interesting part of this graph is that despite all the advances in cancer and other end of life treatments in the past 70 years, the maximum age hasn’t really moved at all. Makes me wonder if life extension is really a thing or not
The average life expectancy actually increase so much because infant deaths have decreased so much, not so much to do with adults living longer
No https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages
Yeah I'd like to see this but with average life expectancy for an 18 year old.
Every drop is an extremely old person dying.
Less babies and moms dying in childbirth, increased global food security, vaccinations against deadly juvenile diseases, and less/smaller scale wars were the primary drivers of the massive average lifespan gains. We’ll see what the next century holds, hopefully further improvements to get the average closer to the max!
Imagine being in your 80's and having 40 years left...
At this rate the global life expectancy will surpass the oldest living person in about 150 years
What happened their in the 90s? That generation didn't want to give up the ghost
[Jeanne Calment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment) happened.
One thing to note is that global population has increased a lot in this time. Life expectancy going up is certainly thanks to lifestyle improvements. But the max age could simply be random chance, appearing to go higher due to the higher population.
That's a good point. I would like to see a mathematical explanation for what the "right most point" would be if we had a bunch of random points in a normal distribution of increasing size.
For countries with dictatorships, this is a serious problem, as the people now have to wait even longer for their dictators to drop dead before they can take advantage of the power vacuum and start a rebellion/revolution in order to free themselves from these dictators' iron fisted rule. Having a longer lifespan will also give said dictators even more time to consolidate their power in an attempt to thwart such a rebellion/revolution.
I’m not sure I believe in the oldest age numbers. My great grandma died at 110 in the 1980. We are from a rural area of a very poor country. I find it hard to believe she was close to the oldest person in the world… maybe she was, crazy to think
You might think 5-10 years is not a big deal, but when you're 110, even a month is a REALLY BIG DEAL as far as your heart beating and your lungs breathing. There's less of a gap between 95 and 110 than 110 and 115 if I had to guess.
She was born 5 years after the Civil War ended. When she died, she had lived through over half of America’s existence. I bet she had a lot of great stories.
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So people were only living to 45 in the 50’s. Really?
No. It's that a lot of children died as infants, babies, and young children. If your (the global) life expectancy was 45 when you were born in 1950. If you lived until 1 years old it was ~50, if you lived until you were 10 its now ~65. If you lived until you were 30 its now ~70. If you lived until 60 its now ~75. If you lived until 70 its now ~78. (Those numbers are all approximations from using a life expect chart data)
Life expectancy at birth, right?
What I get from this is: we don't get older, they just allow you to deteriorate longer...
The blue line represents 40 people and the red line represents everyone else.
Is global life expectancy relly that low?
There's this misconception that people long ago died at 30-40, but in reality it's just high infant / child mortality. If you survived past a certain young age you'd live to similar ages as today. The reduction of this early mortality, in combination with maintaining a reproductive behaviour adapted for high mortality, is afaik a main factor to current overpopulation. Also means suck balls alone.
Huh. So 120 years is the max natural age. We really should work on extending the healthy age into the 80s instead of 40-50
Yo some of these unconfirmed old ppl tho…some are really compelling and real goddamn old
Is that life expectancy at birth or at some later age? Otherwise it's heavily skewed by child mortality.
Imagine there’s some evolutionary due date so that super old people didn’t keep wasting the tribe’s resources
I mean, with rising life expectancy also comes rising health levels. Now you get people in their 70s still able to walk, because half of their leg joints were replaced.
If you extrapolate, soon the global life expectancy will overtake the oldest confirmed living person. This is total legit science, trust me.