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Study Suggests There's No Limit On Longevity (smithsonianmag.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Smithsonian: The science of longevity is surprisingly controversial, mainly because there are so few people of extreme old age -- defined at 110 years or older -- around to study. So researchers look to statistics to try and figure out how long people can live. [Ben Guarino reports via The Washington Post] that in 1825, actuary Benjamin Gompertz put forth the idea that the odds of dying grow exponentially as we age. Further research bears that out. Between the age of 30 and 80, the odds of dying double every 8 years. What happens after that, however, is not completely figured out. According to a controversial study released in 2016, which analyzed data from 40 different countries, the average person could make it to 115 with the right genes and interventions, and a few genetic superstars would be able to make it to 125. But that was it, they argued. There was a wall of mortality that medicine and positive thinking simply cannot overcome.
But not everyone is convinced by that data. That's why for the new paper in the journal Science, researchers looked at the lifespans of 3,836 people in Italy who reached the age of 105 or older between 2009 and 2015, with their ages verified by birth certificates. What they found is that the Gompertz law goes a little haywire around the century mark. According to a press release, a 90 year old woman has a 15 percent chance of dying in the next year, and an estimated six years left to live. At age 95, the chance of dying per year jumps to 24 percent. At the age of 105, the chance of dying makes another leap to 50 percent. But then, surprisingly, it levels off, even past 110. In other words, at least statistically, each year some lucky person could flip the coin of life, and if it comes up heads every time, they could live beyond 115 or 125.
But not everyone is convinced by that data. That's why for the new paper in the journal Science, researchers looked at the lifespans of 3,836 people in Italy who reached the age of 105 or older between 2009 and 2015, with their ages verified by birth certificates. What they found is that the Gompertz law goes a little haywire around the century mark. According to a press release, a 90 year old woman has a 15 percent chance of dying in the next year, and an estimated six years left to live. At age 95, the chance of dying per year jumps to 24 percent. At the age of 105, the chance of dying makes another leap to 50 percent. But then, surprisingly, it levels off, even past 110. In other words, at least statistically, each year some lucky person could flip the coin of life, and if it comes up heads every time, they could live beyond 115 or 125.
Is that a consequence of biology or the result of a mathematical oddity arising as a result of so few people living that long and those who do being exceptional cases? The results seem somewhat counter-intuitive, so I'm inclined to think it's the latter case.
I'm more interested in seeing what the interventions that are currently available (and those that will become available over the next several decades) will do in the long run. Maybe they won't extend the total amount of time all that much, but if I can feel like I'm 40 when I'm 90, I won't complain too much if I still check out at 100.
Elisabetta Barbi, Francesco Lagona, Marco Marsili, James W. Vaupel, Kenneth W. Wachter.
These statisticians are 115 times more deluded than Pons and Fleischmann
... we could live on statistics, and not need things like... stem cells.
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Genesis 6:3
Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”
Ok, problem solved. Quick, some tell Elisabetta Barbi, Francesco Lagona, Marco Marsili, James W. Vaupel, and Kenneth W. Wachter! With all the free time they'll have now, maybe they can come up with a formula that explains why humans need sleep.
Maybe we're just really crap at looking after ourselves and each other.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
So a 50% chance of dying every year? Wow, that's just the comfort I needed on these long, cold, dark nights.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So far so good.
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
Oh PLEASE let Donald, Vlad, Kim, and all the other assholes die well before the cure for aging is rolled out.
Can you Imagine having those monsters around for all eternity?
You make a good point, but actually the sample is not 7 billions (we don't know when those currently alive will die) the sample is whatever number of billions of people who have died so far.
Jeanne Calment 122 years, 164 days -- beats your 115.
No, cancer is it's own thing - a cell-line that rebels against the body's constraints in favor of personal immortality. Healing in contrast requires cells to carefully integrate themselves into the existing lattice. And a core problem in that regard appears to be the formation of scar tissue, which "patches things up" quickly, but also prevents new cells from properly integrating.
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The submission suggests scientific controversy... but the philosophical controversy regarding whether this is actually something humans should strive for is probably a much bigger deal.
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Some tissues are very "cell dense." Dermal, brain, muscle, liver, spleen. They are composed of mostly living cells. Other tissues, bone, cartilage, connective tissues, are "intercellular matrix dense." Put a sample of these tissues under a microscope and you will see a few cells with a lot of 'non-living' tissue in between. This is one of the reasons a cut on the skin will close up in days or weeks, while a broken femur may take months to heal. More cells replicate at a faster rate, and also regrow the intercellular matrix at a faster rate.
So, biochemical methods to extend life currently focus on living cells. If, say, we help out telomeres, well, there are not telomeres in the intercellular material. We may end up with healthy skin, liver, and brain, but also arthritic joints, weak bones that spontaneously fracture, ligaments that rupture and tear. We may slow aging, but it may not slow equally in different tissues. Yes, other measures can be done to replace joints, etc. But we may end up like the horrific medical care trying to keep really old ladies pretty in Brazil (1985) film.
The above is wanton speculation on my part. Comments?
Even the proton may decay and yet someone actually write a paper (or at least a headline) that suggest no limit on longevity? As our effective mortality rate is a perfect 100% which means there is absolutely zero factual evident to suggest otherwise. Also just from reading the summary, their findings seem to actually indicate the chance of dying does not worse after a certain age but that does not imply no limit on longevity.
Imagine what a living hell immortality would be in the aeons leading up to the heat death of the universe, or the Big Rip, or whatever... and beyond.
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I'd like to read something where Trump was not the topic and was not mentioned. Let it fucking go already.
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The older I get the more fucked up things seem as I figure things out. The more fucked up things are the more I drink. Unless I can R&R my liver easily I can see my "best by" date.
Big thing today is the closing of the Toys-R-Us stores. Every talking head I heard said e-commerce killed them. Nobody mentioned how Mitt Romney, by way of Bain, did a leveraged buyout, sucked out all the cash, loaded it up with debt, then sold it to suckers.
I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like they had $500 million cash, $300 million debt. Bain bought them, stripped them of the assets, then sold them with something like $100 million cash and $5 billion in debt.
There is no way a company can survive that, Amazon/Walmart/Target had nothing to do with it.
What a weird line of thinking. Just because nobody has thrown head 64 times in a row (in a proper coin toss), doesn't mean that there is some fixed limit on the amount of times you can do it. With only 7 billion, or 10 billion, or 20 billion people the odds of someone reaching 130 are very small, but not impossible. You'd think people on /. would understand how quickly 1/2^n grows.
Argument from article is closer to "While we have little sample of people living over x years, that doesn't mean everything have to die by x years.
The sample is not 7 billion and multiple verified people has hit over 115. On top of what other replies already suggested, there have also been multiple claims of people from developing countries - especially many claims from remote and highland rural areas (which fits the current narrative of low stress, plenty of exercise and simple diet being conducive of longevity) - of people over 120.
While most claims either remain unverifiable or since debunked because of the sketchy record keeping in the 19th Century (in many places birth cert didn't even exist then, Carmelo Flores Laura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... being an example), there is a reasonably high chance that a small handful of the longevity claims are real but undocumented.
"Aging is genetic. You need to die for evolution to do its thing."
That's not exactly true. Death is needed only on steady populations (i.e.: on systems at their carrying capacity). Evolution is still capable of doing its thing without deaths as long as population is allowed to grow (i.e.: immortality plus space travel).
I'm more worried about the awful starting conditions than the growth rate. Who cares if he got the growth rate wrong if the starting conditions are orders of magnitude off?
7 billion people alive now, not already died, well that's a small error. But larger is the fact that most of those people do not even live in countries where there is enough civic continuity to be able to trust old documents; many people in the world do not even use the same calendar, or treat counting the years of life with the same seriousness. To a lot of people in the world, it is like asking a stranger their weight; they don't really think that you have some right to an exact literal answer, and they'd be surprised if you took the answer to be like that.
Or places like Italy, where there was a war big enough to destroy a lot of documents right around the time of the surprising numbers, and also a lot of people at that time lied about their ages to join the military... and then were still in the military after the war when they needed their documents re-created... and they probably didn't want to admit the lie in that situation. You don't just need the people to present an old-looking piece of paper, you need to have the right civic conditions, continuously, in order to trust the documents and compare them to each other directly.
My wife always answers off by 1 first, then sometimes corrects the answer, because where she is from the custom is to use the age the person will turn this year! So it doesn't matter when in the year a person's birthday is, everybody gets a year older when a new year starts. It took me a few years to figure that one out, too. I thought she was just being a pessimist!
And then, not every country makes an effort to record all the deaths. In a lot of places there is no special documentation of deaths unless there was a court case, and one of the parties had above-average wealth. At age 130, most people would have spent any retirement savings, and there wouldn't be any court cases after they died. The older the get, the less likely it becomes.
Furthermore, if Grandpa says, "I'm 135 this year," do people all around the world rush to call Guinness, or do they just assume he doesn't remember numbers very well anymore? These records seem premised on having a younger relative who knows your age, has access to your documentation, and also cares about records. Very few of the interviewed "oldest people" seem impressed by the interest, or credulous of actually having the record. Some of them even get a sly smile when they say, "Oh, am I that old?!"
Man I am really looking forward to living until 125, that just means I have to ahem save up TWICE than I make over the course of a 30 year career, to have a shot at supporting myself in my old age? Or become an unsustainable burden on an already bankrupt social security. Breed like rabbits in order to be supported by my kids like in a third world country? :)
WTF would you even DO with that much time, in your frail body full of pain. Have those scientists ever seen people grow old, suffer needlessly for decades and die?
I've buried nearly all my relatives, thank you very much, I would be very happy if people didn't live so long.
The oldest person to ever live was 122 years and 164 days. The 3rd oldest person to live recently died at age 117 years and 260 days. If half die each year, then less than 4% of the people who beat the current number 3 person would beat the current number 1 person. It could be quite a while before the all time record is broken again.
"Mortality is what keep us from living under Genghis Khan, Hitler or Pol Pot forever."
There two "kinds" of mortality: natural and violent. Even if we can avoid natural causes, nobody here is arguing to have a cure for a head chopped off so, bye, bye Hitler and Genghis Khan. Also given the violent traits of the lives of the ones like them, the longer they live, the most probably they find a wacky end (either violent or by letting them out of the healing procedures).
"Death grants us as a species to opportunity to renew and evolve."
Another argument could be that many of the problems we, as species and civilization, affront is because we die too soon and the ones that come after us repeat the same mistakes, since they are new for them. The most obvious may be war: how many (mainly male) teenagers either explicitly or implicitly see war as a romantic gest full of epic and worth of looking after (if only for the right causes) and then, how many veterans think the same (and even for those that still think that war is needed when it's needed, aren't the required standards set much, much higher?). It can be said that youngsters are naive and full of it and then, the elders that know better have lost the strength to be heard and/or make things happen they way they should. Maybe things would be different if that trend were reversed.
If you look at a conclusion that's medically ridiculous then rather than looking for a magic island of coin flips you should probably sanity check against other data. Here in Norway I looked it up and we have 66 people age 105 or older. Our currently oldest person is 108 years, 273 days at last update. If we were doing coin flips you'd expect 33 age 106, 16 age 107, 8 age 108, 4 age 109, 2 age 110, 1 age 111. The reality is we have 4 age 108, all the rest died at 105, 106 or 107 or in other words quite consistent with an exponential increase. Of course the odd exception does happen, last year our second oldest person ever died at 112 but she was probably one in a million.
The main reason I doubt people even with official papers is that as late as the 90s a classmate of mine was issued an incorrect passport, it was still being typed by hand and listed him as two years older than he actually was. Guess who got to buy beer and booze early? Now that wasn't the master data so the extra years "disappeared" at the next renewal but just because something is written and stamped as an official record doesn't make it correct. And being able to retire a few years early and claim senior citizen discounts on everything is a pretty big benefit, there's little doubt in my mind that this happens in systems that allow it. And things were a little different 100+ years ago...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Talking about big numbers, the study in it's entirety is shallow thinking insanity. First question, are you alive or are your cells alive because suck it up folks, you are born, live and die, every single day of your life, part of you is dying and part of you is being reborn. To live in reality is to die continuously, it's just that the dying catches up and overtakes the being reborn. To go beyond cellular existence is to extend quantum conscious existence, where you cells share a quantum field state that defines the conscious you, keeps those billions of cells juggling a shared existence, as they are born, live and die.
Sometime things are never as clear as they seem. For example to control your emotions, it is always assumed that you limit them, why, from my understanding to control my emotions is to choose the ones I wish to feel and express and generally promote a sound physiological state to live pleasantly. A freeman is a slave to nothing and no on, not even their own emotions or life. Control your emotions, why wouldn't make yourself feel happy and content, why would you choose to feel nothing or let others control your emotions for you.
Do you already live forever, just a matter of relative time as a fraction of infinite space and time?
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
"the research looks to statistics"... It seems these people do not know how to do statistics, like at all. They would just need to count the people 150 years old and older and they would immediately see a sample size of zero. That passes basically any sane test for the statement "there is a hard upper bound to ageing".
OI don't know why otherwise sane and smart people lose it completely when it comes to aging. Yes, you will grow older and yes, you will die it it will probably be long before reaching 110 years. So what? Deal with it. That is how things are set up this life. Using fake mathematics will not help, but will waste some of the time you have.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Right... Because there's all those rich people living to 150.....
Delusional leftie.....
Quality of life.
"alive" means what in this context? Heart still beating? Is the mind still there? Is the life active? Are you in pain? Will you look like a shriveled yoda?
Full regeneration is what you're going to want... and for real immortality you're going to need neural backup and replication.
Imagine living to 125 in increasing pain and decreasing mobility.
Yay.
Side effects include suicidal thoughts.
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Almost all of them will die before age of 100, heck a large part of them will die before age of 40. If a person is at good health at age 100+ yes they have a good chance of making few more years, but what's the chance of making to 100 at good health in the first place? Pretty lousy. Are you fat? Not going to make it. Do you drink, smoke or do drugs too much? Not going to make it. Are you poor? Not going to make it. Are you unlucky when crossing the road? Not going to make it. Even if you live a perfect life, you are more likely to get cancer than to make it to 100+ and then you are not going to make it. Attrition rate in life is pretty bad and aging makes it much worse, organ functions decline, mass loss in bones and muscles, including heart, nervous system damage piles up, probability of cancer goes up etc, etc. Nobody dies of old age as such, but longer you live, more likely you are to face something fatal, or have lesser problems sum up to fatality. Eventually the survival rate drops to zero. 7 billion or not, exponent catches up to any sample size pretty fast. If you manage to bypass all the early deaths, then yes, actual limit is probably much further than ~120 years, but there is a definite biological limit on a cellular level. Aging does eventually kill off cellular division, that's a known fact from shorter lived species. This limit is harder to find in humans, keeping aging tissue samples in petri dishes for over a century is a pretty tough challenge.
The cynic in me tells me that if a cure for age was rolled out, it would be first and foremost used by those rich , and thus dictators included, before it hits the general public. And that would be the last generation of human : earth could not sustain eternal people.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Sounds interesting but try to flip a coin and get the same side 10 times in a row. Whoops. You're dead.
It's not like Vegas where you can put it all on black, double your money and walk away.
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Statistics do not dictate how things work in the same way that the bernoulli equation doesn't dictate how gas flows... it just observes it and can predict it mathematically to some degree of accuracy. This kind of idiocy is like looking at moores law saying "it's exponential, chips improve to infinity" without attempting to look at the underlying mechanisms.
No one has lived their lives in careful isolation from anything that might harm them and taken perfect care of their health and won the genetic lottery.
That's the real issue with old age. Stuff starts to break, damage accumulates, eventually something fails.
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The sample is rather larger than 7 billion, since it includes not just the people alive now, but the people who lived in the 20th century who are no longer alive. Probably closer to 15 billion than to 7.
And someone may have lived past 115 that we just missed. Say, some Buddhist Monk born in the 19th century, no birth certificate, no record of his death....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I assume what they mean by excessive healing is that more DNA replication leads to more transcription errors and a higher risk of cancer. If they didn't, I guess they're just wrong.
Telemeres disagree.
It doesn't include all the people alive now, just those that are over 115 years old, which is probably less than a hundred. It also doesn't include everyone who has died in the 20th Century, just those whose birthdays are known and reliably recorded. That's most people in the developed world, but not all of them.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It might not be "outside the laws of physics" impossible, but that doesn't mean it's not still impossible for all practical purposes.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'd say all evidence shows there is a hard limit on human life, and reaching 124 years is utterly impossible. Prove me wrong. You can't.
IIRC there was an earlier study of someone who had reached the age of 125 and they were down to one variation in immunological stem cell. This would seem to imply that if you want to live much past that, you acquire bubble-boy syndrome.
OTOH, it's true that this was a study of just one individual of that age. And possibly it would be possible to build new immuno stem cells from rejuvenated skin cells. Etc. So they may be ways around it. But at first glance it looks as if there is an inherent lifespan limit unless you tinker with it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I am more interested in that. Does the article mentions Australian centigenarian traveling to Zurich to commit assisted suicide?
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If humans lived long enough, they would all eventually develop cancer. This is because of inherent limits in the DNA repair mechanisms.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/1...
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