Hey, your centenarian grandma may be a big deal in your family, but let’s face it, she’s not impressing Jean-Marie Robine. This guy is a demographer and longevity researcher, and he’s got 30,000 centenarians in his home country of France alone. Yeah, you heard that right, 30,000! That’s like the population of a small town. And if you add up all the centenarians around the world, you get 570,000 of ’em – that’s a whole Baltimore’s worth of extremely long-lived humans. So sorry, Grandma, having a cake with 100 candles just ain’t cutting it anymore.
But wait, there’s more! Robine is actually more interested in supercentenarians – those folks who live to 110 or beyond. He’s even helped validate the age of the oldest person who ever lived – a French lady named Jeanne Calment, who made it to the ripe old age of 122. Now that’s something to write home about! And Robine is collecting data on all kinds of super long-lived people to try and figure out if there’s an upper limit to human lifespan.
Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, I’ve read interviews with supercentenarians. They always have some secret to their longevity, right?” Wrong. According to Robine, we’re looking in all the wrong places. Sure, there are plenty of theories out there – kindness, no kids, nature, avoiding men (hey, can’t blame ’em), marriage, smoking, not smoking, whiskey, no alcohol – but the truth is, we need to look at super-long-lived people as a group, not just as individuals. It’s a statistical puzzle, and we need to figure out exactly how many people die at each age to see if there’s a limit to how long we can live.
But don’t worry; we’re not the first ones to try and crack this code. Back in the day, a British mathematician named Benjamin Gompertz did some calculations using birth and death records, and he found that after age 92, the risk of dying leveled off at 25% per year. Crazy, right? There might be no upper limit to human aging. So who knows, maybe one day we’ll all live to be 150 and partying like it’s 2099.
