How long did people used to live for?
Back in the 1500’s, records show that life expectancy in Europe was between 30 and 40
years old, and it stayed that way up to around 1800, according to evolutionary biologist
Caleb Finch in his 2010 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences.
He also tells us that in ancient Greek and Roman times it was as short as 20 to 35 years.
Since the early 1800s, Finch writes that life expectancy at birth has doubled in a period
of only 10 or so generations.
But after 1800 things improved with better health care, sanitation, immunizations, access
to cleaner water, and people also ate better.
Today many people live past 100 years old.
But have we reached the limit and seen the oldest person we will ever see?
That’s what we’ll be looking at in this episode of The Infographics Show: Is The Human
Max Age Is 122?
Jeanne Louise Calment was a French supercentenarian, who has the longest confirmed human lifespan
of 122 years, 164 days.
She was born on 21 February 1875 and passed away on 4 August 1997.
Living all of her life in Arles, a city on the Rhône River in the Provence region of
southern France, Calment outlived both her daughter and grandson, and she became the
oldest living person on 11 January 1988 when she reached the ripe old age of 112.
She was declared the oldest person ever on 17 October 1995 at 120, two years before she
passed away.
No one has ever passed her record-breaking lifespan of 122 years on the planet.
So how did Calment do it?
Was it a freak anomaly or did she live in a way that helped her carry on for so much
longer than the average life?
Clement did come from a family of relatively long lifers, but nothing in comparison to
her 100+ marathon.
And though she lived a comfortable and stress-free life, with a healthy appetite and a daily
exercise routine, there was nothing particularly special about Calment’s lifestyle.
In fact from the age of 21 to 117 she smoked cigarettes.
According to Wikipedia, she smoked no more than two cigarettes per day but it is not
known whether she inhaled which could make a difference to the affect on her heath.
So maybe she was a one off.
In a study published in October 2017, in the journal Nature, Jan Vijg, a molecular geneticist
at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, analyzed data on how long people
have lived in recent decades across multiple countries.
They discovered that lifespan in many of the countries had not changed much since the 1980’s
leading them to conclude that humans may have reached their maximum possible lifespan and
that the plateau was about 115.
However there was some controversy surrounding this research and James Vaupel, a demographer
at the Max Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging in Denmark, commented, "I was outraged
that Nature, a journal I highly respect, would publish such a travesty."Vaupel argued that
one of the databases lacked data for many of the years they studied and that they analyzed
maximum age at death in a year, rather than maximum life span attained in a year.
Siegfried Hekimi, a geneticist at McGill University in Montreal, also concluded that there was
no evidence that maximum human lifespan had reached a peak, when he and his team analyzed
trends in the life spans of the longest-living people from the United States, the United
Kingdom, France and Japan.
When looking at each year since 1968, they found that both maximum and average life spans
might continue to increase a long way into the foreseeable future.
But even if that is the case, we only have an example of one person who has lived past
120, so the odds are still very low.
As our technology advances can we increase the length of our lives?
Scientists have managed to alter the DNA of small species such as worms, mice, and flies
to increase lifespan.
And though it maybe possible, according to James Vaupel, the director of the Max Planck
Institute for Demographic Research, attempting the same procedure with humans is still a
long way off.
And even then, we may only grab a few more years.
But during our research we found a solution that may turn all of this on it’s head,
and that takes us to the realm of artificial intelligence, more commonly known as AI.
There are some people out there, who believe it will someday be possible to transfer a
person’s consciousness into a new host body or even into a robot body that could go on
forever.
In Altered Carbon, a recent Netflix series where human consciousness has been digitized
and the body no longer matters, one character explains “You shed it like a snake sheds
its skin.”
But this is a TV sci-fi series and surely can’t become reality?
According to Randal Koene, a Neuroscientist and founder of Carboncopies Foundation, mostly
likely it can.
Most scientists agree that everything about our mind and conscious awareness comes about
due to the operations carried out by the biological machinery of the brain.
So if we can understand those operations and implement them elsewhere, then that new implementation
will again produce the mind and conscious awareness we know to be ourself.
And there’s even a startup company who claim to be working on this.
Humai is an AI technology company and their CEO, Josh Bocanegra, says his team will resurrect
their first human within 30 years.
Bocanegra explained in 2015 "We’re using artificial intelligence and nanotechnology
to store data of conversational styles, behavioral patterns, thought processes and information
about how your body functions from the inside-out.
This data will be coded into multiple sensor technologies, which will be built into an
artificial body with the brain of a deceased human.
Using cloning technology, we will restore the brain as it matures."
Can Humai really achieve this?
After he made these statements there was a lot of backlash online with established scientists
saying that we are a long way from being able to do this and it’s still only philosophized
in conversations.
So maybe Bocanegra is jumping the gun a little.
Andrea Riposati, an artificial intelligence expert formerly employed at Amazon, said Bocanegra’s
plan is both a hoax and could be “a very effective way to rob people.”
There certainly seems to be a lot of debate and opinion on this subject and though 122
is currently the maximum age, we are yet to see if someone will live longer to tell the
tale.
Do you think we’ll live to be older in the future and if so how old?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video Things Old People Say They Regret.
Thanks for watching, and as always, please don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time!