Originally published 2021-10-02.
A modeled possibility is not a promise
The research concerns the tail of a lifespan distribution. It does not establish that a particular person will reach 130 or that doing so will become common within the century.
A new study published by the Royal Society Open Science journal demonstrates how humans could live up to at least 130 years.
Among the findings of the study, researchers discovered that after a certain point, the surviving/dying chance stabilises at a 50/50. The hypothesis is that newly advanced medicine could potentially grant increasingly long lifespans.
Lead researcher and professor of statistics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Anthony Davison, told Agence France-Presse:
"Beyond age 110 one can think of living another year as being almost like flipping a fair coin. If it comes up heads, then you live to your next birthday, and if not, then you will die at some point within the next year," he added.
In order to reach their conclusion, the researchers had to implement existing analyses to extrapolate data. However, their modelling leaves open the possibility of such ages; it does not guarantee an observed 130-year lifespan within this century.
Davison told AFP:
"We were able to show that if a limit below 130 years exists, we should have been able to detect it by now using the data now available."
He adds:
"But in the absence of major medical and social advances, ages much over this are highly unlikely ever to be observed."
[h/t: Futurism]
A yearly survival probability compounds over many years
The study’s coin-toss comparison concerns survival for another year at very advanced ages. Surviving a long sequence of years is a different probability from surviving just one. That distinction helps explain how a statistical model can leave an age possible while making it extremely unlikely for any one person. The authors’ comments describe limits of inference from the available data, not a demonstrated medical intervention that extends life to 130.
What the paper found
The study, “Human mortality at extreme age” by Belzile, Davison, Rootzén and Zholud, appeared in Royal Society Open Science (volume 8, issue 9) in 2021. It analysed the mortality of Italian and French semi-supercentenarians using extreme value statistics, survival analysis and computer-intensive methods, taking account of how the people in the data were sampled. The authors found that a constant risk of death beyond age 108 described the data well, with no evidence of differences between countries or birth cohorts, which agrees with an earlier analysis of the International Database on Longevity. Their power calculations made it implausible that there is an upper limit to lifespan below 130 years; any physical limit, they concluded, is likely to be so high that it is unlikely to be approached. After 108, survival did not differ between women and men in the Italian data or the international database, but it was lower for men in the French data.
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