Studying people who live well beyond the age of 100 could reveal the secret to living longer, healthier lives. But the statistics tell another story. 📷: Getty Images
But statistics is a cruel science, and Gompertz knew that too. According to his data, the risk of dying at age 92 was so high that you would need an unthinkably large number of humans to reach that age before you found just one person who lived to 192. Three trillion humans, to be precise—30 times more. And yet Gompertz found himself hampered by his dataset. So few humans made it past the age of 90 that it was hard for him to really know what mortality rates were like at very advanced ages.
Modern demographers have picked up where Gompertz left off, sometimes with surprising results. In 2016 Jan Vijg and his colleagues at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York concluded that mortality rates past the age of 100 start to rise rapidly, putting a cap on human lifespan of. Two years later another group of demographers, this time led by Elisabetta Barbi at Sapienza University in Rome, came to the opposite conclusion.
If mortality rates really do plateau at a certain age, then extreme longevity is just a numbers game, Robine says. Say you had 10 people reach the age of 110, and the risk of any of them dying each subsequent year had plateaued at 50 percent. You’d expect five of them to reach the age of 111, two or three to reach 112, one or two of them to reach 113, just one to reach 114, and no one to make it to 115.
Japan, for instance, has more centenarians per capita than anywhere in the world, but in 2007 its Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfareon its centenarians—meaning one of the richest sources of super-long-lived people is no longer producing useful information. And in countries that produce good data, the process of validating and tracking down birth records that can date back to the early 19th century is still laborious and frustrating.
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