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Medicine Science

Why People Don't Live Past 114 916

kkleiner writes "Average life expectancy has nearly doubled in developed countries over the 20th century. But a puzzling part to the equation has emerged. While humans are in fact living longer lives on average, the oldest age that the oldest people reach seems to be stubbornly and oddly precisely cemented right at 114. What will it take for humans to live beyond this limit?"
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Why People Don't Live Past 114

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  • Genesis 6:3 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:50AM (#39058751)

    And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:51AM (#39058771)

    No, I didn't read the article. It really doesn't matter. 114 is not some magic barrier.

    • by boef ( 452862 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:06AM (#39058987)
      TFA does not state you get suddenly croak when you hit 114.. That number is more when the odds change.. and the question is why.
      quote:
      “the odds of a person dying in any given year between the ages of 110 and 113 appear to be about one in two. But by age 114, the chances jump to more like two in three.”
      • by neyla ( 2455118 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:49AM (#39059601)

        Yeah. "more like", and the statistical data are tiny, given that the population of people above say 112, is *tiny*.

        It makes sense that the odds of living another year, dwindle with mounting age. A 10-year old in the first world has more than 99.9% chance of turning 11, but the same cannot be said about a 110 year olds chances of living to 111.

        The question is if there's a "knee" in the curve around 114. Maybe, but I don't think we've even got enough data to say for sure.

        That the curve is squarer makes sense; it just means it's (on the average) easier to prevent young people from dying, than it is to prevent old people from dying. It's easier to come up with some treatment that'll make a person who'd otherwise die at 30 live for 4-5 more decades, than it is to do the same for a person who is 80 to begin with.

        That's because there's *many* things it's "normal" to die of at 80, and *few* (relatively speaking) at 30. Thus if you've got (say) HIV and are 30, *only* removing HIV (not that we can), would add decades to your life-expectancy.

        But if you remove HIV from a 80-year-old, you're left with "something else will still probably kill him soon".

        It's nothing magic, and the same for cars. If a single thing is broken in an otherwise new and good car, odds are that fixing that single thing will make the car work for a significant period. Fix the single thing that stops a old-and-worn-down car from working, and odds are *another* problem will show up in short order.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @11:29AM (#39061465) Homepage

          The question is if there's a "knee" in the curve around 114. Maybe, but I don't think we've even got enough data to say for sure.

          More like a crunch where it all really collapses. I have some mortality data [www.ssb.no] from Norway here, "Dødssannsynlighet for alder x" = "Death probability at age x" in parts of 1000, "Begge kjønn" = "Both sexes". Already around 98 years it's up to over 30% per year but it doesn't continue the collapse, it stays in the 30-40% range up until 105 in this table and as I understood it up to 114. Of course with only 60-70% surviving each year the chance of living from 98 to 114 is 0.65^16 = 0.1%, but right now 114 looks very close to a cutoff. That perhaps now it's an additional cause of death, not just the sum of everything that's affected "younger" hundred and something year olds.

      • by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @12:38PM (#39062449)

        2/3 / 1/2 = 4/3 = 1/3 increase.

        I think we can safely attribute the 33% increase in the chance of dying this year to:

        1) The fact that the sample size is so low. Not very many 114 year olds to run data on, and many of them aren't actually 114. A lot of people that old don't have a reliable record of their birth.

        2) The fact that they're 114 fucking years old.

  • by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:52AM (#39058791)
    This has been noticed before. Here [slate.com] is another article on it.
  • by characterZer0 ( 138196 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:53AM (#39058803)
    • by dredwerker ( 757816 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:56AM (#39058843)

      You would have a job doing that as she is dead. :)

  • by Rooked_One ( 591287 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:54AM (#39058809) Journal
    is 42. And 114 is 42 backwards if you add the 1's together. The opposite of life is death - metaphysically speaking of course.

    Look a bunny!

    what?
  • Time travel (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:57AM (#39058859)
    From TFA:

    A person born in the US at the turn of the 20th century could expect to live 49.2 years. Their ancestor born in 2003 could reasonably expect to see their 77th birthday.

    The emphasis is mine.

  • by zarlino ( 985890 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:58AM (#39058881) Homepage

    Even if medicine could keep me alive that long, I'd rather just live a normal lifespan and make space for my sons.

  • Obviously... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geogob ( 569250 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:59AM (#39058891)

    ...God plays with the same modus operandi than most corporations built to his image; It simply planned obsolescence.

    • by dunkelfalke ( 91624 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @11:05AM (#39061009)

      Yes, because god used a shareware version of Genome Creator.

    • Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tom ( 822 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @11:16AM (#39061227) Homepage Journal

      Aside from the god joke, you are right on the money.

      Living organisms haven't evolved to survive very long. Passing on your genes to a couple new specimen has turned out to be the superior strategy. Obviously, since eternal life is pretty much the end of evolution in organisms that don't do runtime-mutations very well.

      Shapeshifters are about the only imaginable species where eternal life could evolve, and even there I'd say the odds are stacked against the trait for reasons of risk-spread.

  • A statistical blimp (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bjourne ( 1034822 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:00AM (#39058911) Homepage Journal
    Here's the gist of the article, and also an explanation of why it isn't really interesting at all:

    “This is a fascinating phenomenon and nobody has really much idea of what’s going on. What we do know is that it’s absolutely essential to not jump to conclusions about what’s going on. Time and time again over the decades past demographers have been brutally misled by short-term phenomena, by statistics gathered only over a few years. Blips happen for all manner of impenetrable reasons. In this case we’re talking about people born in a small segment of time, around 1900, and most of them born in particular countries and going through certain types of life they might not have gone through had they been born 20 years previously or 20 years later. There are many factors called ‘cohort effects’ that can cause early life phenomena to have an influence on longevity.” Bottom line: don’t believe the hype.

  • by slidersv ( 972720 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:02AM (#39058939) Journal
    ...to live beyond that limit? Cryogenic freezing, I guess. But seriously, the problem is not the ability, but purpose. It's one thing to be able to survive into 100+, and completely another to enjoy your time on this planet. If you survive for 150 years, but enjoy the first 50 and suffer for the next 100, that sounds more like a Doom episode: Hell on Earth. All people are measuring when it comes to age is heart beating. But what they should be focusing on are different questions. Like: "do you enjoy getting up in the morning?" "how fast can you read?" "and write?" "do you hear me well enough?" "can you describe me what you see outside the window?" Can people over 80 on this forum add to this discussion, if they are interested to live another 34 years, until the "current limit" of 114?
    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:42AM (#39059483)

      Personally, I would happily be immortal.
      To want to die is insanely stupid IMHO.

      As for suffering, I suffer every day. I'd still rather live forever suffering those pains, than die.

      Even the sort of fairy-tale immortal where I cannot die. Even if I were sucked in to a blackhole and left there for millions of years till it evaporated, I'd still rather exist than UNexist. To become infinitely nothing, lesser even, is the most frightening thing in existence.

  • Oblig. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:03AM (#39058951) Journal

    Tyrell: The facts of life... to make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
    Batty: Why not?
    Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutation give rise to revertant colonies, like rats leaving a sinking ship; then the ship... sinks.
    Batty: What about EMS-3 recombination?
    Tyrell: We've already tried it - ethyl, methane, sulfinate as an alkylating agent and potent mutagen; it created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before it even left the table.
    Batty: Then a repressor protein, that would block the operating cells.
    Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication; but it does give rise to an error in replication, so that the newly formed DNA strand carries with it a mutation - and you've got a virus again... but this, all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
    Batty: But not to last.

  • by Senior Frac ( 110715 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:06AM (#39058983) Homepage
    I'm betting there is some warranty clause that kicks in at 115.
  • by concealment ( 2447304 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:07AM (#39059001) Homepage Journal

    No one likes the idea of dying, but I think we might be less traumatized by it if we felt our time on earth meant something. Let's face it, working a McJob, fighting with an unfaithful spouse, buying lots of crap on Amazon.com and cheering for corporate football teams just doesn't make us "feel alive."

  • Heart rate (Score:5, Funny)

    by ewrong ( 1053160 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:20AM (#39059135)

    Well according to this post http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/02/15/2338229/scientists-study-how-little-exercise-you-need?utm_source=feedburnerGoogle+UK&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+(Slashdot)&utm_content=Google+UK [slashdot.org] earlier today. A person's maximum heart rate can be calculated: "very roughly, by subtracting our age from 220".

    From these two 'facts' that I have learnt today I conclude that once your maximum heart rate drops to 106 - you die.

  • by advid.net ( 595837 ) <slashdot@@@advid...net> on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:29AM (#39059271) Journal

    Simple: the Matrix has a 4 Yotta bytes limitation for any human memory.

    Each lived day stores 150 Peta bytes of sense information in short term memory, which quickly decays in 100 Peta bytes for long term memory (of lot of which is kept for dreams and feelings, only 3% is used by conscience simulation).

    This storage limit translates into 114,9 years of life simulation.

  • Epiphenomena (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nfk ( 570056 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:31AM (#39059293)

    I haven't read the article (shock), so I'm not arguing with those who say this isn't interesting, but it reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter in GEB:

    "I was talking one day with two systems programmers for the computer I was using. They mentioned that the operating system seemed to be able to handle up to about thirty-five users with great comfort, but at about thirty-five users or so, the response time all of a sudden shot up, getting so slow that you might as well log off and go home and wait until later. Jokingly I said, "Well, that's simple to fix -- just find the place in the operating system where the number '35' is stored, and change it to '60'!" Everyone laughed. The point is, of course, that there is no such place. Where, then, does the critical number -- 35 users -- come from? The answer is: It is a visible consequence of the overall system organization -- an "epiphenomenon".

    Similarly, you might ask about a sprinter, "Where is the '9.3' stored, that makes him be able to run 100 yards in 9.3 seconds?" Obviously, it is not stored anywhere. His time is a result of how he is built, what his reaction time is, a million factors all interacting when he runs. The time is quite reproducible, but it is not stored in his body anywhere. It is spread around among all the cells of his body and only manifests itself in the act of the sprint itself.

    Epiphenomena abound. In the game of "Go", there is the feature that "two eyes live". It is not built into the rules, but it is a consequence of the rules. In the human brain, there is gullibility. How gullible are you? Is your gullibility located in some "gullibility center" in your brain? Could a neurosurgeon reach in and perform some delicate operation to lower your gullibility, otherwise leaving you alone? If you believe this, you are pretty gullible, and should perhaps consider such an operation".

  • by lazlo ( 15906 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:58AM (#39059771) Homepage

    I'd say the answer here is fairly simple, we haven't put much effort into keeping 100+ year olds alive, relative to the amount of effort to keep, for instance, 5 year olds alive. As I understand it, a huge amount of the gains in average life length have come from squeezing the bottom of the graph, not extending the top of it. Here's an interesting, though somewhat morbid, exercise. Go to a very old graveyard and look at the stones on the family plots. You'll often see a family with 12 children, half of whom died in childhood, and the other half lived to their 90's. So in that family the average life length was around 50, but that doesn't mean that a 50 year old should be looking for the grim reaper around the corner, quite the opposite in fact. As I understand it, the life expectancy of a 25-year old has been fairly stable for a fairly long time. Once you've survived the fragility of youth and the stupidity of adolescence, the following decades are a cake-walk, morbidity-wise.

  • by Arrepiadd ( 688829 ) on Thursday February 16, 2012 @11:17AM (#39061245)

    Wikipedia has a list of the oldest people in the world. [wikipedia.org]. 27 of them got older than 114 (only three of them disputed) and one of them is still alive.

    So... "nothing to see here, move along..."

Things are not as simple as they seems at first. - Edward Thorp

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