For [researcher Jean-Marie] Robine, each supercentenarian is a crucial datapoint in the quest to answer a big question: Is there an upper limit to the human lifespan? “There are still many things we don’t know. And we hate that,” says Robine.
His style is to step back, take a look at how many supercentenarians there have been, and figure out when they lived and died. The limits of human longevity won’t be found by looking at individuals, he believes, but by examining super-long-lived people collectively. It’s a statistical puzzle: to crack it, you need to know exactly how many people died at age 111, 112, 113, and so on, to work out the likelihood that a supercentenarian won’t make it to their next birthday.
Robine’s friend Jay Olshansky, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a different take on the matter. “Whether mortality rates plateau or whether they continue to rise is probably completely irrelevant,” says Olshansky. The sheer fact that it’s hard to generate reliable death rates past the age of 110 tells us everything we need to know about the upper limit on human longevity, he says—the fact there are so few supercentenarians tells us we’ve already reached the upper limit to human longevity.
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