• Question: has a child already been born that will live to 150

    Asked by anon-210266 to Verity, Sergio, Nick, Maria, David, Annette on 5 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: David Whitworth

      David Whitworth answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      With the current rate of technological progress, knowledge of medicine, disease control and vaccines it could well have happened. Look at the difference between now and 150 years ago, 1869, where the life expectancy was around 40 years old for most people, where now in the UK woman have a life expectancy of 83 and men 79, but people have lived to 110. For some reason recently life expectancy in the UK has stopped increasing. To live a long life I would think about moving to Japan where the average life expectancy is 87 for women and 81 for men.

    • Photo: Maria Walach

      Maria Walach answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      There’s no way of knowing how long any one will live, so we can’t say if this has happened yet or not! We’ll only know once someone reaches the age of 150…

    • Photo: Annette Raffan

      Annette Raffan answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      So the oldest person now is thought to have been over 122 years old. It is entirely possible that someone who will live to 150 has already been born. We don’t yet know what the physical capacity of the human body is – I’ll use an analogy to explain. Usain Bolt holds the fastest 100m at 9.58 seconds. The next person to beat this will likely shave off a few milliseconds at most. Compare that to 100 years ago when it would have been thought impossible to reach 9.58s. The difference between the record in that time was probably a second or two. Basically the human body has limits and the closer we get to them the less and less difference there will be for the new record. Lets say that living to 122 is close to the limits of our body (due to things such as cell breakdown, effects of gravity etc.), that means we’ll be unlikely to live much longer. Or we could be nowhere near the upper limit and 150 could be easy to reach by today’s lifestyle. Perhaps you could look at the pattern of oldest people for each year starting from maybe 1900 and see how it increases as you get to 2019. You’ll probably find that the line gets less steep each year – leaps and bounds to begin with. Maybe you could predict it from that?

    • Photo: Sergio Adan Bermudez

      Sergio Adan Bermudez answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      As David said, with the current progression of life expectancy, the average number of years has incremented from around 80 to 90. However, with advances in medicine, in particular, the compatibility between synthetic organs, we could transplant the damaged ones and improve the life expectancy… who knows!

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