When do you think that the last living person ever to live in the nineteenth century will die? I was looking at this list of the world's oldest people and apparently there are 92 verified supercentenarians, people over the age of 110. Currently you only have to be over 109 and 13 days to have been born in the 19th century so I imagine that there are between 100-130 of those officially left. If you were going to guess when the last one would die to the day, when would it be? Bear in mind that the record age is 122 and a half years, but that appears to have been somewhat of a freak occurrence and the top 10 were mostly in their 117th year. Do you think any of the current 100-130 contenders will break the record?

I'd say it's not at all unlikely. Need info on circumstances of birth, life, current health and habits/circumstances (ie, smoking, drinking, living alone, mentally active, etc). Life expectancy in the West seems to continue to rise.

Its strange there's not a Soviet Georgian or Russian in the bunch. Guess I watched too many yogurt commercials.

Also no Chinese with their "eat noodles for long life and longevity" superstition. Lots of Japanese though maybe its the fish diet, miso and absence of pork...hmmm...they also walk...a lot more than the typical Westerner does.

All those Americans on the list...hard to believe...the U.S. must REALLY have some good medical care.

Probably a class thing. Be very surprised to see many non-whites from the US in there.

There is a class system in the US based on colour?


I would put money on 2 or more of the survivors breaking the current record.

Not as such, no. Just thinking that any ethnic minorities born around that time are liable to have been economically deprived. Could well be wrong, just rambling.

Quality thread. For your next thread, how about cutting to the chase and just generate a random number and ask us to guess what it is.

Darren Brown plays that game and gets paid for it. I would guess 616 but that may change between now and the question actually being put forward.

Sorry to abandon the thread. I was away from home for a couple of days. I asked this question to somebody in real life and they pointed out that actually the number of realistic last-nineteenth-century-people is much smaller than 130. My 130 estimate includes people who are currently well into their 110s who are virtually guaranteed not to be around to compete with those currently aged 109. The realistic list of candidates might be just around 50 or so. Someone above commented that I'm essentially asking for a random number in this thread by asking for a date, so choose a month. I think it's very unlikely that the last will die within 5 years as the 109ers would just be reaching the age of the current oldest. In 13 years time the current 109ers, if still alive, would break the record. The problem is that it's unlikely that any of those 109ers will break the record because they're a relatively small group, although the record could be broken by somebody older than them. I'll go with a middle point and say January 2018.

Bump thread. This is perhaps more interesting now. I checked the list of living supercentenarians and now there are officially only 56 people left alive who were born in the nineteenth century. There are another 14 who are pending acceptance to the list. I guessed 22 months ago that there were about 100-130 left. I had to make that guess because at the time there were a few people born in the nineteenth century who weren't supercentenarians yet, so they weren't available on the list. So in 22 months the number of them has roughly halved. Is 22 months going to be a reasonably accurate figure for the half-life of this group? I suspect it will get about 25% shorter with each half-life that passes. So I reckon that in another 17 months or so there should be about 35 left (including the pendings).

I think a few of the Japanese supercentanarians were found to have been dead for years, one of them still in his apartment. Unless you've already accounted for that, there were likely less to begin with.

where the hell have you been?

Oh yeah, I forgot about the Japanese! I don't actually know how many of them there were supposed to have been. I just tried searching for it in BBC news, but there are just a ton of items from a couple of years ago about Japan's record numbers of centenarians, how they achieved it, and what are they going to do about it? That does scupper the "half-life" theory a bit.

half-life... lol that's good

He wrote those comments almost two years ago....this is an old thread that got bumped up.

In ten years we will know if the record is broken. Bump the thread then. I would maybe guess that one will.

When did the 19th century end?

I'm pretty sure absolute outliers in life expectancy can not be used to speculate upon ways to live longer. Granted they prob dont smoke and drink like fish but we don't need these people to prove that those pastimes are -ev for livelong.

Quick aside as this is fantastic:

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

"had the longest confirmed human life span in history, living 122 years and 164 days (44,724 days total)."

"In 1965, aged 90 years and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died. Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death"

What about Moses... didn't that dude live to be like 500 or something. wtf.

kept living out of spite for lawyers, imo

This a little RGT.ish, but didn´t Metusalem live for 999 years? That´s an order of magnitude more than dudes nowadays.

haha good find

Bumpety-bump!

The list of verified living supercentenarians born in the 19th century now only contains 34 people, and there are 3 pending cases. About 13 months ago (when I last checked) there were 54 and 16 pending, so it has almost halved again in that time.

Anybody for any more predictions? (It is almost certainly only me that cares about this!) These supercentenarians seem to be dropping so quickly that I doubt any of those 34 (+3) will live to be 120.

Also, I wonder if, if you were in charge of investigating whether somebody on the pending list was legitimately as old as they say, would you bother doing any work on it? Or just wait for them to die and then the problem just goes away on its own?

How many live now will make it to the 23rd century? Do most people think 0? I would say that it'll be millions, but probably not in completely traditional form.