How long did people used to live for? Back in the 1500’s, records show that life
expectancy in Europe was between 30 and 40 years old, and it stayed that way up to around
1800, according to evolutionary biologist Caleb Finch in his 2010 article published
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He also tells us that in ancient Greek and
Roman times it was as short as 20 to 35 years. Since the early 1800s, Finch writes that life
expectancy at birth has doubled in a period of only 10 or so generations. But after 1800 things improved with better
health care, sanitation, immunizations, access to cleaner water, and people also ate better. Today many people live past 100 years old. But have we reached the limit and seen the
oldest person we will ever see? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this
episode of The Infographics Show: Is The Human Max Age Is 122? Jeanne Louise Calment was a French supercentenarian,
who has the longest confirmed human lifespan of 122 years, 164 days. She was born on 21 February 1875 and passed
away on 4 August 1997. Living all of her life in Arles, a city on
the Rhône River in the Provence region of southern France, Calment outlived both her
daughter and grandson, and she became the oldest living person on 11 January 1988 when
she reached the ripe old age of 112. She was declared the oldest person ever on
17 October 1995 at 120, two years before she passed away. No one has ever passed her record-breaking
lifespan of 122 years on the planet. So how did Calment do it? Was it a freak anomaly or did she live in
a way that helped her carry on for so much longer than the average life? Clement did come from a family of relatively
long lifers, but nothing in comparison to her 100+ marathon. And though she lived a comfortable and stress-free
life, with a healthy appetite and a daily exercise routine, there was nothing particularly
special about Calment’s lifestyle. In fact from the age of 21 to 117 she smoked
cigarettes. According to Wikipedia, she smoked no more
than two cigarettes per day but it is not known whether she inhaled which could make
a difference to the affect on her heath. So maybe she was a one off. In a study published in October 2017, in the
journal Nature, Jan Vijg, a molecular geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
in New York, analyzed data on how long people have lived in recent decades across multiple
countries. They discovered that lifespan in many of the
countries had not changed much since the 1980’s leading them to conclude that humans may have
reached their maximum possible lifespan and that the plateau was about 115. However there was some controversy surrounding
this research and James Vaupel, a demographer at the Max Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography
of Aging in Denmark, commented, "I was outraged that Nature, a journal I highly respect, would
publish such a travesty."Vaupel argued that one of the databases lacked data for many
of the years they studied and that they analyzed maximum age at death in a year, rather than
maximum life span attained in a year. Siegfried Hekimi, a geneticist at McGill University
in Montreal, also concluded that there was no evidence that maximum human lifespan had
reached a peak, when he and his team analyzed trends in the life spans of the longest-living
people from the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Japan. When looking at each year since 1968, they
found that both maximum and average life spans might continue to increase a long way into
the foreseeable future. But even if that is the case, we only have
an example of one person who has lived past 120, so the odds are still very low. As our technology advances can we increase
the length of our lives? Scientists have managed to alter the DNA of
small species such as worms, mice, and flies to increase lifespan. And though it maybe possible, according to
James Vaupel, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, attempting
the same procedure with humans is still a long way off. And even then, we may only grab a few more
years. But during our research we found a solution
that may turn all of this on it’s head, and that takes us to the realm of artificial
intelligence, more commonly known as AI. There are some people out there, who believe
it will someday be possible to transfer a person’s consciousness into a new host body
or even into a robot body that could go on forever. In Altered Carbon, a recent Netflix series
where human consciousness has been digitized and the body no longer matters, one character
explains “You shed it like a snake sheds its skin.” But this is a TV sci-fi series and surely
can’t become reality? According to Randal Koene, a Neuroscientist
and founder of Carboncopies Foundation, mostly likely it can. Most scientists agree that everything about
our mind and conscious awareness comes about due to the operations carried out by the biological
machinery of the brain. So if we can understand those operations and
implement them elsewhere, then that new implementation will again produce the mind and conscious
awareness we know to be ourself. And there’s even a startup company who claim
to be working on this. Humai is an AI technology company and their
CEO, Josh Bocanegra, says his team will resurrect their first human within 30 years. Bocanegra explained in 2015 "We’re using
artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of conversational styles, behavioral
patterns, thought processes and information about how your body functions from the inside-out. This data will be coded into multiple sensor
technologies, which will be built into an artificial body with the brain of a deceased
human. Using cloning technology, we will restore
the brain as it matures." Can Humai really achieve this? After he made these statements there was a
lot of backlash online with established scientists saying that we are a long way from being able
to do this and it’s still only philosophized in conversations. So maybe Bocanegra is jumping the gun a little. Andrea Riposati, an artificial intelligence
expert formerly employed at Amazon, said Bocanegra’s plan is both a hoax and could be “a very
effective way to rob people.” There certainly seems to be a lot of debate
and opinion on this subject and though 122 is currently the maximum age, we are yet to
see if someone will live longer to tell the tale. Do you think we’ll live to be older in the
future and if so how old? Let us know in the comments! Also, be sure to check out our other video
Things Old People Say They Regret. Thanks for watching, and as always, please
don’t forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time!
