On June 20, 1785, a farmer named Eilif Philipsen died in his hometown of Kinsarvik, Norway – an unremarkable event except that Philipsen was the first documented human centenarian, dying one day short of 103 years.
While Philipsen was something of an anomaly in his lifetime, his achievement has been duplicated so often in the last half-century that living to age 100 and beyond now is almost considered routine.
In the near future, the number of centenarians is not only expected to reach new levels, but human life expectancies could soon push our long-standing limits of longevity into realms previously reserved for science fiction and the biblical book of Genesis.
“The number of people living to be centenarians is expected to quadruple in the next 30 years,” said Matthew Lohman, Ph.D., associate professor specializing in epidemiology, biostatistics and gerontology with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. “But it is hard to say how far we could go beyond 100 years because at this point, the nature of our human age limit is still not clear.”
For example, according to a 2005 working paper by Brown University researcher
Oded Galor and Reichman University economics professor Omer Moav titled “Natural Selection and the Evolution of Life Expectancy,” the chances of someone living to their mid-40s during the last part of the Iron Age around 600 B.C. was slim at best.
Not much had changed by the early Middle Ages, the Black Death in the mid-1300s or even as late as the beginning of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.
Causes for shorter life spans were simple and straightforward: heredity, high infant mortality rates, prevalence of wars, infection from tooth decay and injury and all forms of illness such as cancer, smallpox, pneumonia and blood contaminations with nothing to fight them.
In the last 100 years, lifestyle choices have also played a part in limited life expectancies, such as smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and recreational use of drugs and narcotics.
There are also residuals that include accidents, crashes, animal attacks, violent crime, plus individual intangibles, such as broken hearts and low thresholds of coping with emotional grief.
Despite all of nature’s weapons to keep human life to a minimum in the last 300,000 years, people are living longer now in greater numbers than ever before.
In a 2024 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, researchers estimated the number of U.S. seniors 65 and older at 57.8 million and counting – more than 1 in every six Americans.
The number of people 85 years and older is expected to nearly double by 2035, from 6.5 million to 11.8 million – and nearly triple by 2060 to 19 million.
Additionally, the U.S. Census Bureau is projecting older adults to outnumber children by the year 2034 for the first time in U.S. history – meaning that the already large number of octogenarians and above is only going to keep increasing.
Some researchers with the National Institute on Aging say the 85+ group will grow even faster than current expectations because death rates at older ages will decline more rapidly than the U.S. Census Bureau predicts.
“And there are others who argue that at some point we will reach an inflection point, which means that our ability to repair the human body would outpace its natural deterioration,” Lohman said.
One proponent for this idea of almost unlimited life potential is British biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey.
The author of the 2007 book “Ending Aging,” de Grey coined the term methuselarity, which he defines as the moment when medical therapies will rejuvenate people enough to continue living healthily until the next improved generation of rejuvenation biotechnology, and so on, indefinitely.
“De Grey argues that the technology for keeping people alive indefinitely is on the horizon,” Lohman said. “And that once we achieve this ability, or the inflection point, we will start to see people living far past 100 to much greater ages.”
He also pointed out that advances in medical technologies such as transplantation, gene therapy and stem cells, as well as changes in behavioral health and preventive care, are likely to have “a definitive impact on human longevity.”
Lohman added though that reaching this kind of Methuselah-like milestone would require “simultaneous radical advances in every area of medicine.”
“For instance, if a universal cure for cancer were found, it would still not prevent gradual deterioration of skin, bone, muscles and organs that would also lead to death by age 120,” he said. “And reliably replacing organs like the heart with synthetic substitutes still wouldn’t prevent accumulation of plaques that kill neurons in the brain.”
Which for the moment leaves a nagging question: How close are we to making people at age 100 or more look, act and feel like they are only 30?
“It’s certainly an idea that we are just beginning to explore as possible,” Lohman said. “But maybe the best chance for it to happen is to help people live more active and quality lives right now so that the longer they live, the longer they will want to live.”
By L. C. Leach III
