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World's oldest person Emma Morano dies at 117
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- TwoBit 10y agoHow would you calculate the average time between deaths of the currently oldest person, assuming a constant population and constant max age?
- w1ntermute 10y agohttps://math.stackexchange.com/questions/349155/how-often-does-it-happen-that-the-oldest-person-alive-dies https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/349155/how-often-do...
- hashhar 10y agoThat's a rabbit hole I'll be digging up now. It was quite interesting. There should be a dedicated website for such obscure things. Reddit helps but doesn't cover a lot of ground.
- tomerico 10y agoA quick approximation is the life expectancy of a person that is around 117 years old. Looking at https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html it's around 0.72 years.
- lacampbell 10y ago117. I can't even imagine that span of time. Seeing fashion change must annoy you. "Damn hipsters, we did that in the 20s!"
- Pica_soO 10y agoI think you withdraw after a time and become deeply cynically. For her trump, stalin, mao, the duce, hitler, the italian king.. it must all look like endless repetitions of the same boring theme, broken by endless promises of learning from past mistakes. All your friends are gone- only you - the relic dwell on. Even your sons and daugthers are dead. The lonesome george of mankind. One of my ancestors comes from a Italian mountain village near Lago di Garda. Those villages are very poor, but also fascinating. They did a study on longevity and health - in which they found that farmers whos field would run up the mountain and down the mountain lived longer then farmers who fields did not have such height difference.
- warent 10y agoIt's all in perception, she could also have seen those as triumphs of humans coming together, including space travel which wasn't even considered remotely possible or understood when she was a young woman. I have doubts anyone can live to be that age with a perpetually negative outlook on life
- PKop 10y agoMao - 40,000,000 http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Mao http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Mao Stalin - 20,000,000 http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin Hitler - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_enumerated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_enumerat... Trump? Yea, I'm sure she thinks Trump is as bad as the 20th century's most brutal dictators. I'm sure she doesn't think the millennial's who think this are embarrassingly and shamefully naive and exaggerating, if the word exaggerating even captures the absurdity well enough.
- noonespecial 10y agoAnd at 117 you might have to specify which 20s!
- zeptomu 10y agoActually ... not in this case. She was born around 1900 and was twenty in the 1920s.
- paulddraper 10y agoIt was hypothetical
- zeptomu 10y agoOh, sry, I read that wrong.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agothe fashion bit is a small part: it must have been hard to stay sane - look at all the political changes that happened during the last 117 years in Italy
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoJust think about the changes in technology since 1900. There are adults living today who don't remember a time before the internet, imagine being able to remember when pretty much every technology in your home was introduced. This woman would (hopefully) remember when households started acquiring fridges, when she was in her teens!
- MichaelMoser123 10y agoInteresting if she had a cell phone.
- chriskanan 10y agoHer diet of only 3 eggs and some biscuits a day, made me wonder if any of her longevity can be credited to having a severely calorie restricted diet [0]. Assuming that's true that means she was probably ingesting 600 calories a day or less. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction
- malmsteen 10y agoyeah many of the elders had weird diets. There was always eggs involved also. Calorie restriction is really interesting
- sarreph 10y agoDo you have evidence about your egg claim? As someone very interested in diets I'd be curious...
- enraged_camel 10y agoNot evidence, but it makes sense if you think about it. Eggs are nutritious, easy to eat (especially for people whose teeth have fallen off) and quite filling.
- developer2 10y agoThe most critical element for survival with any diet - particularly with low calorie intake - is protein. Eggs just happen to be the easiest form factor. Personally when I'm on a weight loss regimen, I take in more canned Wild Pacific Salmon than eggs. Salmon, containing less mercury than many other fish, is a fairly safe bet for frequent consumption. I'm curious how someone with a constant diet of something like eggs and biscuits for 5+ years fares regarding severe deficiencies in truly necessary vitamins and minerals. I do think the body is a miraculous machine that will successfully adapt to many diets that experts would otherwise claim as being dangerously deficient.
- Animats 10y agoAnd that's the last of the 19th century people.
- lovemenot 10y agoTechnically, the new oldest person was born in the nineteenth century: Jamaican Violet Brown, who was born on March 10, 1900. And presumably, there may be others alive who were born before the twentieth century began 1/1/1901.
- zulln 10y agoSo obvious, and yet I somehow did not think about this. Thanks!
- interfixus 10y agoYeah, we all remember the worldwide celebrations at the turn of the last century, 2001-01-01.
- lovemenot 10y agoSome people who had to work 1/1/00 or were on call (e.g. for Y2K) did in fact celebrate the technical new millenium a year later. Probably a few pedants did too.
- danieltillett 10y agoIn addition to the 19th C didn't end until 23:59:59 31:12:1900, there is also the very real possibility that the oldest person alive can't prove when they are born. Large parts of the world don't have reliable birth records from the 19th C.
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- MisterBastahrd 10y agoThe world's oldest person is dead. Long live the world's oldest person.
- phamilton 10y agoThis is pretty solid, and actually makes more intuitive sense than the King version.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoI'd say it makes very little sense. You can say "long live the world's oldest person" all you want; everyone realizes it's not going to happen.
- iamacynic 10y agothat's the point.
- reasonattlm 10y agoTrying to understand why someone lived this long is something of a pointless endeavor. It is random chance, plus a little genetics. If genes double your odds of making it past 100, then that is still 2% odds for people reaching that age now. By 117, with ~50%+ yearly mortality past 110, well, the odds are not good whatever your diet and past lifestyle might have been. Running around analyzing the genetics of supercentenarians isn't really all that useful from the point of view of making people live longer. Doubling a tiny chance is still a tiny chance, and their longevity has a lot more to do with randomness than with anything else. Perhaps more interesting is asking why these people die, what are the causes. Different ages are characterized by a different prevalence of disease; cancer hits a maximum mortality rate and then fades as a major cause in the oldest old, for example. From the few autopsies performed, supercentenarians appear to predominantly die of senile systemic amyloidosis, a clogging of the cardiovascular system with misfolded transthyretin that appears to play a lesser role in heart failure in younger old age. If we want to ask why human life span seems to have a rough upper limit (though 50%+ yearly mortality for any combination of causes is going to look a lot like a hard limit when stretched over 20 years), then this form of amyloidosis seems to be one of the places to look. Interestingly, this form of amyloidosis has an inherited version that shows up in young people, so despite the institutional reluctance to work on medicine to treat the causes of aging, there are actually a number of therapies in development and trials, some of which can selectively remove this form of amyloid. At some point the research community will wake up to this form of amyloid being a contributing cause of heart failure (a process underway judging by recent papers on the topic), at which point we might well see a leap in the observed upper limit to human life in the decades following more widespread use.
- Strom 10y agoIt is random chance, plus a little genetics. Looking at the top 43 oldest people alive [1] I can see that 20 of them are from Japan. That's almost 50%! While not conclusive proof, I think it at the very least heavily suggests that living long isn't about random chance. Whatever is going on in Japan seems to be working very well. -- [1] http://www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html http://www.grg.org/SC/WorldSCRankingsList.html
- seajones 10y agoWorld's former oldest person
- coldcode 10y agoShe didn't leave her apartment since she was 97. That is truly amazing. I can't stand mine for more than a couple days.
- paulddraper 10y agoGive it 70 years, and you might change your mind.
- kylehotchkiss 10y agoIt sounds like she spent 15-17 by herself too (article says she only recently got care). I can't imagine what that isolation would be like.
- Taniwha 10y agoYou know this headline shows up every year or so - dying seems to be something that world's oldest people keep doing - it's probably time we stopped being surprised ...
- Strom 10y agoI do know that people keep dieing. I haven't seen anyone surprised about this though. Is that really a thing that happens often enough that you need to call a stop to it?
- acjohnson55 10y agoSo I'm guessing this means we are officially out of people who were alive before 1900.
- lisper 10y agoGiven that it is 2017 I'd say that's a pretty good guess.
- bkjelden 10y agoThe article says she was the last known living person from the 1800's.
- joss82 10y agoNope, there is yet another one: https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn2DOKjdDtknCxSpTL76FroMz0ht50iQNqjKE https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn... Not many left I guess... EDIT: Stolen from some uncle comment which I have also plussed.
- merb 10y agothis is interesting from a developer point of view. no more birth year below 1900. sorry for the black humour
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago"World's oldest person" sounds like such a depressing title to have. Most people don't hold the title for even a year, with Jeanne Calment being the exception.
- danieltillett 10y agoIt is one I would not mind having. Sure your future life expectancy is not great, but the journey getting there is not bad.
- dghughes 10y agoImagine being a person so old that all people on earth ~7 billion people are younger than you.
- saagarjha 10y agoWell, at some point in time, everyone was once so young that everyone else in the world was older than them.
- tlrobinson 10y agoOk, but very few people are ever older than everyone else.
- FlorianRappl 10y agoStatistically there has to be one at any point in time :)
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- tempay 10y agoIf you're male it's (effectively) impossible. If you're female it looks like the oldest living person title is typically held for around a year[1]. Lets say that means 120 currently living people can hold the title, that gives you a 1 in 29 million[2] chance. Which feels far more likely than I would have intuitively guessed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people#Chronological_list_of_the_oldest_known_living_person_since_1955 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people#Chronological_li... [2] Or half the odds of a given ticket winning the lottery
- acscott 10y agoMy grandpa who still legally drives turned 100 last year. He loves to eat meat (rare to raw), rich foods, and wanted to share with me his stash of liver pate in the refrigerator on my last visit. When I asked him about how he could hook me up to connections while he bragged about his successes he replied "They're all dead!!!". He's said that happiness is a racket and myth; that success is different for each person; that you should never say you are sorry; that you should put your track shoes on early, run like hell, and never look back. There's more. But I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long.
- bencoder 10y ago> I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long. Yes, my great grandmother died at 101, smoked until 90, and generally didn't have much positive to say in her final years (she may have been suffering from dementia or other old age related disease). I agree, advice from the long lived doesn't seem particularly useful when compared to scientific study
- dualogy 10y ago> But I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long. That's a mighty fast conclusion there, young shot! Given that historically, "most of the people were wrong most of the time", combined with the fact that most centenarians seem to live and advise entirely against widespread modern beliefs about mental nutritional medicinal and social health, all leads to the very real possibility that they're in fact inadvertently on to something.. =)
- felipemnoa 10y agoIt is probably just random. Out of seven billion people some of them will make it over 100 years old. People do win the lottery, after all.
- nojvek 10y agoI think we will see more of centurians as health keeps on getting better and natural and artificial selections do their things.
- bkjelden 10y agoIt's crazy to think how different the world looks today than it did 117 years ago. It's even crazier to speculate what it will look like in 117 more.
- Zitrax 10y agoAt least we know that Halley's comet passes Earth that year (2134).
- sixQuarks 10y agoDamn, she was able to see the first flight of an airplane (1903), and the first successful return and relaunch of a rocket (2017) within one lifetime.
- enraged_camel 10y ago>>Damn, she was able to see the first flight of an airplane (1903) Well, no... She was alive during it, but remember they didn't have television back then. ;)
- craigds 10y agoAlso, she was four.
- Prad 10y agoDang 117 years. I remember reading an article about her birthday last year. Rest in peace.
- holic 10y agoFun fact: The population of the world grew ~5x in her lifetime, from ~1.6B to ~7.5B.
- cgag 10y agoTerrifying
- draugadrotten 10y agoThe world's now oldest person Saro Dursun - born 1899 june 01 - lives in Västerås Sweden. Public record of age: https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn2DOKjdDtknCxSpTL76FroMz0ht50iQNqjKE https://www.ratsit.se/18990601-Saro_Dursun_Vasteras/qEQWdEbn...
- misja111 10y agoNow I'm confused. Emma Morano who was the oldest person alive, was born in 29 November 1899 according to the article. Is the article wrong?
- gebe 10y agoNo, Saro Dursun is a fraudster. I don't remember all the details but she Imigrated to Sweden in the 60/70s with another persons papers stating she was 65+ when she was in fact 40-something. 65 is the retirement age in Sweden...
- kobeya 10y agoOne more datapoint for the cliff at 120. No supercentennials are able to pass that age...
- autokad 10y agoseems like we are running out of people born in the 1800s edit: "She was officially the last person born in the 1800s still living" nm, we are fresh out
- bluedevil2k 10y agoExcept Jeanne Calment, who made it to 122
- kobeya 10y agoThe cliff is obviously with some statistical error.