Some say that we have reached the limits of what is possible, that life spans can’t increase much further. But they have said this before, again and again, and they have always been wrong. In 1928, when US life expectancy was fifty-seven years, the statistician Louis Dublin calculated that the ultimate possibility was sixty-five years. Since he did not have numbers for New Zealand, he did not know that this cap had already been surpassed by the women there. Another research team repeated the exercise in 1990, and settled on a limit of eighty-five years. That was reached by Japanese females in
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