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A comment on No limit to maximal lifespan in humans: how to beat a 122-year-old record. Parent comment

Re:No limit to maximal lifespan in humans: how to beat a 122... by maxlamb on Thursday December 16, 2021 @06:53AM (#29577296)
122 is not a number they picked at random, it is the age of the oldest human ever with a verifiable birth certificate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
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Re:No limit to maximal lifespan in humans: how to beat a 122... by coldtea on Thursday December 16, 2021 @07:11AM (#29577393)
What parent means is that it's still random, as that person could just as well have lived 121 or 123 or 125 years.

But that's a trivial observation that doesn't really change anything. 122 wasn't never supposed to be "non-random" as in some kind of physical law. The natural law concerns the increased certainty of death observed as ages > 100 approach, not a hard and fixed 122 number encoded in our DNA.

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