Can we possibly live to 1000 years?

Crucially, this limit is not defined as the highest observed age at death but the highest age
that possibly could be reached.

In order to find an answer to the above questions we use a unique dataset (provided by the CBS) of the ages at death in days of all (about 285,000) Dutch residents, born in the Netherlands, who died in the years 1986-2015 at an age of at least 92 years. To reduce bias, we will, however, use only the higher 75,000 of these life spans for our research, which increases the minimum age in the data to 94.4 years. The oldest person in these 30 years, Hendrikje van Andel (a woman), died in 2005 and reached 115.2 years. Remarkably, already more than 100 years before, Geert Adriaans Boomgaard died in 1899 at the age of
110.4 years.

We will not consider all people who were born in a given year but rather all people who died in a given year. In this way we can compare recent years instead of birth years from long ago. We see the people who died in such a given year as a random sample from the imaginary population of all people who could have died in that year. As usual, we
will consider women and men separately. Then the goal of our research is to investigate if the life spans of Dutch women and those of Dutch men - per year of death - have an upper limit or not and, if so, to find out if there is some trend in these limits over the period 1986-2015. We will mainly focus on the results for women and then at the end briefly compare with the results for men. This article is based on Einmahl, Einmahl and de Haan (2019), where the reader is referred to for a more comprehensive presentation and for references to related research.