In what can only come as a severe blow to the transhumanist agenda, a skeptical researcher has determined that most of the world’s centenarians don’t actually exist.
In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.
The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.
Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death. The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.
The same goes for all the other blue zones. Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the agency first started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old-age life expectancy in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s amazing the cognitive dissonance going on. With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.
In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.
According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together.
I always wondered why these extreme old people being celebrated by the media were invariably relatively poor rural people, when presumably it would be the wealthy, with their access to top-flight medical care and state-of-the-art science, who would survive the longest. But this certainly suffices to explain that particular anomaly.