Living a good healthy long life is the ultimate wish of many. For some people, what they leave behind after they die matters the most because that is the only way your physical existence in the world will be remembered by many generations to come, perhaps for eternity.
In that case, people who live longer also have more chances to do more good things worth remembering.
Thanks to improvements in medical science and access to treatments, life expectancy in developing and developed countries has been steadily increasing.
Life expectancy (at birth) in the range of 75 – 80 years should be good enough for most countries as it somehow demonstrates their ability to take good care of their senior citizens.
Most people don’t live past their eighth or ninth decade, yet the individuals listed below have lived for a century or more.
10 /10 Jeanne Louise Calment (February 21, 1875 - August 4, 1997)
The oldest person to have ever lived was Jeanne Louise Calment from Arles, France. On her 120th birthday celebration, Calment said that she expected her future to be a short one.
She was quite right about that. On August 4, 1997, she died two years later at the age of 122 years and 164 days.
Born on February 21, 1875, Calment claimed to have seen Vincent Van Gogh in 1888. Calment lived an active life and was still riding a bicycle in her 100s. She gave up smoking at the age of 117.
9 /10 Sarah Knauss (September 24, 1880 - December 30, 1999)
Before Sarah Knauss passed away on December 30, 1999, she had been listed as the world’s oldest living person in the Guinness Book of Records.
According to an official at the nursing home where Knauss spent the final years of her life, she was not ill and died quietly in her room at 119 years and 97 days.
Knauss was born on September 24, 1880. She was already two years old when Brooklyn Bridge opened, in her late 20s when Henry Ford introduced the Model T, and 88 years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.