Laura Carstensen could hardly curb her enthusiasm as she talked about a future with an abundance of centenarians.

“Life is getting longer,” said Carstensen, the co-founder of the Stanford Center on Longevity, as she delivered her keynote message to a packed room at the 5th Annual Invest In Women conference in Atlanta. The three-day event, which attracted nearly 500 attendees, is being sponsored by Financial Advisor magazine.

“Most of you will sail through your 80s and 90s, and lots of you will live to reach 100,” Carstensen said, basing her conclusion on the assumed background, education levels and affluence in the world. She didn’t stop there.

“And your children …”

Demographers predict that children born since 2000 will live to 100, and children born in 2007 will live to be 104.

“And we are not going to have to wait for them,” said Carstensen, whose speech was titled “A Long, Bright Future.” Increasingly in the developed world, she said, more and more people are living to be 100 and older.

Carstensen showed a slide of a birthday cake with a candle in the shape of a “100.” She said her aunt, who died at 102, was really “pissed off” that they had birthday cards for 100 but they didn’t go to 101, 102, 103.

“I think this would be a great opportunity for a new business—greeting cards.”

It might be less happy for policy makers and thought leaders. Most of our policies were put in place for very different assumptions about the age of our populations, she said.

And it happened fast, “in the blink of an eye,” she said. Carstensen pointed out that life expectancy 5,000 years ago was 18. In the 1900s, life expectancy reached 47, and it reached 77 at the end of the century. Today, it’s 79 and it continues to increase, she said.

“We humans are creatures of culture, and all of these parts of culture evolved to support lives half as long as we live today,” she said. “The built world we live in is a world that was designed for the young.”

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