Alright Peter Pan, get your head out the sky, I hate to break it to you but you’re not going to be young forever.
And if you’re really that hopeful, you’re also not going to live forever. No matter how healthy you are, time will eventually beat us all.
The life expectancy of a human has gotten higher and higher over the years thanks to a number of factors. I mean, by 1900 the life expectancy in England and Wales was just 44 for males and 48 for women, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Advert
Which doesn’t sound particularly promising.
Thankfully though, we can now expect to live a lot longer and have healthier lives than our ancestors did.
Nowadays, the average life expectancy for someone in the UK is over 80 years - beating out the US where their average hits just over 77.
Thanks to advances in medicine, people are more likely to survive serious medical conditions that would previously have killed them, meaning many get to spend several years more in the world.
The oldest person who ever lived was Jeanne Calment, making it to 122 years old after being born in 1875.
Advert
While most people get nowhere near that, the question of just how long a human body could theoretically live to is one scientists have been grappling with for a while.
A group looking into just this subject found that the longest anyone is ever likely to live is around 150 years old.
Researchers from Singapore biotech company Gero and the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, studied human resilience, the body's ability to recover from damage.
Using AI, they went through the medical data of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to estimate a human's maximum lifespan.
Advert
Factoring in age, illness and lifestyle factors, they found that somewhere between 120 and 150 years the human body's ability to recover completely gave out, meaning a person couldn't really survive beyond then.
Other studies into the science of aging suggest the record for the world's oldest person will probably be broken again by 2100, but not everyone's going to be making it past the grand old age of 122.
Meanwhile, drugs which could try to slow down the body's aging process and theoretically let someone live for up to 200 years are being tested, but the idea that we're all about to live to 200 is a long way off.
Advert
Of course you could always hope that space travel advances to the point where you could move to another planet we discovered where people could live over 3,000 years.
Then again, the reason for that is because that planet has much shorter years, orbiting its sun once every 2.7 Earth days.
While you could technically call that living for plenty of years, by human standards it'd be cheating, and it wouldn't make you live longer.
Still, if you could make it to 150 that'd count as a good innings, and maybe by then we'd have invented a way for people to live forever as robots.
Featured Image Credit: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images/Portra Images/Getty Images