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Scientists conducted study on maximum age a human can live to

Scientists conducted study on maximum age a human can live to

Who wants to live forever? If you do you're in for some very bad news.

If you were hoping that you'd be able to live forever and ever then I've got some bad news for you, no matter how healthy and lucky you get - time will eventually win out.

Over the years human life expectancy has climbed higher and higher, meaning we can expect to live much longer and healthier lives than those our ancestors did.

The average life expectancy for someone in the UK is now more than 80 years, more than a decade longer than it was back at the midpoint of the 20th century.

People are living longer and advances in medicine are helping many 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, who made it to 122 years old after being born in 1875 and living right up to 1997.

As life expectancy gets higher, so too does our idea of our maximum lifespan.
jefftakespics2 / Alamy Stock Photo

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 of scientists 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.

They used artificial intelligence to go through the medical data of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to estimate a human's maximum lifespan.

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 have suggested that the record for the world's oldest person will probably be broken again by 2100, but that 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.

While we might be living longer, scientists reckon we probably can't get beyond 150.
Westend61 GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

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 actually make you live for a longer amount of time.

Still, if you could make it to 150 years that'd definitely 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: Sabine van Erp/Pixabay

Topics: Science, Health, News