Scientists work out maximum age a human can live up to after conducting study

You and I are gonna live forever. Yeah, sure. We can sing that as much as we want and act like we’re Peter Pan but the reality is, we’re obviously not all going to live forever.

You can live your life as healthily as you want, do all the things you’re ‘supposed’ to do for a long life, but time will eventually beat all of us.

We do have better odds than those who came before us though as human life expectancy has climbed higher and higher over the years.

According to Data Commons, the life expectancy here in the UK is just over 80 years, beating the US where it sits at around 77.

And for us Brits, that’s over a decade longer than it was back at the midpoint of the 20^th century.

Thanks to advances in medicine, we’re more likely to survive the serious medical conditions that previously would have left us dead – adding on to the years we get to spend in the world.

The oldest person who ever lived was Jeanne Calment, making it to a mega 122 years old after being born in 1875.

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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.

In 2022, 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.

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 that a person couldn't really survive beyond then.

Thanasis Zovoilis/Getty Images

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.

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.

Although, that’s 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 pretty good innings, and maybe by then we'd have invented a way for people to actually live forever – maybe as robots.

Topics: Health, Science, Artificial Intelligence

Jess Battison

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

@jessbattison_