Scientists have not seen the limit of human life
Scientists from Switzerland and Sweden analyzed data on the long-livers of the planet and found that a person can live at least 130 years. At the same time, they did not manage to find any restrictions in the duration of human life.
Scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg have not found a visible limit to human longevity. In their article published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the researchers argue that a person can theoretically live forever.
As the basis of their research, scientists took the International Database of Life Expectancy, which collected information on more than 1100 centenarians from 13 countries, supplementing it with data on centenarians in Italy and France.
The researchers wanted to find out if the growth in human life expectancy, noted since 1840, will continue in the future. The answer to this question is important from the point of view of both demographics and economics.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that a person can theoretically live up to about 130 years now. At the same time, extrapolation of the available statistics on centenarians suggests that, in principle, there is no limit to human life expectancy.
As noted in the study, the likelihood of death increases with age. However, this only happens until the age of 108: upon reaching this age, the chances of life and death become equal.
A person with a 50% probability can live another year, and with the same probability he will not live to see his next birthday. The authors note that constantly improving living conditions, as well as the development of medicine and an increase in its availability, helped to increase life expectancy, which allowed a person to cope with an increasing number of diseases. Considering that information on how to preserve your health has become more and more available recently, scientists expect that the average life expectancy of people will continue to grow for some time.
However, the study notes, theoretical predictions do not mean that people will live forever. “After 110 years, you can think of living another year as like throwing a coin,” explains lead author Anthony Davison. And in order for a person to live to be 130 years old, he must have an “eagle” 20 times in a row. “The likelihood that this will happen is less than one in a million … although the increase in the number of people living for more than 100 years makes it possible that the maximum recorded age of death will reach 130 years in this century,” conclude the authors of the study.
This is not the first study on the capabilities of the human body, and there is no consensus among scientists on this matter.
Some, after analyzing the data, conclude that immortality is possible, using approximately the same arguments as the authors of the current study. At the same time, the Dutch scientist Jan Weig sees limited human resources and suggests that people are unlikely to ever be able to live indefinitely, and the maximum life expectancy is 125 years. The scientist suggested not to speculate and not to model the future, but to look at the already available statistics, which says that the maximum human life has really grown for a long time, but the last records of longevity in the vast majority of the studied countries were set back in the 1980s. “At first you see this growth every year and you see the oldest person on the planet who lived until the 1990s, but then the growth in life expectancy stops,” he said.
Kirill Sarkhanyants
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