FUTURE HUMAN
But Seriously, How Long Can Humans Live?
Some experts say 150 is not only reachable but inevitable
The oldest person who ever lived — at least according to verifiable records — was Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 in France at the age of 122.
Exactly one person has lived to 119, and seven have reached 117 — including Japan’s Chiyo Miyako, who is currently the oldest recorded living human. Ten people have lived to 116, and 27 have reached 115. Keep subtracting years, and the number of people who live that long increases.
Looking over that list, you get the feeling there must be a ceiling on the human lifespan — some point at which terminal organ failure or some other form of cellular degradation is unavoidable, and a 2016 paper went a long way to confirm that hunch.
Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine published a paper in the journal Nature that laid out the evidence of an upper limit on the human lifespan. “Our main argument for such a limit is the fact that the record-oldest individual died more than 20 years ago,” says Jan Vijg, PhD, chair of genetics at Einstein. “While the record-oldest living individual increased year over year at least since the 1950s, this increase stopped in the 1990s.”
