Age Wise

How Long Can Humans Really Live?

Either we have a natural shelf life, or mortality plateaus and the sky’s the limit

Image: Pixabay/analogicus

If you can just make it to 105, your odds of surviving each subsequent year of life seem to level off at about 50/50. That much scientists largely agree on. Yet one of the oldest arguments in longevity research is whether this statistical curiosity represents an actual “mortality plateau,” which would mean there’s virtually no limit to how long any one of us might be able to hang around, biology be damned.

“Death rates, which increase exponentially up to about age 80, do decelerate thereafter and reach or closely approach a plateau after age 105,” scientists reported in a 2018 paper that re-ignited the long-running debate over the possibility of immortality.

“If there is a mortality plateau, then there is no limit to human longevity,” Jean-Marie Robine, a demographer at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research, said at the time.

But the latest research on the topic suggests we all have a practical shelf life, a maximum possible lifespan that’s not much beyond the most extreme expiration date documented so far, achieved by Jeanne Calment of France, who died in 1997 at age 122.

Here’s what’s nearly 100% certain…

This new research is all about statistics, so bear with me: In 1990, there were 95,000 centenarians (people 100+). Thanks to both a growing population and improvements in health care, that number swelled to 451,000 by 2015 and is expected to reach 3.7 million by 2050.

Sheer odds suggest that as more people make it so far in life, someone will take it a little further and set a new record, scientists concluded recently in the journal Demographic Research. Sometime this century, Calment’s record will fall, the scientists predict with near 100% certainty. They also set odds on whether someone might live to the ripe old age of…

124: 99%
127: 68%
130: 13%
135: “extremely unlikely”

“The data suggests that individuals who survive to age 110 (called supercentenarians) are simply unlike…