In his script for the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, screenwriter Robert Bolt stated: “Death comes for us all; even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little.”
And you know what? He’s pretty spot on because the only thing that’s certain in life is death… and taxes, as the idiom goes.
While eating a well-balanced diet, not smoking cigarettes and enjoying an active lifestyle may potentially increase your life expectancy, death does eventually come knocking.
But thanks to medical advancements and documented economic growth the modern-day human’s life span is much longer than our ancestors.
The Office for National Statistics claims life expectancy at birth in the UK from 2020 to 2022 was 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females.
This beats out the US, where it sits at around 74.8 years and 80.2 years for males and females, respectively.
But just because there’s an average doesn’t mean there aren’t anomalies, just look at Jeanne Calment.
The Frenchwoman was at the ripe old age of 122 when she died in 1997, making her a supercentenarian – a person who is 110 years or older.
While most people get nowhere near that, the question of just how long the human body theoretically can survive is one of science’s most pressing questions.
Scientists believe they know how long the human body can survive (Getty Stock Image)
In 2022, researchers from Singapore biotech company Gero and the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, studied human resilience and the body’s ability to recover from damage.
Using AI, they combed 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.
Other studies into the science of ageing 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 Calment’s grand old age.
Meanwhile, drugs which could try to slow down the body’s ageing 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.
The oldest person to ever live managed to make it to their 122nd birthday (Getty Stock Image)
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 – perhaps as robots.
