A person’s lifespan is influenced by a combination of genetics, lifestyle, and environmental factors.
- People who achieve extreme longevity are still rare enough that they represent a select population
- Scientists and demographers hold different views on whether there is a maximum limit to human life.
By Nazarul Islam | USA
There is no definitive maximum human lifespan, but the longest verified life is 122 years. While the average lifespan has increased dramatically over the last century, experts debate whether there is a fixed biological limit to how long humans can live.
The longest verified human lifespan belongs to Jeanne Calment of France, who lived to be 122 years and 164 days old before her death in 1997.For men, the record is held by Jiroemon Kimura of Japan, who lived to be 116 years old. As of 2022, the average global life expectancy was 72 years, a significant increase from just 32 years in 1900.
Scientists and demographers hold different views on whether there is a maximum limit to human life.
Recent research has identified a “physiological tipping point” where the body’s resilience—its ability to recover from illness or injury—naturally declines. This gradual loss of resilience suggests a practical ceiling on lifespan, with some studies estimating it may fall between 120 and 150 years.
While an aging person’s risk of death grows each year, the rate of increase begins to flatten after age 110. This makes it a “numbers game” where a small number of people reach extreme old age, but the overall maximum remains relatively steady.
The fact that Calment’s record has stood for decades, despite an increase in the number of centenarians, is cited by some as evidence that an upper limit exists.
Other researchers argue there is no biological evidence for a fixed limit to human lifespan. They believe that with a large enough population and enough supercentenarians, someone will eventually break the current record.
Again, some models have predicted a near 100% probability that someone will live past 122 years by the end of the 21st century, with a 13% chance of reaching 130 years.
Experts have also contended that the lack of rigorous, age-appropriate medical care for the very old prevents lifespans from extending further. If supercentenarians received the same level of care as younger adults, they could live longer.
A person’s lifespan is influenced by a combination of genetics, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Lifestyle choices, in particular, are considered the most significant factors that individuals can control.
While genes can predispose an individual to certain diseases or affect the aging process, they account for less than 10% of the variation in lifespan. Lifestyle and environmental factors play a larger role.
Jiroemon Kimura was a Japanese supercentenarian who was the verified oldest living person who died at age 116 years and 54 days on 12 June 2013. He was born: April 19, 1897, Kyotango, Kyoto, Japan
A balanced diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats is linked to a longer life. Diets like the Mediterranean diet have shown significant benefits.
Regular physical activity can also reduce the risk of chronic diseases and improve health, even for older adults.
Getting 7–9 hours of restorative sleep per night is crucial for physical and mental health. Chronic stress can accelerate aging. Techniques like meditation can help mitigate its effects.
Avoiding tobacco use is one of the most effective ways to increase longevity. Access to quality medical care, clean air and water, and favorable socioeconomic conditions are all crucial for a longer life.
Every generation has asked the same question: What is the longest a human can live? Some believed the answer was hidden in genetics, others in strict diets or meditation practices. But modern science has finally taken a deep look at the body’s inner workings.
By analyzing thousands of blood tests and activity patterns from wearable devices, researchers may have discovered a surprising clue. The finding doesn’t just talk about diseases or healthy habits, it points toward something far more fundamental.
The average years people live, has been steadily increasing worldwide thanks to better medicine, nutrition, and hygiene. But lifespan, the maximum years a human body can survive, seems to have a natural ceiling. Despite advances, no one lives forever, and almost no one crosses beyond a certain threshold.
A new research suggests that biology itself sets this upper boundary.
To understand ageing, scientists built a tool called the Dynamic Organism State Indicator (DOSI). It measures how the body responds to stress using blood test data and movement patterns. Unlike counting birthdays, DOSI tells how quickly a body can recover from every day wear and tear.
Over time, DOSI shows a clear trend: recovery slows as people age, pointing toward an eventual limit. This discovery may help predict health decline, guide anti-ageing therapies, and reshape how longevity and human biological resilience are understood globally.
Resilience is the hidden currency of life. It is the body’s power to heal, recover, and adapt to stress. In youth, this recovery is quick and efficient, and you bounce back faster. With age, resilience weakens, much like a fading spring losing its bounce. According to the study, the tipping point comes when resilience is fully lost. At that stage, survival becomes impossible even without a specific illness.
Though the research estimates humans could live up to 120-150 years, very few come close. Chronic illnesses, stress, smoking, poor diet, and environmental challenges chip away at resilience much earlier. The study showed that certain harmful effects, like smoking, can sometimes be reversed if stopped in time, giving resilience a chance to repair itself.
Modern day lifestyles are filled with hidden risks: pollution, processed foods, and constant stress. These not only shorten life but also reduce healthspan, the years lived in good health. The study highlights the importance of protecting resilience, not just avoiding diseases.
Small choices, rest, recovery, movement, and avoiding harmful habits, can make the journey toward older age smoother, even if they cannot extend the biological maximum. The number of people who live past the age of 100 has been on the rise for decades, up to nearly half a million people worldwide.
There are, however, far fewer “supercentenarians”—people who live to age 110 or even longer. The oldest living person, Jeanne Calment of France, was 122 when she died in 1997; currently, the world’s oldest person is 118-year-old Kane Tanaka of Japan.
Such extreme longevity, according to new research by the University of Washington, likely will continue to rise slowly by the end of this century, and estimates show that a lifespan of 125 years, or even 130 years, is possible.
“People are fascinated by the extremes of humanity, whether it’s going to the moon, how fast someone can run in the Olympics, or even how long someone can live,” said lead author Michael Pearce, a UW doctoral student in statistics. “With this work, we quantify how likely we believe it is that some individual will reach various extreme ages this century.”
Longevity has ramifications for government and economic policies, as well as individuals’ own health care and lifestyle decisions, rendering what’s probable, or even possible, relevant at all levels of society.
The new study, published in Demographic Research, uses statistical modeling to examine the extremes of human life. With ongoing research into aging, the prospects of future medical and scientific discoveries and the relatively small number of people to have verifiably reached age 110 or older, experts have debated the possible limits to what is referred to as the maximum reported age at death.
While some scientists argue that disease and basic cell deterioration lead to a natural limit on human lifespan, others maintain there is no cap, as evidenced by record-breaking supercentenarians.
Pearce and Adrian Raftery, a professor of sociology and of statistics at the UW, took a different approach. They asked what the longest individual human lifespan could be anywhere in the world by the year 2100.
Using Bayesian statistics, a common tool in modern statistics the researchers estimated that the world record of 122 years almost certainly will be broken, with a strong likelihood of at least one person living to anywhere between 125 and 132 years.
To calculate the probability of living past 110 — and to what age — Raftery and Pearce turned to the most recent iteration of the International Database on Longevity, created by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. That database tracks supercentenarians from 10 European countries, plus Canada, Japan and the United States.
Using a Bayesian approach to estimate probability, the UW team created projections for the maximum reported age at death in all 13 countries from 2020 through 2100.
Major findings included:
Researchers estimated near 100% probability that the current record of maximum reported age at death — Calment’s 122 years, 164 days — will be broken;
The probability remains strong of a person living longer, to 124 years old (99% probability) and even to 127 years old (68% probability);
An even longer lifespan is possible but much less likely, with a 13% probability of someone living to age 130;
It is “extremely unlikely” that someone would live to 135 in this century.
As it is, supercentenarians are outliers, and the likelihood of breaking the current age record increases only if the number of supercentenarians grows significantly. With a continually expanding global population, that’s not impossible, researchers say.
People who achieve extreme longevity are still rare enough that they represent a select population, Raftery said. Even with population growth and advances in health care, there is a flattening of the mortality rate after a certain age. In other words, someone who lives to be 110 has about the same probability of living another year as, say, someone who lives to 114, which is about one-half.
“It doesn’t matter how old they are, once they reach 110, they still die at the same rate,” Raftery said. “They’ve gotten past all the various things life throws at you, such as disease. They die for reasons that are somewhat independent of what affects younger people.
“This is a very select group of very robust people.”
Read: Questioning the Concepts of Cosmology
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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.
