Setting your sights on immortality? It could theoretically be possible, a new study has found

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For as long as we've been around, humans have been fascinated with the idea of living forever. But to date, the closest anyone has ever come to achieving that was Jeanne Calment, a chain-smoking French woman who, having lived for a remarkable 122 years and 164 days, passed away in 1997. 

However, while Calment may hold the record for the longest lifespan ever recorded, defying the odds and living over the age of 100 is becoming more and more common, providing new opportunities for researchers to examine whether the human body really does have some kind of expiry date and whether it may, in theory, be possible to live forever. 

Earlier studies, relying on the most common method for calculating life expectancy and thus lifespan – the Gompertz equation – placed the limit at roughly 140 years, and a more recent study conducted earlier this year proposed this could even rise as high as 150. 

But in publishing new research earlier this week in the Royal Society Open Science journal, a group of researchers has waded into the debate, positing that the outer limit of human life span may not exist. 

The scientists analysed new data on supercentenarians (people over the age of 110) and semi-supercentenarians (those ages 105 or older) and found that, while the risk of death gradually increases the older we get, it seems to, ultimately, plateau at some point, dropping to a constant 50-50 by the time we reach the age of 110. 

“Beyond age 110, one can think of living another year as being almost like flipping a coin,” said Anthony Davison, a co-author of the study and a professor of statistics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). “If it comes up heads, then you live to your next birthday, and if not, then you will die at some point within the next year,” he said to AFP. 

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Davison and his team used a new dataset released by the International Database on Longevity that covered over 1,100 supercentenarians across 13 countries. They complemented this data with an additional dataset from Italy comprising everyone above the age of 105 between January 2009 and December 2015. Having extrapolated from this data, the researchers concluded that their findings “would imply that there is no limit to the human lifespan.” 

Of course, this doesn't exactly mean that we are suddenly going to see a huge surge in people living beyond the age of 130. Davison noted that, given that the probability of living for additional years past 110 is 50 per cent, the chances of hitting that 130-year milestone is something like one in a million. 

But as more and more advances are made in medical sciences and healthcare, an increasing number of people are achieving supercentenarian status, meaning that the probability of seeing someone live to 130 is also inching upwards. 

“The more people tossing a coin, with a 50 per cent chance of surviving each year after they turn 110, the more we can expect that someone will have a lucky streak and get to the age of 130,” said Dr Leo Belzile, another co-author of the study from HEC Business School in Montreal.