Do we really want to live forever? According to The Guardian, we don’t really have a choice, since there’s currently a fight going on in the scientific community right this very minute about a study was published in Nature that suggested the human life tops out at around 114.9 years old.
TBH, that number sounds about right. If you’ve ever met a 90-year-old, you know things can get pretty grim. The oldest person on earth was Emma Morano, who died at 117 years old just this past April. Right behind her is 111-year-old Agnes Fenton (who subsists on three Miller High Lifes a day and a shot of Johnny Walker Blue Label, FWIW). So, a 115-year-old cap on human life sounds just about right.
But we are no scientists (officially at least), and apparently there are five separate research teams that took issue with this 115-year-old cap thing. They just want to let people live. Like, forever. Forever.
Professor Jim Vaupel, a specialist in aging at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and one of the authors of one of the new studies said:
“The evidence points towards no looming limit. At present the balance of the evidence suggests that if there is a limit,it is above 120, perhaps much above — and perhaps there is not a limit at all.”
Wait, what? What that means is that there’s no evidence that our organs and everything have to stop working, especially given medical advances. Most of the complaints about the original study were that it used weird statistics and only looked at data sets from certain periods of times. These new studies basically claim their methods and math are totally off.
Professor Siegfried Hekimi from McGill University in Montreal said that “people like a number,” but actually there are many ways humans can live longer. For instance, there was a French woman once who lived to see 122 years old. Under one of his models, the oldest person living in the year 2,300 will be about 150 years old. “The increase in average lifespan will not suddenly crash into a 115-year limit,” he said.
It would be nice to stick around and see what happens, maybe. But living forever just sounds sort of depressing at the end of the day. Unless, of course, you really can live on a diet of Miller High Life and scotch. Then we’d be open to negotiating.
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