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Researchers are now suggesting that male and female lifespans continue to increase linearly, and have not yet hit a hard limit.
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Previous studies argued that human life expectancy is increasing by less and less each year, but that is only because it was studied in the wealthiest countries.
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Immortality may still be a reach, but advances in medicine and public welfare mean countries with lower average lifespans are catching up to those that are longer-lived.
From iconic songs by Queen and Alphaville to Isaac Asimov’s radical sci-fi vision of the essence of life eternally encoded into computers, immortality has been a human desire that has persisted since the first deathless gods emerged thousands and thousands of years ago. Could we really live forever if there was no physical or biological force to strike us down?
The omnipresence of that questions explains why humans have a history of trying anything to defy the finality of death. Ancient Egyptians mummified their dead because of the belief that the deceased would need their bodies in the endless fertile fields and gilded palaces of the afterlife. Adaptogen beverages brewed from mushrooms have become the newest New-Age immortality tonic. Walt Disney had himself cryogenically frozen (well, this one may be a stretch).
But so far nothing has worked, and according to many experts, nothing ever will. Several studies have hypothesized a hard limit to the human lifespan. But recently, researchers Lucio Vincius and Andrea Migliano from the University of Zurich have argued against that—they do not see the lifespan of our species plateauing just yet.
While there has yet to be evidence of any human being making it past the age of 122 (a record still held by French supercentenarian Jeanne Calment), Vincius and Migliano have set out to disprove the claim of a hard limit on human life expectancy suggested in a 2024 study led by epidemiologist S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois. Olshansky acknowledges that advances in medicine and public health have steadily increased the human life expectancy over time, but at least in the world’s wealthiest (and longest-lived) nations, increases have slowed down drastically in the past 30 years. What these findings don’t take into account, however, is the rest of the global population.
“Both female and male lifespans continue to linearly increase at a global scale,” Vinicius and Migliano said their study, which is in the process of being peer-reviewed and has been uploaded as a preprint to the server bioRxiv. “This remarkably long trend observed since 1840 remains at odds with our expectation that human lifespans must at some point hit a biologically imposed ceiling.”
Even with life expectancy rising by fewer years per decade, the researchers have found nothing in the data that conclusively proves the trend has hit a ceiling. In fact, they caution that previous claims of such a ceiling are only premature predictions. Now, Olshansky and his colleagues are doubtful that any more than 15% of females and 5% of males will reach their hundredth birthday, and stated “radical human life extension is implausible.” However, these findings are limited to ten countries in which the rise in life expectancy has slowed down, presumably with an end in sight. (This is also not a new assumption—humanity was thought to have approached its upper limit to life expectancy as far back as 1990.)
Referring to the Human Mortality Database—whose longevity data covers 41 countries—what Vinicius and Migliano see is a continuation in the improvement of life expectancy on a global scale. Male lifespans have increased by an average of 2.03 years per decade since 1840, and female lifespans increased by 2.31 years per decade in that same time frame. Between 2000 and 2020, male lifespans have increased by 1.96 years per decade for males and 1.45 years per decade for females, neither of which is that far off from previous decades. Men are catching up to women, and countries with lower life expectancies are catching up to those with higher life expectancies.
Whether lifespans in those countries will reach (or even exceed) what was studied by Olshansky remains unknown. If there is a longevity ceiling, nobody has hit it yet.
So, as far as we know, we are living longer and longer. Figuring out just how long we could live could take centuries, millennia or just a few decades. There is a proposed limit, but even that is hypothetical. The end is not (yet) in sight.
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