Is it possible to live forever?

Have you ever thought of being able to live forever? New research suggests that there might not be a limit to how long a person can live.

Research published in response to a claim that humans had reached their maximum lifespans

Last October, Jan Vijg, a geneticist at the Albert Einstein Institute of Medicine in New York published a paper saying that the human race had reached the point where the oldest age anyone would ever live had already been achieved.

As a biologist, he believed it would only be natural that at some point the human race would reach a point at which the average lifespan would stop increasing. His study suggested that it would be physically and biologically impossible for a person to live past the age of 125. Vijg and his team concluded that any age past this would require serious medical intervention beyond anything that has been discovered.

This research was extremely controversial and was met with a great deal of backlash. It turns out that people really did not like being told that there was a limit to their lifespan. Scientists were quick to respond, and new research has just been released to disprove this claim.

Dutch researchers believe there is no limit to the human lifespan

Researchers at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute set out to disprove Vijg's claim that people would not be able to live past the age of 125. It was previously believed that the chance of morality increased exponentially with age. The accepted concept was that young people had a very low chance of dying, and, as someone got older and older their chance of dying increased. This new research suggests that this is not the case after all.

Using advanced mathematics the Dutch research team found that it appears as though mortality decreases as people get older. The idea is that if you manage to live past a certain age, your chance of dying actually decreases.

This study claimed that by 2070, the Average Lifespan may increase to 125 years. They even go as far as to say that the average lifespan will likely increase from there and that there may not be a limit to how long people can live.

Vijg responded to this new study and defended his own in a recent statement. His number one critique was the use of mathematical modeling instead of human data to predict lifespan. Vijg's work was built on data surrounding how long the average person was living and how this changed over time. He believes that it is extremely unlikely that a person will ever live past the age of 125, and that the average Human Lifespan will likely stagnate at around 115 years old.