How Old Can Humans Get?

[staarker]

An expert on aging thinks humans could live to be 1,000 years old—with a few tweaks to our genetic “software”

How long can human beings live? Although life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, thanks largely to improved sanitation and medicine, research into hunter-gatherer populations suggests that individuals who escaped disease and violent deaths could live to about their seventh or eighth decade. This means our typical human life span may be static: around 70 years, with an extra decade or so for advanced medical care and cautious behavior. Some geneticists believe a hard limit of of around 115 years is essentially programmed into our genome by evolution.

Other scientists in the fast-moving field of aging research, or geroscience, think we can live much longer. A handful of compounds have been shown to lengthen the life spans of laboratory animals slightly, yet some scientists are more ambitious—a lot more ambitious.

João Pedro de Magalhães, a professor of molecular biogerontology at the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham in England, thinks humans could live for 1,000 years. He has scrutinized the genomes of very long-lived animals such as the bowhead whale (which can reach 200 years) and the naked mole rat. His surprising conclusion: if we eliminated aging at the cellular level, humans could live for a millennium—and potentially as long as 20,000 years.

How can that be? If aging is programmed, scientists could theoretically reprogram our cells by tweaking genes that are central to aging. This would require technology that we don’t presently have, but Magalhães thinks it can be created. His great-grandfather died of pneumonia—a leading cause of mortality in the 1920s. When Magalhães contracted the same disease as a child, he was cured with a simple dose of penicillin. He thinks scientists can similarly develop therapies for aging, an endeavor to which he has now devoted his career. “I want to cheat death,” he says bluntly.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... umans-get/

[jasmine]

My grandaunt lived for 104 years. I do not know anyone in our family who has lived until 100 years of age. However, in our culture, there have been numerous stories about long life as well as eternal life. We don't know if these stories are real or just figments of imagination, yet there are many people who believe that ancient savants have lived more than 1000 years, and some even go further to say some savants have lived for many thousanbds of years.

[mr_iqman]

When you really think about it, it's not really a far-fetched idea. A good amount of people believe in the christian bible and its teachings. And in there it talks about some people on earth living for a thousand or more years.