Immortalists suffered a severe insult with the publication of an article in Nature in October of this year. It was accompanied by a corollary article in the Atlantic, "Humans Won't Ever Live Beyond 115 Years." Both presentations from the same source carried the same message. While life expectancy has increased dramatically the fact remains that the lifespan, the upper limit, of humans has probably reached its maximum of 115 years.
The authors of the work are Jan Vijg, and L. and S. Kramer of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The background of their important article streams from the fact that for the past century human life expectancy has been steadily increasing from 40 to 70 plus years. This has led some to extrapolate that maybe this gain will extend upwards into the 150-200 range. The Einstein workers however conclude that the maximum human lifespan has already been reached, and it seems to plateau at 115.
They analyzed data from The Human Mortality Database which compiles mortality population data from 40 countries. All of these countries have shown a decline in mortality. But particularly noteworthy was the fact that the fraction of each age cohort that survives until age 70 increases according to their year of birth. However, when they looked at people who were over 100 these gains decreased rapidly suggesting a plateau. The authors point out that there have been no records of people older than Jean Calment, 122, ever, despite billions of age records. They conclude that the diminishing gains in reducing late life mortality suggest a possible limit to human lifespan. They take issue with the claims of some that the first human who will live until 150 has already been born.
Mdm. Calment is exhibit number one. Her longevity was carefully validated to 122. This is critical because almost all claims of extreme longevity until now have been fraudulent, (SEE Methusaleh) Hers was very securely documented.
These workers looked at France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and US where the largest number of people over 110 years of age reside. From 1970 to 1990 the maximum age continued to rise, but then after 1995 this increase stopped, suggesting a ceiling of longevity.
This of course echoes the basic work of Leonard Hayflick whom I have cited before. His work is responsible for the famous Hayflick Limit in which after explicit examination of cells in tissue culture he found that after a finite number of cell divisions the cells stopped dividing and died. So cells in vitro are mortal after all. This has been codified as the Hayflick Limit.
From the Einstein work it now appears that there is a Calment Limit as well, an in vivo certainty that immortalitmains beyond possibility. The limits of life span are finite. There may never have been a person who lived this long before and possibly again. Dr. Vijg writes "Once you survive childhood you are likely to survive for a long time. There have been great advances in keeping older people alive longer and made progress in medical care and safety, however no one has exceeded 122." He feels that the best we can hope for is to be healthy until 115 by which time our bodies will die from accumulated insult. I have turned this fact into a concept that I call entropy which, I feel, is the ultimate explanation for the finitude of life. Everything in the universe dies, even stars. Energy extinguishes after being concentrated for a finite time, The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Sorry, immortalists there is death in your future regardless of the hype and other snake-oil remedies that you embrace.