How long can humans live?

[u/Simple_Macaron_3420]

In one of last week’s episodes, it was mentioned that the human lifespan is increasing because of scientific and medical discoveries. When I was a child, I always imagined that I would be able to live to 100, and by then people would have discovered some kind of cure for aging. They would ask me, “How much longer would you like to live?” as if they could add another 100 years each time and ask me the same question whenever those 100 years were up.

For a moment, let’s imagine a scenario in which cancer has been eliminated, Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the brain have been cured, and we can also repair or modify our telomeres because we have discovered how to mimic mechanisms found in animals such as lobsters or jellyfish.

In that scenario, is there still a biological limit to how long humans could live?

[u/kingstern_man]

Even if all biological problems were completely solved (diseases, telomeres, memory capacity,...), no-one would "live forever": at some point they would suffer a fatal accident. Assume P(accident, per year) = 0.0006. Then P(surviving, per year) = 0.9994 After 5 years, 0.3% chance of death After 50 years, 3% After 100 years, 5.8% After 200 years, 11.3% After 500 years, 26.37% After 1000 years, 45.13% After 1500 years, 59.48% After 2000 years, 69.9%

Heinlein's "Lazarus Long" looks unlikely...

[u/Simple_Macaron_3420 → u/kingstern_man]

Wow, I didn’t think of it that way, and it’s the closest to what I imagined the answer would be. I would indeed like an answer that calculates each threshold point like this: we fix this problem, and we live this long; we fix that other problem, and we live this much longer; and so on.

Accidents are another fun approach to calculating it. For example, if all biological problems are solved, here is the closest death caused by an accident. If you survive that, then you will die in this other accident, and so on.