Immortality dashed, but humans could live to be 150

Humans could potentially live to be 150 years old, scientists have concluded in a groundbreaking study.

However, any hopes Silicon Valley billionaires may have of making themselves immortal were dashed.

Researchers said 150 was the “absolute limit” any healthy human body would be able to sustain.

Thousands of volunteers in the U.S. and U.K. contributed data to the study which measured how long it took the body to recover from stresses, analyzing blood cell counts and daily step numbers recorded on a phone app.

Using artificial intelligence they were able to measure the lessening “resilience” of the body, and extrapolate the changes over time to the point where it would cease to have any resilience.

Heather Whitson, director of the Duke University Centre for the Study of Aging, who was not involved in the research, told Scientific American: “They are asking the question of ‘What’s the longest life that could be lived by a human complex system if everything else went really well, and it’s in a stress-free environment?’ ”

In doing so the study established a “pace of aging” which could be used to predict the outer limit of what was possible.

Findings from the blood samples and step counts “painted exactly the same future,” the study found.

It said aging manifested itself as a “progressive functional decline” and “resilience” would be “ultimately lost at the age in the range of 120-150 years, thus indicating the absolute limit of human lifespan”.

Currently, the oldest human being ever recorded was Jeanne Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122. Average global life expectancy is currently 73. In 1950 it was 47.