Despite the fact that the average human life expectancy is growing steadily (thanks mainly to improved diet and progress in the field of medicine), experts believe that it has a ceiling and we have already reached it.
Humanity will never be able to cross the threshold of life expectancy of 125 years, scientists say.
Since the 19th century, life expectancy has steadily increased due to improvements in health care, nutrition, medical advances, and more.
On average, children born now will live 80 years, while the average life expectancy for those born in 1900 was 50 years.
Since the 1970s, the maximum life expectancy has also begun to grow - that is, the age to which the oldest people on the planet live.
However, as follows from recent studies, this upward arc of the maximum lifespan has a ceiling, and we almost got to it.
Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York concluded that humans will never be able to break the life records that have already been set.
The results of their research have been published in the scientific journal Nature.
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In the course of their work, they focused on studying data related to the lives of people who (as officially confirmed) lived 110 years or more between 1968 and 2006 in the United States, France, Japan and the UK.
The age of death among these centenarians rose rapidly from the 1970s to the early 1990s, but around 1995 remained at about the same level. This means that the duration of human life has a certain limit.
Researchers believe we reached our lifespan ceiling around 1997, when Frenchwoman Jeanne Calmen died at 122 years old - the longest documented life in history.
According to researchers, 125 years is the absolute limit for the duration of a human life. This means that further progress in the fight against chronic and infectious diseases may raise the bar for average life expectancy, but the level of maximum life expectancy will remain unchanged.
Seva Bardin