How long can the human body live if no accidents or diseases intervene? How to extend life to 150 years, according to some researchers.
In "Being a Machine," Mark O'Connell chronicles the daring attempts of Silicon Valley brainiacs to become immortal. Among Google's top executives, the journalist writes, there are indeed those who swallow 150 pills a day convinced they will stop aging. Even Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) are very serious when they say that our brains can, in the future, be loaded on a computer and from there take other forms, not necessarily organic.
Some researchers, however, have kept their feet on the ground and wondered how long the human body can live if no trauma (such as a car accident) or disease does not intervene to end the life of a person.
What the researchers discovered about the inevitability of aging
"How long could the human body survive if everything else went really well and humans were always living in a stress-free environment?" That's the question from which Heather Whitson, director of the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at Duke University, started. In fact, the findings of available studies on the subject highlight a "pace of aging" that cannot be circumvented and that places a limit on the maximum human lifespan.
To identify the maximum length of existence under ideal conditions, Timothy Pyrkov, a scientist at the Singapore-based company Gero, observed three groups of people living in the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, assessing changes in their blood cell counts and daily number of steps taken.
After recording the cell counts and step counts of the individuals under observation, the researchers noticed a difference between the younger and older observers. In fact, the bodies of the older ones showed a lower capacity in restoring cell number and motor functions to a stable level after a disruption (such as trauma or disease).
How long can a human live at most according to the scientists' findings
As a result, it is clear that the body's ability to restore the balance of structural and metabolic systems fades over time.
In the best conditions, according to the authors of the study, human resilience vanishes altogether between 120 and 150 years, which would then represent the threshold limit for the survival of a human being.
Naturally in the animal world things are very different and some scholars have observed with amazement that, for example, some ants never age. Not to mention the jellyfish.
Giuseppe Giordano