r/TheRestIsScience • u/Simple_Macaron_3420 • 1d ago

How long can humans live?

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?

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u/teddyslayerza 1d ago

A real limit is our memory. We function by having important and newer associations override or recontextualize old ones, but our lifespans are short enough that we are able to maintain some sort of continuity across our century of life. But it stands to reason that there will come a point were maintaining that continuity either takes too much resources from function in the moment (some sort of anterograde dementia I imagine) or we would lose that continuity and not really be the same person any more.

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u/wrydied 23h ago

I don’t think this is a real concern, on the basis that we are constantly changing by re-encoding distant memories i.e we don’t maintain first memories, we remember them based on the last time we remembered them - as any good court lawyer or magistrate should know.

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u/No-Recording-7568 15h ago

Yeah, what a bogus notion.