It’s an inevitable fact of life: Everyone dies. But thanks largely to major medical advances, improved sanitation, and better environmental prot

Will the Average Human Life Expectancy Ever Reach 100?

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2024-11-18 13:30:06

It’s an inevitable fact of life: Everyone dies. But thanks largely to major medical advances, improved sanitation, and better environmental protections, our collective life expectancy has steadily risen year after year starting in the 19th century (outside of a few pandemics). More recent data, however, has suggested that this gravy train is grinding to a crawl.

A study published this past October in Nature Aging, for instance, found that, while life expectancy in countries like the U.S. and other high-income nations has continued to grow, the rate of increase has substantially slowed down over the past thirty years. Moreover, the odds of someone reaching the age of 100 these days remain very low; in the U.S., only 3.1% of women and 1.3% of men born in 2019 are expected to become a centenarian. In light of the findings, the researchers behind the study argue that humanity has started to brush up against the barriers of our natural mortality, and that our current approach to treating age-related diseases like cancer will likely only provide diminishing returns and incremental boosts in longevity moving forward.

Not everyone is quite so pessimistic about the future of aging, though. For this Giz Asks, we asked several experts whether the average person might one day reach 100—and, more generally, if there’s a hard limit to human longevity and how we might break through it.