I believe the Hayflick limit puts that upper limit at around 120-130 years. Obviously there's going to be outliers, but for the most part that's going to be the most that human cells are capable of dividing without external intervention/engineering.


Sorry, but when a document contradicts itself in numerous places, I find myself a little disinclined to believe it. Especially when it's purported to have come from a "higher power." I bet you're one of those people who believes that God wrote it, aren't you?

Unless you're talking about physical size. How big would my feet need to be before you believed me?

Right, your entire argument is based on religion. According to what you said the bigger your feet are, the longer you live. If that were so, why is it that today some people with size 12 feet are outlived by people with size 5 feet? Not to mention if someone had 20m long feet, they would have to be something like 100m tall. If you try to say that they were normal sized but had giant feet, I'll laugh at you. Any 2m person with 20m feet, wouldn't even be able to move, unless their feet were toothpicks.
You claim your grandparents outlived your parents. Your grandparents would have been born in a time when their wasn't as much pollution in the air, and people made healthier choices then they do today. Let's also assume that your father was born in the 60's-70's. That was the unhealthiest age of human history besides the 21st century. I wouldn't be surprised if your grandparents were still alive today. As for saying that that's not true, my own grandparents are alive, and they're more active then my dad.
Not every time has it's own age limit. There are things called evolution, and mathematical impossibilities. Once humans begin to evolve, they can't simply de-evolve. After a point has been reached, there is no going back, unless there are extreme circumstances. In the case of people, there is little chance that any one could live beyond around 130 years. That's assuming that they've reached the end of their evolutionary cycle, and they haven't made a single unhealthy choice in their life, and they're fit. At a certain point your body becomes unable to form as many new cells. Your body detoriates after a certain point of time, making life inhabitable. Not to mention no matter what you do, there will always be that time when all the moisture drains out of your body slowly, and inevitably. Even if you could survive that, you'd become a wrinkled shell, your muscles will deteriorate becoming weaker and weaker over time, until they are incapable of performing the slightest movement. That my young padawan is something called "The Ravages of Time".
No person could escape that through normal means, and until scientists solve cold fusion, and figure out how to merge our consciousnesses into android bodies, this whole living forever problem will be impossible.

For me, the real question is how fully you live. I mean, if I were given 2 options:

a) Living a long and boring life.
b) Shorter but more interesting life.

I'd definitely go for option B.
In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

I'm sorry but that's completely irrelevant to the topic. It's scientifically, as in according to science, what is the maximum number of years that humans could possibly survive to. Not how well you lived those years, but how long those years will last.
Don't enter the topic if you're going to change it from something actually interesting, to something completely unrelated in anyway.

Just wanted to add a different point of view to the discussion.

Dscigs: your point would totally make sense had you not just written a pretty lengthy paragraph on buzzwords and the dispute of a pretty irrelevant post.

Anyways, what I'm saying is total pseudoscience, but wouldn't it be perfectly possible to renew existing neurons/add to their number with a little experimenting on science's part? It should hardly be much more than a microscopic plastic surgery, I'll do some research to see if something like that could be attainable nowdays.

I was thinking that'd work too, such as stem cell type-research. I actually think that was one of the goals of stem cell research, to find a way to prolong an individuals life after his/her cells have "died". My problem is, wouldn't that be too difficult of a surgery (currently)? A full body cell transplant is a doozy.

Furthermore, would new cells react and respond in the same way that your old cells do? It may very well be like being in a new body. You'd probably have to replace nerves and things too.

Not to mention people would start growing again if you gave them a complete set of new cells, right? I'm shakey on this.

This is all theory, just things I've thought up in the last 5 minutes.

Usually when hanz0 says something, he is right. And I didn't understand for shit what you just said either..

There are various methods for bypassing the hayflick limit, so even though we know of the limitation, we are aware that it can be bypassed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line


That's not a problem in the first place. Brain cells divide like any other cell, adding neurons would do all kinds of shit, but wouldn't help you live longer.


Global life expectancy and life span is increasing, even if you can anecdotally say "my grandfather and grandmother lived longer than my father" the averages are still increasing.

User infracted: Useless post.