As the standard of living and access to quality healthcare continues to increases around the world, people have been living for much longer. Yet, for decades, the scientific community has been hotly debating about the absolute limit to human lifespan.

How long could a human actually live for?

Recent studies have made a case saying humans could live up to be 150 years old. Others have claimed that there is no actual age limit for humans.

Now, in a new paper published in the journal Royal Society of Open Science, researchers from the Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, argue that humans could probably live up to 130 years old, and possibly beyond that.

The paper says that although the chance for a person to reach 130 years of age is vanishingly small, there is no maximum theoretical age limit for humans. Researchers say while the general risk of death increases throughout our lifetimes, it plateaus beyond a certain age, and then remains constant.

According to Anthony Davison, lead author of the paper, and a professor of statistics at EPFL, beyond a certain age, say after 110, living for one more year is almost like flipping a coin.

Researchers analysed two sets of data for their research. The first is from the International Database on Longevity, which covers more than 1100 people who are above 110 years of age, from 13 different countries. And secondly, they looked at every person who was at least 105 years old between 2009 and 2015, in Italy.

The researchers say bases on the data available, it can be reasonably assumed that humans can live up to at least 130 years of age. Furthermore, extrapolating the findings of the study implies that there is no theoretical limit to human lifespan.

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