Maximum lifespan

Maximum lifespan is the longest documented or theoretically possible age that a member of a species can reach under optimal conditions, distinct from average life expectancy across a population. In humans, the empirical record stands at 122 years and 164 days, set by the French supercentenarian Jeanne Calment (1875–1997); no independently validated case has come close since. Dong, Milholland & Vijg (Nature, 2016) analysed global demographic data from the International Database on Longevity and found that the annual age at death of the world's oldest person plateaued around 115 years after 1995, concluding that a soft ceiling near 115–125 years is biologically imposed — likely by the accumulating molecular and cellular damage that characterises aging and that no medical intervention has yet reversed at scale. This interpretation is actively contested: Lenart & Vaupel (Nature, 2017) argued that the same data are statistically consistent with continued, if slow, increases in maximum age, and that Calment's record is an extreme-value outlier rather than evidence of a hard limit. Olshansky et al. (Nature Aging, 2024), analysing survival trends in the longest-lived national populations, found life expectancy gains decelerating sharply and concluded that radical extension beyond the current empirical maximum remains implausible within the twenty-first century absent breakthroughs not yet demonstrated in humans. Whether maximum lifespan is a fixed biological constant or a plastic ceiling that geroscience interventions could progressively raise remains one of the central, unresolved questions in aging research.