October 2, 2025 • 13 mins
Your body carries within it a countdown clock, and scientists have finally calculated when it stops ticking.
Read the article: https://weirddarkness.com/human-lifespan-limit-150-years/
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.
#HumanLifespan #AgingScience #150YearLimit #Longevity #WeirdDarkness
Read the article: https://weirddarkness.com/human-lifespan-limit-150-years/
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.
#HumanLifespan #AgingScience #150YearLimit #Longevity #WeirdDarkness
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
I'm Darren Marler, and this is a weird Darkness bonus byte.
The human body comes with an expiration date, not the
kind printed on medication bottles or stamped on food packaging,
but something far more fundamental, written into the very fabric
of our biological systems. Scientists from a Singapore biotech company
(00:26):
have discovered that no matter how healthy you stay, how
many diseases you dodge, or how perfectly you maintain your body,
there exists an absolute ceiling on human life that nothing
currently known to science can breach. Timothy Perkove, a researcher
as Singapore based biotech company Zero, led a team that
(00:47):
examined the piece of aging in three large cohorts from
the US, UK and Russia. Working alongside scientists from Roswell
Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York. The team
wasn't just looking at how people die. They were searching
for something far more elusive, the mathematical boundaries of life itself.
The researchers assessed changes in blood cell counts and daily
(01:10):
step counts, analyzing them by age groups ranging from sixteen
to thirty five years old, thirty five to sixty five,
and then those over sixty five. What they discovered wasn't
a steady decline as many might expect. Instead, they found
something more unsettling, a pattern of diminishing returns that follow
us from birth to death. The magic number turned out
(01:34):
to be somewhere between one hundred twenty and one hundred
fifty years. Using this predictable pace of decline to determine
when resilience would disappear entirely, leading to death, they found
a range of one hundred twenty to one hundred fifty years.
This wasn't just another statistical projection or educated guess. The
researchers had stumbled upon what appears to be a fundamental
(01:55):
biological property of human existence. Think of your bond as
a rubber band. When you're young, you can stretch it,
twist it, pull it out of shape, and it snaps
right back to its original form. A cold knocks you
down for a few days, then you're back to normal.
A scraped knee heals completely. Your energy returns after a
late night. But something sinister happens as the decades pass.
(02:20):
As we age, more and more time is required to
recover after a perturbation, and on average we spend less
and less time close to the optimal physiological state. The
researchers discovered this isn't just about getting sick more often
or healing more slowly. It's about a fundamental breakdown in
what they call physiological resilience, your body's ability to return
(02:42):
to its baseline state after any disruption. The study found that,
on average, the time taken for our bodies to return
to a normal state after stress grows from two weeks
for forty year old healthy adults to six weeks for
eighty year olds. Follow that trajectory forward and you hit
a wall. Extrapolation of this data shows a complete loss
(03:04):
of human body resilience at around one hundred twenty to
one hundred fifty years of age. The discovery connects to
something noticed almost two centuries ago by a British actuary
named Benjamin Gompertz. In eighteen twenty seven, while pouring over
mortality tables, Gompertz made an observation that would haunt demographic
science for generations. He showed that over much of the
(03:26):
adult human lifespan, age specific mortality rates increased in an
exponential manner. Your probability of dying during a given year
doubles every eight years. For a twenty five year old American,
the probability of dying during the next year is a
fairly minuscule zero point zero three percent, about one in
three thousand. When they're thirty three, it'll be about one
(03:49):
in fifteen hundred. When they're forty two, it'll be about
one in seven hundred and fifty, and so on. The
mathematical precision of this doubling is almost eerie in its consistency,
despite large differences between populations in levels of mortality in
earlier life. The slopes in a graph of log mortality
rate against age showed a close approximation to parallelism after
(04:12):
midlife forty years, with a mortality doubling time consistently around
eight years. Whether you lived in India in nineteen hundred
or Sweden in nineteen forty nine, whether you were rich
or poor, the same iron law applied. The Gyro team
discovered that the number of individuals showing signs of the
loss of resilience increases exponentially with age and doubles every
(04:36):
eight years at a rate matching that of the Gompertz
mortality law. It was as if they had found the
mechanism behind Goempertz's observation not just the death rates double,
but why only one person in documented history has pushed
against this boundary and lived to tell about it, or
rather not tell about it. Jean Louis Coalman of France
(04:57):
lived to the age of one hundred, twenty two years
and one one hundred and sixty four days, with her
birth on February twenty first, eighteen seventy five and her
death on August fourth, nineteen ninety seven. Her case has
been extensively validated, though some researchers have raised questions about
whether she might have assumed her mother's identity, a theory
that most experts reject based on extensive documentation. Her age
(05:21):
was well documented throughout her life, her birth certificate was preserved,
and she was listed in fourteen census records. Initially regarded
with skepticism in the scientific community, her case has been
extensively validated while still alive, with dozens of interviews conducted
and large documentary research and verification performed. Kallman's life straddled
three centuries of human experience. She met Vincent van Go
(05:45):
at the age of thirteen in Arles and wasn't impressed
by him. She outlived both her daughter and grandson. Perhaps
most remarkably, she entered into a reverse mortgage agreement at
the age of ninety with a forty seven year old
lawyer who agreed to pay her money until her death
in exchange for her apartment. The lawyer died at age
seventy seven, and his widow continued making payments for nearly
(06:08):
three more years until Gene passed away at the age
of one hundred and twenty two, having paid out more
than three times the value of the house. The research
revealed that human aging isn't a smooth slide, but rather
occurs in three distinct phases. The researchers observed the onset
of aging at age thirty five, which manifests itself as
(06:28):
a slow deviation of physiological signals from their reference values.
This corresponds with observable life changes. The authors noted this
period is often when an athlete's sports career ends, an
indication that something in physiology may really be changing at
this age. The team developed something called DOSI. DOSI, a
(06:49):
measure combining blood cell counts and physical activity data. DOSY
values slowly increased during a growth phase until age thirty
followed by a slightly steeper elevation starting after age forty.
Then after about age sixty five, people show exponentially increasing
DOSEY values with passing years. Each phase represents a different
(07:10):
stage in the body's gradual loss of its ability to
maintain equilibrium. For tech billionaires pouring millions into life extension research,
these findings land like a bucket of cold water. Professor
Andre Gutkov, Senior Vice president and Chair of Department of
Self Stress Biology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and
co author of the work, stated it explains why even
(07:32):
most effective prevention and treatment of age related diseases can
only approve the average, but not the maximum lifespan, unless
true anti aging therapies have been developed. The research suggests
that curing cancer, heart disease, and every other age related
ailment would only help us reach the maximum, not exceeded.
(07:53):
The predicted loss of resilience even in the healthiest, most
successfully aging individuals might explain why we do not see
see an evidential increase of the maximum lifespan while the
average lifespan was steadily growing. In a move that seems
equal parts fascinating and morbid, the gerro team has developed
an iPhone app called gero Sense that can track your
(08:14):
biological age and resilience using data from wearable devices. Peter Fedjev,
co founder and CEO of Jerro, explained gero Sense predicts
biological age as well as how steeble it is and
how quickly it'll likely change, so that we can timely
detect anomalies due to changes in lifestyle or health status.
The app measures the same markers the research team studied,
(08:37):
tracking how your body responds to daily stresses and calculating
how quickly you bounce back. It's essentially a real time
monitor of your position on the resilience curve, watching as
your body's rubber band gradually loses its snap. David Sinclair,
the Harvard Medical School professor of genetics known for his
work on aging, commented on the findings, saying the investigation
(08:58):
shows the recovery rate is an important signature of aging
that can guide the development of drugs to slow the
process and extend health span. The key words there is slow,
not stop, not reverse, but slow. Doctor Percove adds the
researchers don't foresee any laws of nature prohibiting interventions that
could extend life beyond these limits. The aging model they've
(09:21):
developed might guide the creation of therapies that could push
the boundaries further, But for now the wall stands at
one hundred and fifty years. The implications stretch beyond academic curiosity.
Professor Brian Kennedy from the National University of Singapore noted
the research will help to understand the limits of longevity
and future anti aging interventions. What's even more important, the
(09:43):
study may help to bridge the rising gap between the
health span and life span, which continues to widen in
most developing countries. Living longer isn't the same as living well.
The research suggests, even if we could somehow push past
one hundred and fifty years, we might not want to.
By that point, the body would have zero resilience, unable
(10:04):
to recover from even the smallest challenge. A minor cold
could become catastrophic. A small cut might never heal. The
slightest stress could tip the system into irreversible decline. Perhaps
the most unsettling aspect of the research is its mathematical precision.
This isn't about bad luck or good genes or healthy living.
(10:26):
The researchers stated that death is an essential biological property
independent of stress factors. In other words, death isn't just
something that happens to us, It's built into the system.
The research validated their model across different populations and different measures.
Blood cell counts and step counts, two completely unrelated metrics,
(10:47):
painted the same picture. Study co author Peter Fedjev noted
that despite most biologists viewing blood counts and step counts
as pretty different, the fact that both sources paint exactly
the same future suggests this pace of aging component is real.
Since time began, humans have searched for the fountain of youth,
the elixir of life, the secret to immortality. This research
(11:12):
suggests we've been looking in the wrong direction. The question
isn't how to live forever, it's how to make the
most of the one hundred and fifty years maximum that
our biology allows. Your body is running a program written
in the language of cellular decay and systematic breakdown. Every
eight years, the program doubles its speed. Every recovery takes
(11:33):
a little longer, every bounce back bounces a little less
far back. The resilience that defines life itself slowly, mathematically,
inevitably erodes until nothing remains but the final inability to
return to baseline, the point we call death. The researchers
haven't just found the limit of human life, they have
(11:54):
found the equation that governs it, the mathematical proof that
immortality remains for now firmly in the realm of mythology.
Somewhere between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and
fifty years, the music stops, the equation completes, and the
countdown that began at birth finally reaches zero. This actually
(12:15):
shouldn't be a surprise to those who read their Bibles.
In Genesis six, verse three, God himself states, my spirit
shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.
His days shall be one hundred twenty years. It was
twenty five hundred to thirty two hundred years ago that
was written, and we've still not made any progress past it.
(12:35):
If you'd like to read this story for yourself, you
can read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've placed
a link to it in the episode description, and you
can find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange,
and more, including numerous stories that never make it to
the podcast, at Weirddarkness dot com. Slash News
I'm Darren Marler, and this is a weird Darkness bonus byte.
The human body comes with an expiration date, not the
kind printed on medication bottles or stamped on food packaging,
but something far more fundamental, written into the very fabric
of our biological systems. Scientists from a Singapore biotech company
(00:26):
have discovered that no matter how healthy you stay, how
many diseases you dodge, or how perfectly you maintain your body,
there exists an absolute ceiling on human life that nothing
currently known to science can breach. Timothy Perkove, a researcher
as Singapore based biotech company Zero, led a team that
(00:47):
examined the piece of aging in three large cohorts from
the US, UK and Russia. Working alongside scientists from Roswell
Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York. The team
wasn't just looking at how people die. They were searching
for something far more elusive, the mathematical boundaries of life itself.
The researchers assessed changes in blood cell counts and daily
(01:10):
step counts, analyzing them by age groups ranging from sixteen
to thirty five years old, thirty five to sixty five,
and then those over sixty five. What they discovered wasn't
a steady decline as many might expect. Instead, they found
something more unsettling, a pattern of diminishing returns that follow
us from birth to death. The magic number turned out
(01:34):
to be somewhere between one hundred twenty and one hundred
fifty years. Using this predictable pace of decline to determine
when resilience would disappear entirely, leading to death, they found
a range of one hundred twenty to one hundred fifty years.
This wasn't just another statistical projection or educated guess. The
researchers had stumbled upon what appears to be a fundamental
(01:55):
biological property of human existence. Think of your bond as
a rubber band. When you're young, you can stretch it,
twist it, pull it out of shape, and it snaps
right back to its original form. A cold knocks you
down for a few days, then you're back to normal.
A scraped knee heals completely. Your energy returns after a
late night. But something sinister happens as the decades pass.
(02:20):
As we age, more and more time is required to
recover after a perturbation, and on average we spend less
and less time close to the optimal physiological state. The
researchers discovered this isn't just about getting sick more often
or healing more slowly. It's about a fundamental breakdown in
what they call physiological resilience, your body's ability to return
(02:42):
to its baseline state after any disruption. The study found that,
on average, the time taken for our bodies to return
to a normal state after stress grows from two weeks
for forty year old healthy adults to six weeks for
eighty year olds. Follow that trajectory forward and you hit
a wall. Extrapolation of this data shows a complete loss
(03:04):
of human body resilience at around one hundred twenty to
one hundred fifty years of age. The discovery connects to
something noticed almost two centuries ago by a British actuary
named Benjamin Gompertz. In eighteen twenty seven, while pouring over
mortality tables, Gompertz made an observation that would haunt demographic
science for generations. He showed that over much of the
(03:26):
adult human lifespan, age specific mortality rates increased in an
exponential manner. Your probability of dying during a given year
doubles every eight years. For a twenty five year old American,
the probability of dying during the next year is a
fairly minuscule zero point zero three percent, about one in
three thousand. When they're thirty three, it'll be about one
(03:49):
in fifteen hundred. When they're forty two, it'll be about
one in seven hundred and fifty, and so on. The
mathematical precision of this doubling is almost eerie in its consistency,
despite large differences between populations in levels of mortality in
earlier life. The slopes in a graph of log mortality
rate against age showed a close approximation to parallelism after
(04:12):
midlife forty years, with a mortality doubling time consistently around
eight years. Whether you lived in India in nineteen hundred
or Sweden in nineteen forty nine, whether you were rich
or poor, the same iron law applied. The Gyro team
discovered that the number of individuals showing signs of the
loss of resilience increases exponentially with age and doubles every
(04:36):
eight years at a rate matching that of the Gompertz
mortality law. It was as if they had found the
mechanism behind Goempertz's observation not just the death rates double,
but why only one person in documented history has pushed
against this boundary and lived to tell about it, or
rather not tell about it. Jean Louis Coalman of France
(04:57):
lived to the age of one hundred, twenty two years
and one one hundred and sixty four days, with her
birth on February twenty first, eighteen seventy five and her
death on August fourth, nineteen ninety seven. Her case has
been extensively validated, though some researchers have raised questions about
whether she might have assumed her mother's identity, a theory
that most experts reject based on extensive documentation. Her age
(05:21):
was well documented throughout her life, her birth certificate was preserved,
and she was listed in fourteen census records. Initially regarded
with skepticism in the scientific community, her case has been
extensively validated while still alive, with dozens of interviews conducted
and large documentary research and verification performed. Kallman's life straddled
three centuries of human experience. She met Vincent van Go
(05:45):
at the age of thirteen in Arles and wasn't impressed
by him. She outlived both her daughter and grandson. Perhaps
most remarkably, she entered into a reverse mortgage agreement at
the age of ninety with a forty seven year old
lawyer who agreed to pay her money until her death
in exchange for her apartment. The lawyer died at age
seventy seven, and his widow continued making payments for nearly
(06:08):
three more years until Gene passed away at the age
of one hundred and twenty two, having paid out more
than three times the value of the house. The research
revealed that human aging isn't a smooth slide, but rather
occurs in three distinct phases. The researchers observed the onset
of aging at age thirty five, which manifests itself as
(06:28):
a slow deviation of physiological signals from their reference values.
This corresponds with observable life changes. The authors noted this
period is often when an athlete's sports career ends, an
indication that something in physiology may really be changing at
this age. The team developed something called DOSI. DOSI, a
(06:49):
measure combining blood cell counts and physical activity data. DOSY
values slowly increased during a growth phase until age thirty
followed by a slightly steeper elevation starting after age forty.
Then after about age sixty five, people show exponentially increasing
DOSEY values with passing years. Each phase represents a different
(07:10):
stage in the body's gradual loss of its ability to
maintain equilibrium. For tech billionaires pouring millions into life extension research,
these findings land like a bucket of cold water. Professor
Andre Gutkov, Senior Vice president and Chair of Department of
Self Stress Biology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and
co author of the work, stated it explains why even
(07:32):
most effective prevention and treatment of age related diseases can
only approve the average, but not the maximum lifespan, unless
true anti aging therapies have been developed. The research suggests
that curing cancer, heart disease, and every other age related
ailment would only help us reach the maximum, not exceeded.
(07:53):
The predicted loss of resilience even in the healthiest, most
successfully aging individuals might explain why we do not see
see an evidential increase of the maximum lifespan while the
average lifespan was steadily growing. In a move that seems
equal parts fascinating and morbid, the gerro team has developed
an iPhone app called gero Sense that can track your
(08:14):
biological age and resilience using data from wearable devices. Peter Fedjev,
co founder and CEO of Jerro, explained gero Sense predicts
biological age as well as how steeble it is and
how quickly it'll likely change, so that we can timely
detect anomalies due to changes in lifestyle or health status.
The app measures the same markers the research team studied,
(08:37):
tracking how your body responds to daily stresses and calculating
how quickly you bounce back. It's essentially a real time
monitor of your position on the resilience curve, watching as
your body's rubber band gradually loses its snap. David Sinclair,
the Harvard Medical School professor of genetics known for his
work on aging, commented on the findings, saying the investigation
(08:58):
shows the recovery rate is an important signature of aging
that can guide the development of drugs to slow the
process and extend health span. The key words there is slow,
not stop, not reverse, but slow. Doctor Percove adds the
researchers don't foresee any laws of nature prohibiting interventions that
could extend life beyond these limits. The aging model they've
(09:21):
developed might guide the creation of therapies that could push
the boundaries further, But for now the wall stands at
one hundred and fifty years. The implications stretch beyond academic curiosity.
Professor Brian Kennedy from the National University of Singapore noted
the research will help to understand the limits of longevity
and future anti aging interventions. What's even more important, the
(09:43):
study may help to bridge the rising gap between the
health span and life span, which continues to widen in
most developing countries. Living longer isn't the same as living well.
The research suggests, even if we could somehow push past
one hundred and fifty years, we might not want to.
By that point, the body would have zero resilience, unable
(10:04):
to recover from even the smallest challenge. A minor cold
could become catastrophic. A small cut might never heal. The
slightest stress could tip the system into irreversible decline. Perhaps
the most unsettling aspect of the research is its mathematical precision.
This isn't about bad luck or good genes or healthy living.
(10:26):
The researchers stated that death is an essential biological property
independent of stress factors. In other words, death isn't just
something that happens to us, It's built into the system.
The research validated their model across different populations and different measures.
Blood cell counts and step counts, two completely unrelated metrics,
(10:47):
painted the same picture. Study co author Peter Fedjev noted
that despite most biologists viewing blood counts and step counts
as pretty different, the fact that both sources paint exactly
the same future suggests this pace of aging component is real.
Since time began, humans have searched for the fountain of youth,
the elixir of life, the secret to immortality. This research
(11:12):
suggests we've been looking in the wrong direction. The question
isn't how to live forever, it's how to make the
most of the one hundred and fifty years maximum that
our biology allows. Your body is running a program written
in the language of cellular decay and systematic breakdown. Every
eight years, the program doubles its speed. Every recovery takes
(11:33):
a little longer, every bounce back bounces a little less
far back. The resilience that defines life itself slowly, mathematically,
inevitably erodes until nothing remains but the final inability to
return to baseline, the point we call death. The researchers
haven't just found the limit of human life, they have
(11:54):
found the equation that governs it, the mathematical proof that
immortality remains for now firmly in the realm of mythology.
Somewhere between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and
fifty years, the music stops, the equation completes, and the
countdown that began at birth finally reaches zero. This actually
(12:15):
shouldn't be a surprise to those who read their Bibles.
In Genesis six, verse three, God himself states, my spirit
shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh.
His days shall be one hundred twenty years. It was
twenty five hundred to thirty two hundred years ago that
was written, and we've still not made any progress past it.
(12:35):
If you'd like to read this story for yourself, you
can read it on the Weird Darkness website. I've placed
a link to it in the episode description, and you
can find more stories of the paranormal, true crime, strange,
and more, including numerous stories that never make it to
the podcast, at Weirddarkness dot com. Slash News
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.