Scientists have discovered the maximum age humans can live to

We hate to get too morbid here, but whatever way you slice it - we're all going to die at some point.

Plenty of us occasionally get caught up by a stray thought about when it might happen - and you might have even found yourself wondering how long it's actually possible to live for, if you manage to stay as healthy as you can.

Well, researchers in the Netherlands have looked into just this, working out the maximum age humans can actually live to.

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They looked at data from some 75,000 people in the Netherlands to see when and how they died, trying to work out not their life expectancy, but rather their maximum possible life duration.

Life expectancy, after all, accounts for the circumstances you're in, so the diagnosis of a major illness would play into it.

These researchers were instead trying to figure out an average life span if none of those adverse situations cropped up, and they came to slightly different numbers for men and women.

For men, the maximum lifespan was apparently 114.1 years of age, while women got slightly longer at 115.7 years.

Their research seemingly indicated that getting beyond 115 even in perfect circumstances is very unlikely - which doesn't make it impossible, but definitely doesn't apply to most of us.

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The current Guinness World Record holders for old age, after all, are a 114-year-old man and a 115-year-old woman.

Professor John Einmahl, one of the researchers behind the study, told AFP: "On average, people live longer, but the very oldest among us have not gotten older over the last 30 years. There is certainly some kind of a wall here. Of course the average life expectancy has increased. Nevertheless, the maximum ceiling itself hasn't changed."

Still, now you have a number to aim at in your head, if you like to have a big long-term goal (even one where you're not in control of all the variables).

Some people, of course, are trying to take things into their own hands, like the so-called biohacker Bryan Johnson, who's doing everything he can to reverse the ageing process in his body.