I've heard a theory that the first person to reach 150 will also be the first person to live to 1000, because they'll be around for an extra 50 years of anti-aging research, which will buy them more time, and so on.
We do seem to have a hard cap of around 120 which
basically hasn't moved - we are just bringing the averages closer to it. I'm optimistic we'll go past it but not without some advances on a different level of everything so far.
I think we have too few people still approaching 120 to know whether that apparent cap is more than "just" the combination of the risk of multiple mortality causes all getting high enough to make it unlikely.
Knock out or reduce a couple of the big ones, and we'll get an idea.
It's likely there are other limits. Eg. Telomere shortening, but I don't think we can say we're hitting other limits at 120
> but we’ll need to do a bit of research to get us to 150, for instance
Indeed, but we could additionally to research also do something against the most common causes of (early) death - the more people live longer, the higher the chance is that one of those who has not suffered a preventable death is the one that lives to be 150 years.
And there's a lot that we can easily tackle at relatively low cost compared to the gains (both in productivity and years-lived): incentivize people to quit or reduce alcohol and tobacco consumption, make high quality food affordable and accessible to everyone (=combat "food deserts"), reduce working hours in a first step towards 40 hours and then 30 or even 20 hours, reduce commute times, mandate vaccinations for everything that Army soldiers get across the population, increase access to cancer awareness programs and to first-class physical and mental healthcare so that cancer and other illnesses can get detected and treated early enough...
It was from an anti aging TED talk I believe.