system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is there a limit to how many elements there can be?
gpt
Yes, probably. But we don't know what it is, and it's likely higher than what we're currently capable of producing experimentally.

The IUPAC has strict criteria for what can be considered an "element". One of this criteria is that it has at least one isotope with a lifetime at least on the order of 10^(-14) seconds.

As you go up in Z around the superheavy elements, they become very unstable to alpha decay and spontaneous fission. If you extrapolate the lifetimes to heavier species based on trends in nuclei that we know of, eventually you'll probably reach a point where no heavier species has a lifetime which meets that criterion in the definition of an element.