4 ms·

It's not artificial at all. Lifespan is a distribution, what OP describes is moving the distribution around a bit without moving the bounds.

• kbenson 11y ago
  What if there are no upper bounds, and all there is to work with is the distribution?
  • ska 11y ago
    Do we have any evidence for that view? There is at least some evidence for the converse.
    • kbenson 11y ago
      What evidence is that? What single thing is absolutely sure to kill us by age X? Specifically, I don't think "aging", which is really a root cause of other things which cause us to die counts. If the problems aging causes could be reversed or cured, then aging no longer would cause death.
      • ska 11y ago
        Telomere shortening would be one example which, if there is no mitigation possible (and we don't have one or know that one is possible) is a pretty hard limit. That's why I said "some evidence" not "strong evidence", we haven't proven that there is an unavoidable hard limit, but a) we have no evidence that there isn't and b) we know of several mechanisms that look like they may be hard limits.
        • kbenson 11y ago
          I'm aware of telomere shortening, but my understanding is that the theory is not as widely accepted as you imply. I could be wrong though, so feel free to support that,I'm open to new information. That said, it's a limit we may need to overcome at some point if we wish to prolong our lives past a certain point. It's a good candidate for an upper bound on life expectancy, but we still aren't even sure it works as we think. I think that's a good reason why we haven't directly worked on increasing the bounds of life expectancy, we are still definitively identifying them. Note: I may have come across a bit sharply in my prior comment, but my intent was literally to just ask for the evidence you were referring to and supply criteria I thought needed to apply.