"Healthy aging" and "successful aging" as they are used in the research community are fig leaves to avoid talking about extension of human life. The researcher

"Healthy aging" and "successful aging" as they are used in the research community are fig leaves to avoid talking about extension of human life. The researcher pretends that ways to remove or slow aspects of aging will not in fact extend the operating life span of the biological machinery making up a human individual. It is a form of institutional cowardice in most cases, not a belief that we can magically engineer humans that live in excellent health and then somehow drop dead on the present schedule. Drop dead of what, if health is excellent, if age-related disease is prevented, if declines do not exist any more? We are machines, complex yes, but subject to exactly the same statistical laws governing the operation of any system. See reliability theory and its application to, separately, electrical engineering and biological aging, for example.