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> Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. This graph suggests that a 20-year-old in 1850 would on average expect to live anothe

by MarkMc 8y ago

> Human lifespan has increased since ancient times, but not by that much. This graph suggests that a 20-year-old in 1850 would on average expect to live another 40 years, while a 20-year-old in 2015 would expect to live another 60 years: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-by-age-in-the-UK-1700-to-2013.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Life-e... That's an increase of 50%, which I would say is remarkable. Would people in ancient times have lived significantly longer than people in 1850? If not, human lifespan has increased a great deal since ancient times.

rjkennedy98 8y ago
The real misunderstanding is how big an impact modern medicine has had. Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect have had a much bigger impact on lifespan than medicine.
- naravara 8y ago
  >Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect I suspect almost ALL of this can be attributed to having plumbing that magically flushes your waste away, having people wash their hands after using the bathroom, and women being fed well enough to survive childbirth. It's astonishing how much morbidity happened in the past just because water sources would get contaminated by people bathing or excreting into them. Apparently even a crazy amount of deaths in childbirth were attributable to bad hygiene/sanitation. Once you correct for those three almost everything else looks like a little sliver. The presence of antibiotics is the only things that even come close in its impact. If we wanted to have a comparable additional impact today we'd need to accomplish something like wiping out all the disease-carrying insects (mosquitoes, tsetse flies, etc.)
lucideer 8y ago
> That's an increase of 50% ... from an arbitrary starting point of 20. Why 20? What I mean is, if you're 50, it's an increase of 200%, which you could say is even more remarkable except that it can't be as it's the same statistic?
- wjnc 8y ago
  Because infancy-related deaths have clearly declined most in recent decades and excluding them by some arbitrary cut-off still is reasonable methodologically? A graph would have been better.
- MarkMc 8y ago
  I'm not sure why you feel that life expectancy at age 20 is the same statistic as life expectancy at age 50, but to answer your question I chose age 20 because many people seem to think that the only major improvement has been in childhood mortality. But clearly there has also been significant improvement in adult mortality - at all ages.

by MarkMc 8y ago

rjkennedy98 8y ago

The real misunderstanding is how big an impact modern medicine has had. Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect have had a much bigger impact on lifespan than medicine.

naravara 8y ago
>Public health efforts, better nutrition, ect I suspect almost ALL of this can be attributed to having plumbing that magically flushes your waste away, having people wash their hands after using the bathroom, and women being fed well enough to survive childbirth. It's astonishing how much morbidity happened in the past just because water sources would get contaminated by people bathing or excreting into them. Apparently even a crazy amount of deaths in childbirth were attributable to bad hygiene/sanitation. Once you correct for those three almost everything else looks like a little sliver. The presence of antibiotics is the only things that even come close in its impact. If we wanted to have a comparable additional impact today we'd need to accomplish something like wiping out all the disease-carrying insects (mosquitoes, tsetse flies, etc.)

lucideer 8y ago

> That's an increase of 50% ... from an arbitrary starting point of 20. Why 20? What I mean is, if you're 50, it's an increase of 200%, which you could say is even more remarkable except that it can't be as it's the same statistic?

wjnc 8y ago
Because infancy-related deaths have clearly declined most in recent decades and excluding them by some arbitrary cut-off still is reasonable methodologically? A graph would have been better.
MarkMc 8y ago
I'm not sure why you feel that life expectancy at age 20 is the same statistic as life expectancy at age 50, but to answer your question I chose age 20 because many people seem to think that the only major improvement has been in childhood mortality. But clearly there has also been significant improvement in adult mortality - at all ages.