This is generally a good point, but I'm not entirely sure it applies to high-end outliers for aging? We've improved medicine in a lot of ways, but rising lifes

This is generally a good point, but I'm not entirely sure it applies to high-end outliers for aging? We've improved medicine in a lot of ways, but rising lifespans (even measured from adulthood) are almost entirely driven by preventing certain premature deaths and increasing life expectancy for other terminal conditions. Very elderly people have generally escaped a lot of common mortality risks already (heart disease onset is 85% by age 80 in the US, implying that someone who doesn't have it at age 100 isn't likely to). Meanwhile, they rarely benefit from our improving treatments for other risks - we can substantially improve life expectancy for even incurable cancers in adulthood, but centenarians can't tolerate the sort of aggressive treatments we use for that result. (Interestingly, I had thought Alzheimer's was similar to heart disease, but annual onset rates at 90+ are almost as high as at 65-89 combined - it appears to simply be a steadily rising risk. Of course, we can't treat it well and incidents rates haven't changed much, so it's not really a factor in which cohort should have the longest lifespans.) The best visualization I've found is a bit messy, but nicely breaks down life expectancy by age over time. Since 1850, 70-year-olds appear to have gained about 7 years of expectancy, and I'm guessing 100-year-olds have gained substantially less. 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...