To continue your line of logic, it may be more informative to think from the causal side. Life is effectively a mixture model combining two Poisson point proce

To continue your line of logic, it may be more informative to think from the causal side. Life is effectively a mixture model combining two Poisson point process of things that can kill you (roughly, causes of infant mortality and causes of adult mortality)[0]. We've thankfully been able to shift the mixture weight pretty hard away from infant mortality with modern medicine and improved living conditions globally, but we're still linearly chipping away at an exponential problem (because events in Poisson point processes occur with exponential frequency - the most likely time for an event to occur is always, "now", even if the mean is every 79 years). Even were we to completely eliminate all causes of death except things that can kill a healthy person in under a minute, we'd probably just end up with a prettier (probably a few decades shifted, possibly amplified[1]) Poisson distribution. It probably wouldn't be hugely different than what we have now, either - all the top causes of death have a "quick" option, and it doesn't take much cumulative probability of death to massively increase the probability your life will end before a certain age. The article may be right that there is no cap to maximal age, but the likelihood of achieving ages greater than those seen may require significant time, even with the current population level, even if we started intervening generically. I would guess it will always be rare that people live to extreme age, even if that age manages to shift up another decade (shifting the average age of death into the high 90s). [0] The resulting Poisson distribution of deaths is damped and left-skewed because deaths are not independent (saying which is to eliminate significant real-world detail), which is technically a requirement of Poisson point processes. [1] Life saving measures are also not independent, which could be a significant factor if we could really recover from anything that required more than a minute to die.