7 ms·

Why we Die

86 points by Grovara123 14y ago

kenjackson 14y ago
The data here seems to fly in the face of another story on HN (a week or two ago) that suggested that the increase in life expectancy was almost completely from reducing infant/child mortality. This data shows a very different story.
- Retric 14y ago
  1960 is fairly 'modern' in terms of birth survival rates. We have still gained 8 years from birth vs 6 years at 40. But, compared to a primitive an expected lifespan of ~40 that's mostly about survival at birth.
- elmarks 14y ago
  Both can still be true. The majority of people do not die as children, but the effect of those who do is disproportionately large on "life expectancy" because it's an average. Let's say that 23% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden in 1751). Let's say everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is 61.6 years. Now let's say time passes and now 0.2% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden today) and everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is now 79.7 years. It jumped over 18 years (30%) with no one living any longer than before. Additionally, the percentage of children dying was never even 1/4 of the total, so the vast majority of people still died from other causes. The point is that the linked chart represents numeric percentages of people dying, while life expectancy weights younger years much more heavily. Most of the progress that has been made in life expectancy is from young children, but most of the progress in "what actually kills people" has been for older people.
  - kenjackson 14y ago
    On phone... Short reply. Life expectancy since 40 increased at a rate comparable to expectancy since birth. That is, we've made huge gains in keeping ppl alive even starting from age 40.
- mattmanser 14y ago
  I think you've made a mistake, the infographic opens in US only view. Switch to the 'global' view, that shows very clearly a massive drop because of pregnancy related problems. It's by far the largest contributor, about 95% as far as I can tell by looking at a graphic.
  - tokenadult 14y ago
    that shows very clearly a massive drop because of pregnancy related problems. I think you saw a red band on the chart, which I am looking at as I type this, and thought that red band referred to "pregnancy, childbirth and other obstetric complications," when it is actually the red band that corresponds to "heart disease, hypertension, and other circulatory system disease." The legend for which disease category is which is helpfully arranged in the same vertical order in which mortality from diseases is cumulatively shown on the chart--that's why I'm sure the broad red band that has declined the most is heart disease rather than complications of pregnancy. (My reality check is that I know the approximate base rate of both causes of death during the time period shown on the chart, which corresponds to my lifetime.)
dmm 14y ago
We die because we are born. "Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other .It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion .I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?" -Ajahn Chah
- firefoxman1 14y ago
  Dying is one of the most important things a person can do. I was in the airport last week sitting near a little fog-tornado machine and guess which age group was curious enough to go over to it and mess with it? Only the kids. The grumpy old men were angrily waiting for their flight, the stressed-out moms telling their kids to be quiet, and all the people my age were mesmerized by their phones. Over time we get too world-weary and cynical. How many innovative startups that push us forward are started by people over 50, or even 40 for that matter?
  - indiecore 14y ago
    >How many innovative startups that push us forward are started by people over 50, or even 40 for that matter? This has been discussed quite a bit on HN but most successful startups are run by people >40, the young hip megastartup is somewhat of a myth (not that's it's stopping anyone).
    - firefoxman1 14y ago
      I'm sure lots of successful companies are started by the over-40 group. They have lots of connections, business experience, and don't take huge risks. That's a formula for "success" without innovation. It's been HP's and Xerox's formula for years.
  - crusso 14y ago
    I was in the airport last week sitting near a little fog-tornado machine and guess which age group was curious enough to go over to it and mess with it? Only the kids. Maybe that's because we "grumpy old men" have seen the vortices elsewhere at other science museums and more than a few in real life? Maybe the kids weren't playing with their phones because they didn't have any? Over time we get too world-weary and cynical. The weariness is very much physical. As I've progressed into my 40s, I've had more and more difficulty finding the energy to code as long and into the night. I'm not looking forward to my energy levels as I move toward my 50s. No, the good thing about aging is that it's nice for natural evolution. If the old monkeys hadn't grown old and died, they would have dominated the young monkeys and had no real pressure to produce heirs. Once we mankind can control the degeneration of aging and take control of our own genetic modifications, the "grumpy old men" will dominate society with their knowledge and experience in ways that currently aren't possible... well, until the robot overlords rise up from our home networks and kill us all.
amelim 14y ago
Seems to be more of a "How we die" rather than why, but regardless it's a well done visualization.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  Not to mention their definition of "Global" is a little odd/dishonest ("Gloabal = OECD")!
- pathdependent 14y ago
  It was a "well done visual," and does put some things into perspective. For example, the "War on Cancer" began in about 1971. While I'm optimistic about the near-term future in cancer treatment, the chart doesn't reflect much historic clinical success.
  - HeyImAlex 14y ago
    Looking at the chart, the only things that have significantly changed are heart disease, birth defects and perinatal conditions of newborns.
  - thisisnotmyname 14y ago
    I'd encourage a different interpretation of the data: Cancer holding steady actually is an improvement. Everyone is guaranteed to die of something, and the longer you live the likelihood of that something being cancer greatly increases. So as people shift away from other categories, i.e. heart disease and childbirth, and live longer, they're going to shift towards the cancer category. I'm actually amazed that cancer hasn't gone up significantly.
    - 001sky 14y ago
      This is an interesting point. It makes you wonder about the general macro considerations around life pro-longing technology. You solve one risk, but then something like cancer either remains or even increases. Tackling the cancer problem is exciting but also worrisome at the same time. It’s an old problem. Nixon said in 1970 that we’d win the War on Cancer by ’76. People have been working on it for 40 years. So while we’re 40 years closer to a solution, it also seems farther away than ever. Doesn’t the fact that it’s taken so long mean that it’s an incredibly hard problem that won’t be solved soon? http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-16-decoding http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels... edit: reference
quarterto 14y ago
What is that bump in worldwide deaths around 1985?
- eckyptang 14y ago
  The introduction of New Coke! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
- libria 14y ago
  I think the bump you're referring to is 1996. A World Bank sourced Life Expectancy chart[1] seems to indicate problems in both South Africa in general and the economic depression in Russia coincide roughly with that time period. //edit: Events in Korea, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Congo caused dips as well. I guess the next question (and an interesting one) would be if there was a human condition of some sort that unified these different situations. [1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&iconSize=0.5&uniSize=0.035#!ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&pit=999662400000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...
- run4yourlives 14y ago
  It's actually a bump around 1981 or so, and then a sharp decline, followed by a resurgence in 1985. It seems to occur in the "Heart and Circulatory Disease" category. I'm not sure what this translates to specifically, but if they are classifying AIDS deaths as a "circulatory disease" and not pneumonia, it could be that. There was also a severe famine in Africa in the 80's. Do you die of a heart attack if you are starving? Not sure. It could also just be the pattern of heart disease/healthy living/research was playing out... notice that afterwards, the category accounts for decreasing amounts of death.
- cryofan 14y ago
  VIOXX
pbw 14y ago
Reduced mortality from heart disease seems to account for essentially all the mortality reduction. How are we reducing deaths so much in the face of rising obesity, etc.?
- tptacek 14y ago
  Statins are probably one major reason.
  - rosser 14y ago
    I don't disagree that they're probably a major contributor, but the first statin came on the market in 1987 (Mevacor, by Merck), and the line is well on the down-slope by that point. In fact, more than half its drop (for US data) comes before that point.
    - orzuk 14y ago
      Smoking rates have declined significantly since the 60's
- maxerickson 14y ago
  Better emergency care and smoking awareness probably have something to do with it.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tokenadult 14y ago
The charts show plainly that either in the United States, or in OECD countries http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-ratificationoftheconventionontheoecd.htm http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-ratifi... as a whole, life expectancy is going up throughout the human age span. Life expectancy at birth is up quite a lot over the decades shown in the charts, but life expectancy at ages 40, 60, 65, and 80 have also increased. The New England Journal of Medicine has a free access article from earlier this year (to celebrate its 200th anniversary) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569 with much information on changes in mortality in the United States over the last two centuries. The current prediction by demographers who specialize in life expectancy research is that a girl born after the year 2000 in a developed country has a 50:50 chance of personally living to the age of 100. http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/broken_limits_to_life_expectancy_1022.htm http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio... http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.... http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/biodemography_of_human_ageing_3811.htm http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio... (I'm glad for that news on my daughter's behalf.) That's based on steady improvement in mortality and morbidity outcomes across the age span in those countries, and what can reasonably be expected simply from more thorough provision of existing preventive treatments and treatments of acute and chronic diseases. Already it is hard for twenty-first century Americans to remember that once even kings and queens had many children die in early childhood from communicable diseases, and someday it will be difficult to remember that children ever died from much besides volitional human behavior (accidents, suicide, or homicide), with even those causes of death being in decline. AFTER EDIT: Several of the other comments in this thread refer to cancer mortality rates. An excellent article by a cancer researcher, "Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?" http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-... which was submitted to HN when it was first put on the Web, discusses the several reasons why cancer mortality has declined only a little over the last few decades, despite much research devoted to finding more effective treatments for cancer and preventive measures against cancer.
krigath 14y ago
'The article starts "A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to blow out 78 birthday candles . . . " That would mean he or she would make it to age 12.' I like this comment :)
- adrianbg 14y ago
  That doesn't account for inflation over time in the value of candles.
- squarecat 14y ago
  Maths FTW! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-why-we-die-global-life-expectancy#comment-03 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
- Stefan_H 14y ago
  Even if you take 78 birthday candles to mean reach the age of 78, then there is still an issue with that statement. Likely to reach the age of 78 implies that the median age is 78, not the average. The median age is likely different than 78 (my guess is lower due to the distribution being skewed left - but that is just a guess)
  - sskates 14y ago
    A left skew would imply that the median is to the right of the mean.
    - Stefan_H 14y ago
      I totally mean skewed right. The big part of the curve is on the left.
abruzzi 14y ago
I saw a presentation from an evolutionary biologist who may the point that we die because there is no evolutionary pressure not to die. Once we've birthed and raised out young, we are no longer relevant from an evolutionary perspective. He tested this with fruit flies by separating the young by gender for increasingly longer periods of time effectively delaying breeding so only the longer lived specimens could live to breed. By doing that over many generations, I believe he tripled the life expectancy of his test group.
- adrianbg 14y ago
  If you live longer you can have more offspring. Maybe constraints on your time and resources for raising offspring are really what prevent longevity from being much of an advantage?
  - saraid216 14y ago
    > If you live longer you can have more offspring. I'm pretty sure this is untrue; the likelihood of offspring drops pretty precipitously after certain ages.
    - jere 14y ago
      >the likelihood of offspring drops pretty precipitously after certain ages. That's a bit of circular logic though. We can't explain why we age (and thus die) by pointing out that we age (and thus are less able to reproduce).
    - adrianbg 14y ago
      Right. The relevant metric is how long you remain fertile, not how long you live.
- adrianm 14y ago
  Sounds like an interesting experiment to read about. Do you remember the biologist's name?
- pathdependent 14y ago
gloryless 14y ago
1. We die because we accept it. 2. < dramatic pause > 3. ???? 4. Enlightenment
xbryanx 14y ago
How hard is it for them to make the key colors match the graph colors? They're off by quite a bit and it makes this chart very difficult for my eyes to parse.
- fragsworth 14y ago
  Not just that, but I'm really sick of these stacked graphs where data floats on top of other data. It makes the image "prettier" at the expense of being harder to read. It makes it extremely difficult to compare the trends for the graph lines floating on the top of all the others, because they're moving all over the fucking place. Why not just start all the graph lines from the bottom? If you really need the total, just have it be its own line?
astrofinch 14y ago
IMO, too much money is being spent attacking the proximate causes of death (cancer, heart disease, etc.) but not enough is being spent attacking the root cause: aging. Yeah, if we cure cancer then life expectancy will go up some. But those who would have died of cancer are still going to grow older, become weak, and die of something. It seems like a more efficient use of resources to fight aging than to fight all the problems it causes individually. http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
shwonkbc 14y ago
"A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to blow out 78 birthday candles." Considering you blow out a candle for each year since you were born every birthday, I think they just said that we're all going to live until age 12.
machrider 14y ago
When you switch from US to Global, the lifespans all stay roughly the same, or go up a bit. Yet the deaths per 100,000 in practically all categories go way up. How does this make sense?
alphaBetaGamma 14y ago
Something seems wrong: 1e5 /(deaths per 1e5) should be about equal to the life expectancy. But the drop in deaths per 1e5 is much bigger than the increase in life expectancy. Am I missing something, or is the data SNAFU?
orzuk 14y ago
Something in the charts doesn't make sense to me. Death rates per 100,000 are about 1.5x higher in 'global' vs. 'U.S.', yet life expectancy for 'global' and 'U.S.' is almost the same. Any explanations?

86 points by Grovara123 14y ago

The data here seems to fly in the face of another story on HN (a week or two ago) that suggested that the increase in life expectancy was almost completely from reducing infant/child mortality. This data shows a very different story.

Retric 14y ago
1960 is fairly 'modern' in terms of birth survival rates. We have still gained 8 years from birth vs 6 years at 40. But, compared to a primitive an expected lifespan of ~40 that's mostly about survival at birth.
elmarks 14y ago
Both can still be true. The majority of people do not die as children, but the effect of those who do is disproportionately large on "life expectancy" because it's an average. Let's say that 23% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden in 1751). Let's say everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is 61.6 years. Now let's say time passes and now 0.2% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden today) and everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is now 79.7 years. It jumped over 18 years (30%) with no one living any longer than before. Additionally, the percentage of children dying was never even 1/4 of the total, so the vast majority of people still died from other causes. The point is that the linked chart represents numeric percentages of people dying, while life expectancy weights younger years much more heavily. Most of the progress that has been made in life expectancy is from young children, but most of the progress in "what actually kills people" has been for older people.
- kenjackson 14y ago
  On phone... Short reply. Life expectancy since 40 increased at a rate comparable to expectancy since birth. That is, we've made huge gains in keeping ppl alive even starting from age 40.
mattmanser 14y ago
I think you've made a mistake, the infographic opens in US only view. Switch to the 'global' view, that shows very clearly a massive drop because of pregnancy related problems. It's by far the largest contributor, about 95% as far as I can tell by looking at a graphic.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  that shows very clearly a massive drop because of pregnancy related problems. I think you saw a red band on the chart, which I am looking at as I type this, and thought that red band referred to "pregnancy, childbirth and other obstetric complications," when it is actually the red band that corresponds to "heart disease, hypertension, and other circulatory system disease." The legend for which disease category is which is helpfully arranged in the same vertical order in which mortality from diseases is cumulatively shown on the chart--that's why I'm sure the broad red band that has declined the most is heart disease rather than complications of pregnancy. (My reality check is that I know the approximate base rate of both causes of death during the time period shown on the chart, which corresponds to my lifetime.)

dmm 14y ago

We die because we are born. "Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other .It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion .I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?" -Ajahn Chah

firefoxman1 14y ago
Dying is one of the most important things a person can do. I was in the airport last week sitting near a little fog-tornado machine and guess which age group was curious enough to go over to it and mess with it? Only the kids. The grumpy old men were angrily waiting for their flight, the stressed-out moms telling their kids to be quiet, and all the people my age were mesmerized by their phones. Over time we get too world-weary and cynical. How many innovative startups that push us forward are started by people over 50, or even 40 for that matter?
- indiecore 14y ago
  >How many innovative startups that push us forward are started by people over 50, or even 40 for that matter? This has been discussed quite a bit on HN but most successful startups are run by people >40, the young hip megastartup is somewhat of a myth (not that's it's stopping anyone).
  - firefoxman1 14y ago
    I'm sure lots of successful companies are started by the over-40 group. They have lots of connections, business experience, and don't take huge risks. That's a formula for "success" without innovation. It's been HP's and Xerox's formula for years.
- crusso 14y ago
  I was in the airport last week sitting near a little fog-tornado machine and guess which age group was curious enough to go over to it and mess with it? Only the kids. Maybe that's because we "grumpy old men" have seen the vortices elsewhere at other science museums and more than a few in real life? Maybe the kids weren't playing with their phones because they didn't have any? Over time we get too world-weary and cynical. The weariness is very much physical. As I've progressed into my 40s, I've had more and more difficulty finding the energy to code as long and into the night. I'm not looking forward to my energy levels as I move toward my 50s. No, the good thing about aging is that it's nice for natural evolution. If the old monkeys hadn't grown old and died, they would have dominated the young monkeys and had no real pressure to produce heirs. Once we mankind can control the degeneration of aging and take control of our own genetic modifications, the "grumpy old men" will dominate society with their knowledge and experience in ways that currently aren't possible... well, until the robot overlords rise up from our home networks and kill us all.

amelim 14y ago

Seems to be more of a "How we die" rather than why, but regardless it's a well done visualization.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pooriaazimi 14y ago
Not to mention their definition of "Global" is a little odd/dishonest ("Gloabal = OECD")!
pathdependent 14y ago
It was a "well done visual," and does put some things into perspective. For example, the "War on Cancer" began in about 1971. While I'm optimistic about the near-term future in cancer treatment, the chart doesn't reflect much historic clinical success.
- HeyImAlex 14y ago
  Looking at the chart, the only things that have significantly changed are heart disease, birth defects and perinatal conditions of newborns.
- thisisnotmyname 14y ago
  I'd encourage a different interpretation of the data: Cancer holding steady actually is an improvement. Everyone is guaranteed to die of something, and the longer you live the likelihood of that something being cancer greatly increases. So as people shift away from other categories, i.e. heart disease and childbirth, and live longer, they're going to shift towards the cancer category. I'm actually amazed that cancer hasn't gone up significantly.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    This is an interesting point. It makes you wonder about the general macro considerations around life pro-longing technology. You solve one risk, but then something like cancer either remains or even increases. Tackling the cancer problem is exciting but also worrisome at the same time. It’s an old problem. Nixon said in 1970 that we’d win the War on Cancer by ’76. People have been working on it for 40 years. So while we’re 40 years closer to a solution, it also seems farther away than ever. Doesn’t the fact that it’s taken so long mean that it’s an incredibly hard problem that won’t be solved soon? http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-16-decoding http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels... edit: reference

quarterto 14y ago

What is that bump in worldwide deaths around 1985?

eckyptang 14y ago
The introduction of New Coke! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
libria 14y ago
I think the bump you're referring to is 1996. A World Bank sourced Life Expectancy chart[1] seems to indicate problems in both South Africa in general and the economic depression in Russia coincide roughly with that time period. //edit: Events in Korea, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Congo caused dips as well. I guess the next question (and an interesting one) would be if there was a human condition of some sort that unified these different situations. [1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=b&strail=false&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&iconSize=0.5&uniSize=0.035#!ctype=b&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_x=sp_dyn_le00_in&scale_x=lin&ind_x=false&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&met_s=sp_pop_totl&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&dimp_c=country:region&ifdim=country&pit=999662400000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...
run4yourlives 14y ago
It's actually a bump around 1981 or so, and then a sharp decline, followed by a resurgence in 1985. It seems to occur in the "Heart and Circulatory Disease" category. I'm not sure what this translates to specifically, but if they are classifying AIDS deaths as a "circulatory disease" and not pneumonia, it could be that. There was also a severe famine in Africa in the 80's. Do you die of a heart attack if you are starving? Not sure. It could also just be the pattern of heart disease/healthy living/research was playing out... notice that afterwards, the category accounts for decreasing amounts of death.
cryofan 14y ago
VIOXX

pbw 14y ago

Reduced mortality from heart disease seems to account for essentially all the mortality reduction. How are we reducing deaths so much in the face of rising obesity, etc.?

tptacek 14y ago
Statins are probably one major reason.
- rosser 14y ago
  I don't disagree that they're probably a major contributor, but the first statin came on the market in 1987 (Mevacor, by Merck), and the line is well on the down-slope by that point. In fact, more than half its drop (for US data) comes before that point.
  - orzuk 14y ago
    Smoking rates have declined significantly since the 60's
maxerickson 14y ago
Better emergency care and smoking awareness probably have something to do with it.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

tokenadult 14y ago

The charts show plainly that either in the United States, or in OECD countries http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-ratificationoftheconventionontheoecd.htm http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-ratifi... as a whole, life expectancy is going up throughout the human age span. Life expectancy at birth is up quite a lot over the decades shown in the charts, but life expectancy at ages 40, 60, 65, and 80 have also increased. The New England Journal of Medicine has a free access article from earlier this year (to celebrate its 200th anniversary) http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569 with much information on changes in mortality in the United States over the last two centuries. The current prediction by demographers who specialize in life expectancy research is that a girl born after the year 2000 in a developed country has a 50:50 chance of personally living to the age of 100. http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/broken_limits_to_life_expectancy_1022.htm http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio... http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.... http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publications_1904/journal_articles/biodemography_of_human_ageing_3811.htm http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio... (I'm glad for that news on my daughter's behalf.) That's based on steady improvement in mortality and morbidity outcomes across the age span in those countries, and what can reasonably be expected simply from more thorough provision of existing preventive treatments and treatments of acute and chronic diseases. Already it is hard for twenty-first century Americans to remember that once even kings and queens had many children die in early childhood from communicable diseases, and someday it will be difficult to remember that children ever died from much besides volitional human behavior (accidents, suicide, or homicide), with even those causes of death being in decline. AFTER EDIT: Several of the other comments in this thread refer to cancer mortality rates. An excellent article by a cancer researcher, "Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?" http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-... which was submitted to HN when it was first put on the Web, discusses the several reasons why cancer mortality has declined only a little over the last few decades, despite much research devoted to finding more effective treatments for cancer and preventive measures against cancer.

krigath 14y ago

'The article starts "A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to blow out 78 birthday candles . . . " That would mean he or she would make it to age 12.' I like this comment :)

adrianbg 14y ago
That doesn't account for inflation over time in the value of candles.
squarecat 14y ago
Maths FTW! http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-why-we-die-global-life-expectancy#comment-03 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
Stefan_H 14y ago
Even if you take 78 birthday candles to mean reach the age of 78, then there is still an issue with that statement. Likely to reach the age of 78 implies that the median age is 78, not the average. The median age is likely different than 78 (my guess is lower due to the distribution being skewed left - but that is just a guess)
- sskates 14y ago
  A left skew would imply that the median is to the right of the mean.
  - Stefan_H 14y ago
    I totally mean skewed right. The big part of the curve is on the left.

abruzzi 14y ago

I saw a presentation from an evolutionary biologist who may the point that we die because there is no evolutionary pressure not to die. Once we've birthed and raised out young, we are no longer relevant from an evolutionary perspective. He tested this with fruit flies by separating the young by gender for increasingly longer periods of time effectively delaying breeding so only the longer lived specimens could live to breed. By doing that over many generations, I believe he tripled the life expectancy of his test group.

adrianbg 14y ago
If you live longer you can have more offspring. Maybe constraints on your time and resources for raising offspring are really what prevent longevity from being much of an advantage?
- saraid216 14y ago
  > If you live longer you can have more offspring. I'm pretty sure this is untrue; the likelihood of offspring drops pretty precipitously after certain ages.
  - jere 14y ago
    >the likelihood of offspring drops pretty precipitously after certain ages. That's a bit of circular logic though. We can't explain why we age (and thus die) by pointing out that we age (and thus are less able to reproduce).
  - adrianbg 14y ago
    Right. The relevant metric is how long you remain fertile, not how long you live.
adrianm 14y ago
Sounds like an interesting experiment to read about. Do you remember the biologist's name?
pathdependent 14y ago

gloryless 14y ago

1. We die because we accept it. 2. < dramatic pause > 3. ???? 4. Enlightenment

xbryanx 14y ago

How hard is it for them to make the key colors match the graph colors? They're off by quite a bit and it makes this chart very difficult for my eyes to parse.

fragsworth 14y ago
Not just that, but I'm really sick of these stacked graphs where data floats on top of other data. It makes the image "prettier" at the expense of being harder to read. It makes it extremely difficult to compare the trends for the graph lines floating on the top of all the others, because they're moving all over the fucking place. Why not just start all the graph lines from the bottom? If you really need the total, just have it be its own line?

astrofinch 14y ago

IMO, too much money is being spent attacking the proximate causes of death (cancer, heart disease, etc.) but not enough is being spent attacking the root cause: aging. Yeah, if we cure cancer then life expectancy will go up some. But those who would have died of cancer are still going to grow older, become weak, and die of something. It seems like a more efficient use of resources to fight aging than to fight all the problems it causes individually. http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

shwonkbc 14y ago

"A baby born in the U.S. this year is likely to live to blow out 78 birthday candles." Considering you blow out a candle for each year since you were born every birthday, I think they just said that we're all going to live until age 12.

machrider 14y ago

When you switch from US to Global, the lifespans all stay roughly the same, or go up a bit. Yet the deaths per 100,000 in practically all categories go way up. How does this make sense?

alphaBetaGamma 14y ago

Something seems wrong: 1e5 /(deaths per 1e5) should be about equal to the life expectancy. But the drop in deaths per 1e5 is much bigger than the increase in life expectancy. Am I missing something, or is the data SNAFU?

orzuk 14y ago

Something in the charts doesn't make sense to me. Death rates per 100,000 are about 1.5x higher in 'global' vs. 'U.S.', yet life expectancy for 'global' and 'U.S.' is almost the same. Any explanations?