21 ms·
New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
- Swizec 1y agoWhat about quality of life adjusted life years? I don’t want to live to 100 and be miserable for the last 30 But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then that’s just fine.
- fcatalan 1y agoMy grandfather lived to 102 and only the last few months were bad, nothing dramatic, just fading away at home, no hospital. I'd sign up for the same
- PartiallyTyped 1y agoMy grandfather looked in his 50s and had more mobility than 50 year old men well into his 80s it’s only when cancer got to him that he started looking his age. I’d sign up for that.
- xenobeb 1y agoYea I would sign up to win the lottery too.
- melling 1y agoYes, the term is “health span” and that’s basically what everyone is talking about every single time you read an article on the subject.
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- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- PeterHolzwarth 1y agoYou may feel differently when you get there. Be careful of present you making decisions about future you.
- Swizec 1y agoThat’s the best part! Making decisions that keep you in good shape until 89 are also likely to help you live until 100. At that age if you can avoid cancer the rest is stuff like “Strong enough so you don’t break a hip when tripping on the stairs”
- iwontberude 1y agoI’d rather be alive engulfed in flames than dead.
- entropyneur 1y agoHave you been engulfed in flames before? I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- iwontberude 1y agoNot yet fortunately. All life is some amount of suffering and then you die. I agree I’m probably not correct about how I would feel in the moment.
- animuchan 1y agoThis is probably untrue (but you do you!) Beginning at some acute level of pain you actually want to detach from the failing body.
- iwontberude 1y agoYeah you right
- matwood 1y agoI’m wondering if you’ve ever felt debilitating acute pain. I had nerve pain in the past to where my leg felt like it was on fire. It was then I understood how people get addicted to pain killers. I was able to address the problem and I’ve been fine for many years, but it hurt more than any pain I’ve ever had - and I have had many from sports.
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- jumploops 1y agoMy grandfather had a little saying at each of his birthdays: 88, feeling great! 89, feeling fine 90, less mighty* 91, not yet done! 92, don’t think I’ll hit 102! He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility. *note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!
- cronelius 1y agobryan johnson has entered the chat
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoFor anyone else who didn’t know the name, you may recall the shredded weirdo in the helmet from 2021: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-16/braintree-founder-s-helmet-size-hospital-aims-to-mine-mind-data?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-16/braintree...
- meindnoch 1y agoI have this feeling he's going to die way earlier than he would have if he just lived a normal life.
- elitan 1y agoI have the opposite feeling.
- EasyMark 1y agoI don't, he's using he body like a lab. One of those experiments is likely to go terribly wrong rather than just eating optimally and exercising and crossing your fingers and hoping that you won the genetic lottery.
- AstroBen 1y agoI mean he's just marketing eating well, sleeping and exercising.. how on earth would that make him die way earlier?
- rhyperior 1y agoThe number of supplements and treatments he’s taking are probably too much, and some are quite experimental. He’s definitely rolling some dice.
- adastra22 1y agoThere is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.
- wslh 1y agoAre you watching "Alien: Earth" series?
- tokai 1y agoIt out of my wheelhouse but isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?
- andrewflnr 1y agoI believe the argument would go "there's no fundamental reason we can't fix telomeres".
- chpatrick 1y agoIsn't the reason cancer? Eventually the DNA copying errors add up.
- sodality2 1y agoCancer is not fundamentally unsolvable (AFAIK?). This is a tough question to answer though. Can we prove cancer to be solvable without solving it?
- andrewflnr 1y agoThere are a handful of animals, mammals even, that essentially don't get cancer (some/all large whales and naked mole rats IIRC). So that might be solvable other ways.
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- czhu12 1y agoI don’t want to be that guy but isn’t this kind of an obvious result? The main claim is that life expectancy improvements in the past century are mostly due to decreases in childhood mortality. During the Roman period, the average life expectancy was only 22-25 years old because so many babies were dying prematurely. If you could make it past the age of 10, then you were expected to make it to about 50, which almost doubles life expectancy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empi...
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- echelon 1y agoThat's 100% on the mark. Infants aren't dying anymore. Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology. Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything but the brain. The tough problems: - religious ick and luddite ick - artificial gestation - deactivating the brain stem without impacting development - keeping the body physiologically active and developmentally normative - head transplants that preserve spinal cord function - lots of other ancillary issues with changes to pulmonary and immune flux.
- Earw0rm 1y agoWon't happen for broadly the same kind of reasons interstellar travel won't happen. Lab-grown organs is doable, but the brain and spinal column just aren't modular in that way. In-place system renovation and targeted replacement is a more likely way to yield results.
- billfor 1y agoI think antibiotics also have a lot to do with the initial gains.
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- bigmattystyles 1y agoI wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death. We’re built not to be I realize, and we should never be for those that are young but I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. That being said, I’m not cool with the idea of dying when good, but when I’m in a major depressive episode, the idea of immortality is terrifying.
- wetpaws 1y ago[dead]
- KronisLV 1y ago> I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out. Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.
- bigmattystyles 1y agoMaybe, but I feel like most would eventually reach same conclusion as the (majority of) protagonists in the good place…
- KronisLV 1y agoPerhaps! Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them. Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
- kiba 1y agoThat's just terror management of death.[1] That's why we say things like "death gives life meaning". Utter bollocks. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
- keiferski 1y agoIt is ironic that many of the people obsessed with life extension are also those deeply involved in creating systems that deliberately waste the time we already do have, via addictive algorithms, clickbait content, unnecessary consumerism, etc. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca
- tempodox 1y agoThat makes perfect sense, since you’re meant to spend any additional time with the profit-generating pastimes you mentioned.
- keiferski 1y agoHah, you’re right. I didn’t think about that- of course the extra time gained will be spent the same way it’s spent now.
- latexr 1y agoI was already familiar with Seneca and that quote, but reading it now it sounds condescending. Of course a stoic would say that. Even if we concede that most people “waste” most of life, claiming it is “long enough” and we have a “sufficiently generous amount of it” is just opinion and not something to be prescribed to others. “Long enough” for what? For what Seneca enjoyed, maybe, he had nothing to do and only a fraction of the available world knowledge. Nowadays one lifetime isn’t even enough to read every book one would find interesting, and reading might be your favourite thing in the world that you do at literally ever opportunity. Long enough… Pft… Seneca clearly wasn’t familiar with the essentially infinite world of fan fiction. He surely would’ve judged it if he had. Just to drive the point home: The comment is tongue in cheek. I agree with your first paragraph.
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- ALittleLight 1y agoThis looks pretty trivial. Obviously modern gains in life expectancy were from removing things that killed us in early age. This says nothing about future gains in life expectancy which may come from biological/medical interventions that reduce senescence.
- DustinBrett 1y agoThat kind of thinking is fuel for the AI accelerationists
- markus_zhang 1y agoI think it’s fine. When I get older I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife, whatever it is.
- latexr 1y ago> I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife That’s only intriguing if the answer is “yes”. Otherwise it doesn’t matter.
- markus_zhang 1y agoYeah the if is where the intriguing is.
- qgin 1y agoWhen you have general anesthesia, you experience nothing, not even the vague sense of time passing like when sleeping, it's just an edit in time. You basically don't exist when you're under general anesthesia. If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.
- markus_zhang 1y agoYeah I did have one and it was as you said, an edit in time. However this is after all still different from real death so we will see.
- jart 1y agoWhy would they pull you out of the sim if you're not dead? For all we know you need to sleep up on the spaceship too.
- dyauspitr 1y agoThere isn’t, you’re just looking for something as your life comes to an end.
- dyauspitr 1y agoLife extension will happen. It’s really just a matter of time with the upper bound being no later than a century from now in my opinion.
- elicash 1y agoMy understanding was that life expectancy has been declining for like a while, not merely slowing in gains -- first because of opioids and then because of COVID. Edit: In the U.S. that is.
- hollerith 1y ago>life expectancy has been declining Only in the US whereas the OP "analyzed life expectancy for 23 high-income and low-mortality countries".
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- irrational 1y agoIs it just genetic? On my father’s side, people typically live to 100 at a minimum and are perfectly healthy mentally and physically right up till a week or so before they die. My grandmother is 103 and can still lives alone in her house and can walk unassisted, has a memory sharp as anything, and so on. Maybe look at long lived families and figure out what is different about them?
- ivape 1y agoI think it's just plus or minus 10 years for whatever fate (genetics) had in store for you. That plus or minus being the little we can control (diet/activity).
- rhyperior 1y agoSo much of the modern US diet that’s being exported to the world negatively impacts life and health span. It’s very much controllable, just harder than the default.
- ivape 1y agoWe're also exporting modern US attitudes and psychology (expectations, worldview), which is just an engine for stress. I think overeating is a stress response. Not everyone was a fiend for vanity at the scale we are today.
- lenkite 1y agoI think you can safely double that to plus or minus 20 years for what "little" we can control.
- markus_zhang 1y agoWow that’s such a blessing. You are going to have maybe 50% more quality time than many people.
- jvanderbot 1y agoYou're asking if anyone has bothered to study long lived people to determine why they live a long time?
- amelius 1y agoTrump administration isn't helping either ...
- ETH_start 1y ago[dead]
- qgin 1y agoNew research reveals horse-drawn wagon engineering gains slowing, travel at speeds beyond 12mph unlikely.
- swaraj 1y agoExactly
- baq 1y agoRight, we’ll just replace ourselves with humanoid robots. Only half joking
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoYou know this is how we will end eventually in the best case. We won’t master our biology, we will simply transcend it by pro-creating offspring that have something better. It’s also a much easier solution than untangling evolved biological systems that are not designed to last for what have been very beneficial reasons (e.g. scientific advances occur via death of the old guard).
- kelnos 1y agoI think this is reasonably likely. We need to remember that our bodies are evolutionarily optimized for getting to childbearing years, and then living long enough to get our children to a point where they can be independent. After that there are really no evolutionary pressures keeping us around. Untangling all that and re-engineering ourselves (biologically) to overcome that is probably a pretty monumental task; starting from scratch with something simpler (and perhaps non-biological) might be easier, with sufficiently advanced technology.
- aradox66 1y agoArguably there are some evolutionary advantages to the presence of elders in social species with cultural transmission but your point stands
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- ziofill 1y agoOh, crap
- userbinator 1y agoIn other words, 7 bits is still sufficient to hold the age of a human.
- ethersteeds 1y agoI like my structs packed and my lifetimes finite.
- dsign 1y agoI was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress. In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce. So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce. You cannot discount the destabilising potential of immigration, and the lowering of societal trust it comes with. As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule. It will be especially harder to integrate people the way the demographic pyramid is looking right now in "developed" countries. I would also question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged by the western, "developed" countries that will be hosting them. I am an immigrant (expat?). I don't enjoy paying contributions for the welfare of the people who played in a huge role in the reasons I had to emigrate.
- simianparrot 1y agoI appreciate you being honest, but I also don't want people like you to immigrate to my country. How are you so sure of the role our old people played in your reasons for emigrating? Even if you're in the US and from a country the US has actively destabilized, how many of the people on welfare -- old and/or infirm -- were instrumental in the actions that led to the destabilization of your country? How many of these people had any active choice? This is why we need strong vetting of immigrants.
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- picafrost 1y agoI admire the human belief that the improvement of technology and our living standards will be infinite. It will be a bitter moment if we finally realize the plateau we've been stuck on is not temporary and all future gains will be marginal.
- 9dev 1y agoThis realisation is by definition wrong, or coincidence. You can’t know the future, so you’ll never know whether something will eventually come around and change everything.
- picafrost 1y agoI think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.
- 9dev 1y agoFair enough. If we reach a point where we’ve discovered all fundamental truths of the universe and no more knowledge is helping towards solutions we need, then yes, that may imply awareness of the plateau; I’ll give you that. It also seems fantastically far away, so much so that it seems an exercise in futility to speculate about it.
- DiscourseFan 1y agoIts so far away, in fact, considering that we cannot even observe most of the universe, or even have a fully coherent notion of what the universe is.
- picafrost 1y agoWe didn't need to discover every mathematical truth to discover that there are limits to what we can mathematically prove. Nor did we need to discover every algorithm to know that we can't determine if a program will halt. Both of these have helped understand where plateaus exist in their respective domains. We don't need to enumerate every truth to understand that there are some things we cannot do.
- abeppu 1y agoI think it's important to distinguish between "life expectancy gains have slowed substantially" vs "meaningful longevity increases are not reachable". A huge fraction of deaths in the developed world are from "lifestyle diseases" from obesity, poor food choices, sedentary behaviors, alcohol, tobacco, etc, all of which we could improve. We eat too many highly processed foods, added sugars, etc. We have places without infrastructure for clean water. We have gun deaths and traffic deaths, and we have bad gun laws and car-centric communities. We have flooding/hurricane/heatwave deaths and we have a climate-denial public policy. There are _so many fixable things_ that shorten people's lives, and we'd all probably also live happier lives if we fixed them.
- simianparrot 1y agoThe assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change. Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else.
- nojs 1y agoThis is a catch-all dismissal that you could make about any medical innovation throughout history. There are a lot of things we can fix, and we’ve had a lot of success so far in doing so.
- simianparrot 1y agoIt’s not. We never fix anything in medicine: We treat and prevent. Removing the appendix prevents or treats acute appendicitis, but it also has a tradeoff in terms of removing a gut biome reservoir. This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in the past — and then some. But you can’t fully fix aging. You can’t infinitely improve standard of living.
- ACCount37 1y agoNot if you throw your hands up and never try! Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Once it gets at least the same kind of focus cancer or heart disease does now? Then we'll talk about how it's "impossible to fix".
- baq 1y agoAging is a disease in the same way children are parasites. Fix one, fix the other.
- londons_explore 1y agoI believe this is mostly due to misdirected healthcare efforts. I think we could get the average life expectancy up to 100 if we did a better job of all the preventative things: * Prevent airborne disease by having all indoor spaces getting 50 air changes/filters per hour. * Prevent waterborne disease by having all tap water RO treated in homes, and by heating all shit up to boiling point before it leaves toilets. * Large scale animal and human trials of every chemical used in daily life to find those things like a pacifier which gives you cancer 60 years later. It is far better to do an 'unethical' trial of a chemical than the current system of just putting it in all products and going bankrupt later. * Prevent spread of other diseases like the common cold with daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone, with the government bringing you food and paying you to stay home if infected with any spreadable disease. * Work on many more vaccines and give them out for free to the whole world to eliminate more diseases like we did with smallpox (that vaccine has saved around 800 million lives). * Dramatically reduced effort on individual treatment (cancer, care homes, etc) by putting a 200% tax on healthcare, and funnelling that money into preventative things so the next generation doesn't get the health issues at all.
- lblume 1y ago> daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone How would you prevent people from abusing this system? Covid tests were simple to get to show a positive result, and I know some people who would make this instantly unsustainable.
- londons_explore 1y agoI'd have the tests not show a simple line, but instead a complex checkerboard pattern you scan with a phone. The scan results would simultaneously test for 100+ diseases, and be uploaded to some department of health server which would then decide if you specifically should be paid to stay home. That decision can be made based on fraud risk, but also on the benefit to society of that person not spreading that disease further. For example if a disease has already infected most of the town in the last few weeks, it makes no sense for someone to stay home because local immunity is already probably high and further spread unlikely. However the first case in a new town would 100% be worth staying home for to avoid infecting thousands of others.
- ACCount37 1y agoAging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Very little research currently goes into attacking aging directly - as opposed to handling things that are in no small part downstream from aging, such as heart disease. A big reason for poor "longevity gains" is lack of trying.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoThat’s kind of naive. Plenty of people definitely “try”, billionaires would love to live a few hundred more years. We know how aging occurs, there is degradation in DNA, telomeres shorten, and a bunch of other things. The main problem is that biological life simply can’t undergo overhauls like machines do, and we will probably just solve aging by creating successor beings that can.
- ACCount37 1y agoJust compare the effort and the investment that goes into fighting aging with what goes into fighting cancer. You can't rely on billionaires to fix everything for you. The kind of research effort that would be required to make meaningful progress against aging would likely demand hundreds of billions, spent across decades. Few billionaires have the pockets deep enough to bankroll something like this, or the long term vision. Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though. If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.
- imtringued 1y agoBill Gates has enough money for effective longevity research. Longevity research isn't even particularly expensive. The actual problem is that you would have to do selective breeding and genetic modification of humans the same way we do it with plants and animals. It is primarily an ethical problem.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoLongevity in misery can be a form of cruelty in itself... Someday, I don't think synthetic intelligence will escape this facet of existence. After 84 humans call it the forth age, and things tend to stop getting better for ones quality of life. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
- ggm 1y agoRemarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence. If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity. The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be. Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?
- nabla9 1y agoRadical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. - Possible in our lifetime. - Affordable to the faithful. You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.
- brabel 1y agoWhat theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
- nabla9 1y agoIf you had full understanding of human cell and how they contribute to homeostasis, you could reprogram the cell to rejuvenate them endlessly without turning into cancer (many cancers have unlimited lifespan). You would also need to find ways to remove all cruft that gradually accumulates even in healthy body, like heavy metals etc.
- brabel 1y ago
- camillomiller 1y agoThe longevity trend is fascinating. It’s mostly fueled by people who hoard money and power and realize they will just lose it all like everyone else when death will inevitably come. This fear has driven men for a long time, but we used to focus on living through memory. So we tried and gain literary and art fame, if coming for poorer backgrounds, or we built mausoleums and palaces that were supposed to outlive us in the centuries.l, if rich and powerful. Now the shallow uncultured tech billionaires just believe their own simplistic mechanistic lies and focus on living longer themselves. The result is there’s nothing trickling down for all the others. This that we have to all endure must be the most inane and distasteful class of rich and powerful people to ever walk the Earth.
- arisAlexis 1y agoHumans can't grasp the actual possible future with radical lif extension. They like to be contrarians and talk trash on outlandish science fiction like breakthroughs. It's not everyone's cup to understand the limits of science and usually journalists and old scientists are pretty bad at projecting.
- AlgorithmicTime 1y ago[dead]
- giantg2 1y agoThere are plenty of longevity things and new meds still being researched. Living longer is possible and there are a fair number of people who make it to 100 all things considered. However, life expectancy reaching 100 does seem unlikely to me. With the issues of drugs and obesity being rampant in many parts of the population, what can we expect?
- tossandthrow 1y agoPeople have been conditioned to think in exponential growth. Some generations ago that was likely also a reasonable approximation. But with the hyper growth we see today, it becomes ever clear that we always work with sigmoidal growth. We can see that because more an more system are in the latter half of the sigmoid.
- ck2 1y agoMost longevity supplements and drugs work by pulling biological processes to baseline That's all they do So for someone sitting around 24/7 maybe vaguely helpful For someone active, they defeat stress adaptations, so your "gains" disappear or never happen in the first place They also do nothing for disease, they may help avoid some disease but once the disease is in progress, they can't cure anything There's going to have to be a "next gen" of such drugs, years if not decades away The next-gen will probably deal with mitochondria function, enhancing and restoring/rebooting dysfunction, which actually might cure some disease So hopefully investment will continue towards "next gen", it's a very long road
- lemoncookiechip 1y agoI find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy, considering that by the time you reach 70, most people are already in decline (some worse than others), and the drop from 70 to 80 tends to be steep for many. Those who make it past 80 into their 90s or even 100s often aren’t living particularly fulfilling lives, if you can even call it living at that point. Losing your vision, your hearing, your mobility, and worst of all, your mind, doesn’t sound very appealing to me. So unless we find a way to both live longer and to decliner slower, I just don't see the point for the majority of people who will unfortunately live lonely worse lives.
- meeks 1y agoI think this is a huge misconception and I don't think it works this way. have you heard people say 50 is the new 40, etc.? The same thing would work at older ages. Sure the last 10 years are a decline, but you are pushing those years out not adding more of them.
- ACCount37 1y agoThis. Expecting a "150 years lifespan" to look like "90 years of aging normally and then staying at 90 for another 60 years" is simply unrealistic. The very reason you're expected to die in your 90s is that your body has decayed into a complete mess where nothing works properly anymore and every single capability reserve is at depletion. You die in old age because if you spend long enough at "one sliver away from the breaking point", statistics make going over it inevitable. Even a flu is a mild inconvenience to the young, but often lethal to the elderly. To make it to the age of 150, you'd pretty much have to spend a lot more time as a healthy, well functioning adult.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoIt really depends on how you live your life. My grandfather on my dad's side never drank or smoked, got a ton of exercise, avoided candy etc. he's in his 80s and still lives in a detached house and walks his two very large dogs daily. My grandmother on my mom's side smoked multiple packs of cigarettes a day, drank a ton of sugary soda, rarely got any real exercise, and died in her 50s after a number of very rough years. Everyone keeps talking about health care but IMO it's really downstream of you attending yourself. It's almost a spiritual thing really. American health is so bad because Americans don't feel like they themselves are worth taking care of. The contrast between the people who disagree here gets extreme as they age.
- bradley13 1y agoGenetics required. Natural evolution has zero interest in old people, so there has been no evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan. Possibly even the opposite. We could apply that pressure, either through selective breeding over generations, or through direct genetic modification. Maybe we aren't quite there yet, but it won't be long. Experiments on insects with selective breeding have easily tripled lifespans. How well that would transfer to mammals is hard to say, but a substantial increase is certainly possible.
- wongarsu 1y agoIn modern society there is little evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan, but that's a very recent phenomenon. If my parents watch my kids and do the cooking so I have more time to hunt or work the field that improves the survival chances of my children, and my children share 25% of their DNA with their grandparents. The grandparents living a long productive life is good for the survival of their grandchildren, and thus for the reproduction of their DNA, causing evolutionary pressure. It's mostly the unproductive years (dementia, debilitating illness, severely limited mobility) that are a detriment. You could argue the same forces are still at play at societal levels. People around the age of 50 have a vast economic impact, having accumulated experience and relationships over many decades. And the average age of soldiers in Ukraine is somewhere around 40-45. If one country had a population that stayed at the mental and physical fitness of a 50 year old for another 20 years that would be a drastic advantage, both in terms of skilled workforce and in terms of military capability. Even just another 5 productive years are a big deal in a world where the time you spend productively working is about twice the time you spend "growing up" and getting an education. And my nation doing well means my children can afford more children, spreading my DNA, making it favored by evolution
- Davidzheng 1y agoNot an expert by any stretch of imagination. But it seems to be that not only is there almost no selection pressure on increasing lifespan, bc of medical advances in healthcare there's also less evolutionary pressure on reducing diseases and infertility (i guess there should still be substantial health related evolutionary pressure from sexual selection) in modern society. Why shouldn't we expect long term deterioration of fitness of genome similar to the deer in Yellowstone before reintroduction of wolves?
- Ericson2314 1y agoWhat will happen first, immortal humans, or 100% general purpose desktop computer? Something to think about, HN.
- ben_w 1y agoDepends on the definition for both. Henrietta Lacks and Turing completeness respectively.
- jacquesm 1y agoThe only thing life extension will get us is a very powerful class of ancient people that will have ownership of just about everything. The only thing that resets the clock on wealth accumulation under the capitalist system is death. No matter how much of a grifter you are the grim reaper will force you to divide it amongst your heirs. But if that no longer happens and if capital keeps begetting more capital then the end game would be a very sober one for an even larger slice of humanity than it already is. Interesting story on this theme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Benefit_of_Mankind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Benefit_of_Mankind
- Slava_Propanei 1y ago[dead]
- Illniyar 1y agoThe article doesn't make sense to me. They mention 1900-1938 life expectancy rose by ~5 months per generation. And then say it grew from 62 years to 80. Does that mean each generation is ~2-3 years? What unit of measurement is that supposed to be? Then for 1938-2000 they say it's 2.5 months per generation. If generation is 2-3 years we should already be at 100 year expectancy. Also having 1900-1938 and 1938-2000 as the only points in time seem meaningless. Does the entire 1938-2000 have a single graident? What's the slope here? They also mention that the main advancement in 1900-1938 is infant mortality. Which is really uninteresting for the old age.
- giardini 1y agoSince there's talk of euthanasia: Soylent (green) is now available off-the-shelf (Saw it at Walmart yesterday, in a handy half-gallon container): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF54G8F9/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF54G8F9/ For reference: the movie "Soylent Green" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
- mcswell 1y agoBut Bilbo Baggins! And my cat recently had his one hundred eleventieth birthday, based on one cat year = five human years. (He's now about 23.)