Live data from Hacker News

Does the human lifespan have a limit?

nature.com

111–120 of 227 posts

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#111
post #105

My grandparents are now 95 and 96 (just shy of their 75th wedding anniversary). They are wonderful people, but it is clear that life is hard for them now. They have chronic pain and nothing can really be done about it. They have very limited opportunities for enjoyment or activity. Watching them, and also my mother struggle with health issues at 73, has really changed my perspective on aging. I am very focused on enj…

Dr. Sinclair's book Lifespan (https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/150...) talks about extending the health span of people. I've been personally taking 1g/day of NMN for almost 3 years now, and I feel like aging has paused or is going backwards slowly.

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#112
post #111
post #105

My grandparents are now 95 and 96 (just shy of their 75th wedding anniversary). They are wonderful people, but it is clear that life is hard for them now. They have chronic pain and nothing can really be done about it. They have very limited opportunities for enjoyment or activity. Watching them, and also my mother struggle with health issues at 73, has really changed my perspective on aging. I am very focused on enj…

Dr. Sinclair's book Lifespan ( https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/150... ) talks about extending the health span of people. I've been personally taking 1g/day of NMN for almost 3 years now, and I feel like aging has paused or is going backwards slowly.

Where can you get NMN?

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#113

Whenever this topic comes up, I’m always reminded of the fact that the bible knew of this long before any statistician. 'My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh; his days shall be a hundred and twenty years' (Gen. 6:3). As a non Christian this always baffles me.

> As a non Christian this always baffles me. I don't understand how this is in any way baffling. There were plenty of humans around for people to observe when the bible was being written, and some of them probably lived to be quite old.

How many 120 year olds do you think the average person would be exposed to several thousand years ago? Especially in an age where birth certificates did not exist.

I have never seen a supercentenarian myself, and I have been in a lot of nursing homes. I only know they exist because of the internet to be honest.

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#114
post #111
post #105

My grandparents are now 95 and 96 (just shy of their 75th wedding anniversary). They are wonderful people, but it is clear that life is hard for them now. They have chronic pain and nothing can really be done about it. They have very limited opportunities for enjoyment or activity. Watching them, and also my mother struggle with health issues at 73, has really changed my perspective on aging. I am very focused on enj…

Dr. Sinclair's book Lifespan ( https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have/dp/150... ) talks about extending the health span of people. I've been personally taking 1g/day of NMN for almost 3 years now, and I feel like aging has paused or is going backwards slowly.

How old are you?

How are you gauging “aging has paused or is going backwards slowly”?

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#115
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means it's fixable. I don't want a world where I replace my father and am replaced by my children. I want a world where my father starts acting like a valedictorian again, but with a life of experience behind it. As we move through life, we inherit bias and experience and no longer have fresh perspective. It's possible to get wiser with age, but it's also likely we will gain experience that hold us back, such a…

No, no, I'm not talking about psychological baggage, but a very concrete biological mechanism. Take a look at this for a good description: https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-s...

Do you think psychological bagged is not real and not ultimately rooted in some physical mechanism (s)?

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#116
post #2

If we consider the average lifespan as say 80 years old, I find it quite interesting that no single human ever has achieved even close to twice that age.

>> find it quite interesting that no single human ever has achieved even close to [160 years].

Human mortality varies widely, but one relationship seems constant: death rate increases exponentially with age. A mortality table from 2011 shows males age 40 have a death rate of 2.1 per thousand; at age 100 the death rate is 357.9 per thousand. That's an increase of a factor of 170 over 60 years, or about 9% per year. Mortality graphs are almost straight lines on semilog plots. Different groups (men versus women, different countries, etc.) show different y-intercepts but the slopes of all these mortality curves is about the same.

From this we can deduce that males aged 104 (in this sample) have about a 50% chance of dying within the next year: another way of saying their life expectancy is 1 year. Mortality rates which increase 9% a year, will double in 8 years. So a male aged 112 will have a life expectancy of 6 months. At age 120, 3 months. And so on.

That's why we don't see many humans older than 110 or so, and why no one has lived past 130.

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#117
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, because there are many bible characters older than 120 years. One of many contradictions, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB3g6mXLEKk

Check out the book of Genesis. There is a specific point at which God changes the maximum human lifespan to 120 years, after which this does not occur.

So this is the definitive proof that Jeanne Calment is a fake!

Re: Does the human lifespan have a limit?

#120
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we already have a lot of medical interventions that skew our species' "normal", pre-civilizational population tree towards something never seen in nature. In a Stone Age society you would definitely find people twice as old as their group's average lifespan. But that average lifespan would be rather low.

Didn't most people live to their 60s if they survived childhood and pregnancies?

The child (Life expectancy at birth was around 30-35 for at least the several preceding centuries in Europe.
Post reply on HN