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New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

lafollette.wisc.edu

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Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#141

Post by psalaun »

picafrost wrote: post #136

I 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.

And it even might be a rather short (in length, not height) peak we won't ever reach again. Nowadays I don't see a single reason to believe that children won't be put back to work in western societies in 200 years, unless massive hypothetical innovations are made to replace depleting oil and keep the very high productivity per capita we've been enjoying for decades.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#142

Post by picafrost »

9dev wrote: post #139
picafrost wrote: post #136

I 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.

This 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.

I 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.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#143

Post by refactor_master »

davnn wrote: post #124
irrational wrote: post #39

Is 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?

Maybe living the blue zone [1] lifestyle? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone

The lifestyle with olive oil and fish, or pension fraud? [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/04/are-blu...

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#144

Post by abeppu »

I 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.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#145

Post by simianparrot »

dsign wrote: post #118

I 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…

> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.

Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have been misled about what it should look like. And no it’s not about ethnicity.

And that’s saying nothing about the impact on source countries as some other comments go into.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#146

Post by AngryData »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #106
SoftTalker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd then that every living thing ages and eventually dies?

but we haven't really even tried ...

We have been trying since medicine existed. Granted we can see much further now thanks to modern knowledge and tools, but we still can't see far enough to identify the causes or even speculate about actual solutions to aging. For all our technology and medical knowledge, getting somebody to live past 100 is still 95% a mix of genetic lottery and the chance of not developing too serious of cancer until really late.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#147

Post by AngryData »

andrewflnr wrote: post #87
chpatrick wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the reason cancer? Eventually the DNA copying errors add up.

There 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.

Nitpick, it is far less likely, but they can still get cancer.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#148

Post by simianparrot »

The 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.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#149

Post by oezi »

simianparrot wrote: post #145
dsign wrote: post #118

I 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…

> But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce. Unchecked immigration of people who do not share the majority of the destination’s cultural values leads to a monoculture that is terrible for everyone. Multiculturalism doesn’t work when everyone’s culture is equal everywhere. And unless it wasn’t obvious, I firmly believe in multiculturalism, but I believe we (here in Europe in particular) have…

As another European I don't understand your argument because Europe has seen so much internal migration over the hundreds of years that it is weird to argue it is leading to monoculture.

Also unchecked migration to Europe is down to 200.000 people per year so less than 0.1% of population.

Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

#150

Post by paganel »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #11

I 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.

We did that, it’s only the Western consumerist society that started getting scared to the Moon and back when it comes to dying, you can see it in one of the comments above where another commenter sees life as a movie that needs to be consumed as long as possible. Really bleak.
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