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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

#191

Post by ggm »

Remarkable 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?

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

#192

Post by sigmoid10 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #182
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’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.

Just 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…

Global investment in cancer research (not treatment) between 2016 and 2020 came in just under $25 billion [1]. That means someone like Elon could have financed basically all cancer research around the globe for a decade. Instead he bought twitter. And remember that the Forbes billionaires are not the most wealthy people in the world. They are just the ones living in countries with public company accounting. There is a lot of dark money in the Middle East and Russia. So it's not like they can't, it's more that this is still seen as a delusion or megalomania in these circles, since most anti aging research funded by billionaire happens very quitely by comparison. You won't hear them announce it like they do with e.g. malaria.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...

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

#193

Post by somenameforme »

czhu12 wrote: post #5

I 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…

There were also major gains in things like access to clean water, general safety from the perils of war (which often drives famines, etc), and so on. If one only looked at e.g. Roman aristocracy (which essentially controls for these sort of variables) then their life expectancy would likely be similar to our own. This exact study was carried out on the Ancient Greeks [1], even prior to the Romans, and found a life expectancy of 72 years. [1]

And while I know some will contest the source, while intentionally conflating the mystical with the historical, even the Bible hits on the average age of man: "The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away."

Notably that is in Psalms, Old Testament, and so it was like written over the time frame of 400-1400BC. And I think it's fairly self evident that that segment was written in the context of plain historical observation with no mysticism implied or stated. Basically life expectancy once you leave childhood, let alone peak longevity, hasn't changed all that much over thousands of years.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/

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

#194

Post by lm28469 »

londons_explore wrote: post #162

I 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. *…

The main causes of death in the US are literally sloth and gluttony, none of your points adress that. If people wanted to live long the single most effective thing they can do is exercise and eat clean, apparently the vast majority of people simply don't care.

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

#195

Post by animuchan »

iwontberude wrote: post #138
Swizec wrote: post #2

What 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.

I’d rather be alive engulfed in flames than dead.

This is probably untrue (but you do you!)

Beginning at some acute level of pain you actually want to detach from the failing body.

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

#196

Post by Intralexical »

ACCount37 wrote: post #163
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.

"Get comfortable with death" is the mortal cope. We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved.

That's the logic of a cancer cell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line

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

#197

Post by lm28469 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #154
psalaun wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can you think this in a world where AI is making miracles happen?

> llms are somewhat good at some things hence immortality is around the corner

Idk if we should study age as a disease but we surely should study the delusions of techno solutionists

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

#198

Post by ACCount37 »

Intralexical wrote: post #196
ACCount37 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Get comfortable with death" is the mortal cope. We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved.

That's the logic of a cancer cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line

If cancer cells can pull it off, then why not humans? Clearly, there are no "laws of biology" that would forbid it.

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

#199

Post by throw__away7391 »

lblume wrote: post #175
grues-dinner wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech? Only if it can improve life quality rather than length alone. Of course if we make it so you can live to 200 in the body of a 24-year-old and then suddenly drop dead, the good news is there will be no pensions to pay any more and the bad news is you will drop dead at your 180th year at work. Which is not to say I would not take t…

Historically, increases in total lifespan have always corresponded to increases in the length of healthy lives. People don't only live longer, they also live without being sick a whole lot longer.

Exactly. It is far more fantastical to imagine such lifespan improvements resulting in a planet of crypt keepers than one of external youth. What magic do you expect would keep such people alive?

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

#200

Post by Earw0rm »

makingstuffs wrote: post #187
orwin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure US cultural slop destroyed more of my culture in the last 20 years than immigration ever did, and while immigrants are part of the movement for sure (especially English retirees, but also a lot of 2nd/3rd gen migrants from eastern Europe/North Africa), they're not the main driver.

100% I often say to people that the reason for the UK’s loss of culture is not immigration but the fact that we, as British people, stopped being British in pursuit of the ‘American dream’. Somewhere along the line we stopped looking to our own previous generations (which include European nations as, you know, we’re Europeans) for cultural identity and started following Hollywood as our cultural oracle. Generations o…

Yes, this!

A few Pakistanis moving in down the road doesn't stop British people practicing British culture. The reason they don't can be summarised as laziness and ignorance.

"The pub got turned into a mosque", maybe it did but it wasn't because the Moors invaded fgs. A successful pub gets to carry on being one - if it's not successful, maybe that's because people stopped using it.

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