New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by UltraSane » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #294

pembrook wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into. Aesthetic Traditions ≠ Culture. Traditions are just one aspect, but as Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, traditions are not a substitute for values. America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every backgroun…

Do we really have to read again and again the same fantasies the far right spew out continuously here in France on Hacker News? It’s so easy to factually disprove, it’s kind of boring. I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder: - America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no…

"half the country would be happy to slaughter the other half"

You are talking complete nonsense.

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

#452

Post by inglor_cz » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:40 PM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #443

inglor_cz wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible. On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later. We can already rejuvenate individual c…

The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel. On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.

"takes all the advancements you mention into account"

And I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. There is no way you can extrapolate from basic experiments like Katcher's to the year 2080.

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

#453

Post by throw__away7391 » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

grues-dinner wrote: post #223

throw__away7391 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The same magic that keeps some people on quasi-life support for sometimes decades already. You could imagine entirely curing cancer, heart disease, frailty and infection but not brain degeneration, for example. Curing everything else except frailty also seems invidious, though with sufficiently good brain-machine interfaces perhaps that would be less of a problem: you can just float in anti-impact gel from 100 and 20…

Weird that you say that because these life support systems are exactly what I had in mind as evidence to the contrary. Without such an external life support system attached keeping you alive, there's not going to be some drug that holds your body together in a zombified form. Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body, as would whatever keeps your circulatory system and all the other tissues in all your other vital organs in working order. The alternative would be to encase the body in ever increasing layers of machinery, which is definitely not what anyone talking about life extension means.

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

#454

Post by JumpinJack_Cash » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:47 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #401

bradley13 wrote: post #359

Genetics 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…

Mick Jagger had his most recent son at the age of 73. Today, that's an anomaly, but historically, older men fathering children was not at all uncommon (73 would probably be an outlier, but successful men were fathering children well past the age when women can no longer bear children). That would exert significant evolutionary pressure for men to have longer lifespans.

Watch out for news such as Jagger's , Bernie Ecclestone etc.

We never know if it's their or not.

Famous people are just people who are famous and while the prenup rates are high, people who actually do the DNA test for paternity purposes are low as they are in the general population

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

#455

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

jart wrote: post #444

r_singh wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the sarcasm and respect your take Science has helped reduce mortality at birth and manage or even eliminate a lot of diseases like malaria, HIV, small pox, polio and many more. Also for burns, broken bones and accidents. And continues to. I advocate vaccines. I myself took the Anti Covid shot 3 times. And use medicines and supplements regularly. There’s another side to it though. At what point do I j…

You don't trust doctors but you took the covid jab three times? I accept that I will never understand some people. If anything the covid jab is the reason we're not going to get longevity anytime soon. The medical establishment destroyed all the trust and hope people had in the future of biotechnology with that thing.

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by whodidntante » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

4gotunameagain wrote: post #376

whodidntante wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of countries to go to that are not complicit in your home countries issues if your issue is with the US. Russia and China have well above average lifestyles based on PPP. So do many South American countries, as well as Japan, and South Korea and other Asian countries. Also a number of countries in the middle east. Yes, I understand the US is a very very bad country. I am also a very very bad person b…

Oh rest assured, I am not in the US. I would never do that. I find the mentality there insufferable. The mentality that you laid bare in your comment. About the land of opportunity, as long as the cost is externalised.

The US has a lot of history to deal with - genocide of Native Americans, slavery, treatment of women, to name a few. A number of horrible wars since the aftermath of WW2.

We are also going through significant challenges right now - social, political, economic, foreign relationships.

We may or may not survive as a country. We may have a positive or adverse effect on the rest of the world as we go through what we must go through.

However, the rest of the world is simply not innocent.

Europe has a lot to account for. So does Russia, China, Japan. And lets not forget the Islamic and Ottoman empires, which easily matched and in many respects put to shame the slavery, colonization, genocides, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid of the American, European, and Asian empires.

Most of the worlds current problems are the result of the collapse of these empires about 100 years ago, payment for the failure of their insufferable mentalities over many centuries.

Right now the US is facing payment for its past, the rest of the world is still paying for its past.

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

#457

Post by amrocha » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:50 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #313

zksijdjd wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> An American is (on the whole) somebody who’s genetically European and has had family here for generations. This is obviously nonsense. "White" Americans are something like 57% of the population. The US is very mixed, and always has been.

If you ever think about getting into an online argument with these people, let the fact that pointing out that not white people are americans gets you downvoted stop you.

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

#458

Post by JumpinJack_Cash » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

sdeframond wrote: post #219

ACCount37 wrote: post #165

Aging 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.

I wonder if I would really like to pour billions of taxpayer money into aging when we are not even able to live a basic healthy lifestyle. Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we? It would not raise the life expectancy to 100 years but it would considerably reduce the health burden on the economy.

> Sleeping well, eating well and exercising does work. Science about this is well-established. So why arent we?

Because although longevity is a nice recurrent idea for everyone in theory, when the rubber meets the road people routinely want to optimize time spent in living in pleasure.

The pleasurable stuff is almost all about "YOLO!" in every domain. A candle that shines twice as bright ends up consuming itself twice as fast and all that

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

#459

Post by somenameforme » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #446

brabel wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 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.

If you could put your mind in a robot, is it still you? What if you get a knee replacement? What if you infuse a young persons blood? What if you put on a contact lens? Fun questions, but I’m not sure the answer changes what we will do much.

Two issues here - the first is that relatively new discoveries like the bidirectional gut-brain axis, and the major effects it has on you, pose a technical issue to traditional thought experiments like brains in a vat (or robot as it may be). The second is that this also doesn't really answer the question. Your brain, like everything else in your body, degrades over time. It's not like it becomes immortal if you just stick it in a robot, if that were even possible.

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

#460

Post by nradov » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

gscott wrote: post #57

jebarker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the sad part about dying isn’t the loss of agency in the world as much as missing the rest of the movie. At 43 I already feel like I’ve mostly realized my potential and I’m just here to raise my kids and then I become a burden. But I really want to know what happens next!

Your never done raising your kids regardless of how old they are.

You're never "done" but at some point you have to stop. For your sake and theirs.