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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

#511

Post by arisAlexis »

Fargren wrote: post #406
exe34 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh thank goodness you've finally shifted the goal post! in other comments you were arguing that radical life extension was impossible but now it's merely impossible within our lifetime! that's a huge shift!

I made two comments in this thread. The one you replied to, and this one I'm using now to respond to you. Do you have me confused with someone else? But yeah, I think "within our lifetime" is a critical qualifier, and most people who are not writing it down are implicitly assuming that the qualifier is obvious. I have very limited interest in technologies that will not exist until centuries after I'm born, other than…

If you believe it will take centuries for AI assisted biology to discover new paths..

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

#512

Post by inglor_cz »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #468
inglor_cz wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> I think that prophecies like this are fundamentally unsound and unscientific. Well, the study is literal science from a scientific institution, compared to an internet comment so... It wins here.

It does not. There is a lot of useless papers produced because of the "publish or perish" pressure, and even harder sciences have a massive reproduction crisis.

Feynman diagnosed this sort of cosplay as "cargo-cult science" decades ago.

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

#513

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

inglor_cz wrote: post #305
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in 1968 an analyst may conclude that space travel could never become routine and still be perfectly on the money even after the moon landings. So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.

And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely". Declaration such as: “We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone." is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity t…

Woa. Hold on. I'm talking about "the future" in the context of history. You can predict the future state of some systems, e.g. we can make fairly accurate weather predictions, from past observations of weather events, for sure. As far as I can tell that's what the authors are trying to do.

But if you want to know when the next big technological leap will happen then you won't learn that by looking at what happened last time: last time is not this time, that's my point.

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

#514

Post by lupusreal »

ben_w wrote: post #405
lupusreal wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secular religion spoken of by nabla has nothing to do with afterlives. It's for people who don't believe in any afterlife trying to placate their fear of death by having faith that technology will somehow grant them an indefinite life, not an afterlife. (Context: I am firmly an atheist, but I also disapprove of the people who want to live forever. I think that's selfish and childish. People should get to grips wi…

> People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw

That's nice, but you're still going to die. We all will, and the world is better off for it because progress happens one funeral at a time.

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

#515

Post by api »

rowanG077 wrote: post #507
Intralexical wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The point I'm making is that there is no precedent in nature for a complex animal maintaining homeostasis indefinitely like that (that doesn't rely on bulk regeneration). And given such immortality would presumably be highly evolutionarily advantageous, there is therefore no reason to believe it's possible at all, and many reasons to suspect it might not be (antagonistic pleiotropy, chaos theory, thermodynamics……

Aren't some trees, some fungi, some sharks and some crabs basically exactly that? They are most certainly complex life. Sure you are right heir metabolic profile is very different. But really the your argument is already shifting to "there is no life ver similar to humans that do it, so it must be impossible" which imo is a much larger stretch then assuming it's possible.

We aren’t much more complex than a crab, if we are at all. “Complexity” is not what makes us what we are. It’s that we went down an evolutionary path that heavily leveraged intelligence and social cooperation so we got a big hypertrophied brain. Our brain is like a cheetah’s musculoskeletal system or a rabbit’s reproductive system.

The OP is also massively underestimating plant complexity. We aren’t much more complex than a tree either.

We are higher metabolism than both though, and with that the OP has a point. We are already long lived for a high metabolism animal. Our metabolic rate makes it harder for our repair mechanisms to stay ahead of oxidative and radiation damage. That will make extreme life extension hard for us, harder than if we were reptilians or arthropods.

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

#516

Post by sentinelsignal »

pyth0 wrote: post #399
sherburt3 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes very illogical to hope that life will get better when my analysis proves the opposite. Bazinga!

Why do you believe that extending human life will make “life better”?

This is a very good question which i resonate with. The implications that an extend life is better. In my personal opinion life as we know it would be vastly different and who knows how different it could be, for better or for worse.

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

#517

Post by estearum »

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.

The COVID vaccines are an absolute miracle of modern medicine and it's people like yourself who have turned it into a tragedy.

Without the hysterical and scientifically illiterate people complaining about the COVID vaccines, we very likely could've had a renaissance of investment into next generation biotech platforms like mRNA. Instead, they "have" to be destroyed because the woke right can't read a scientific paper and real information takes more than a tweet or TikTok video to convey.

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

#518

Post by estearum »

swat535 wrote: post #346
seszett wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance. By the time you think suicide is the better option, you are often already in a managed and locked down environment in which it is difficult to impossible to commit suicide in an acceptable manner. Believe me I know it.

"Suicide in an acceptable manner" sounds as like an oxymoron. Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead. Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which…

> Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.

As medicine and technology advance, assisted suicide will make sense/be required in nearly 100% of natural human deaths. With enough money, we will be able to keep people "alive" (on paper) arbitrarily long. It will be nothing like what people think of when they describe extended lifespan, but turning off all the robotic parts will still be tantamount to assisted suicide.

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

#519

Post by estearum »

nradov wrote: post #418
VonTum wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, lobbying efforts have steadily pushed for broader access and eligibility...British legislators have to consider how easily assisted dying can be expanded, how easily abuses can go undetected. Wait, how exactly does one "abuse" MAID? People being so deep in poverty and addiction that they opt for MAID as an option isn't a symptom that it's "too easy" to access it, but rather that _society_ is failing them.…

Several people in the Netherlands have died through MAID who had only psychiatric conditions with no serious physical problems. And these were not people mired in poverty and addiction who were failed by society. We can argue the merits of particular cases but many people would consider that an abuse. https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/16/dutc... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fulla…

Why is a psychiatric problem less "deserving" of MAID than a physical problem?

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

#520

Post by ben_w »

lupusreal wrote: post #514
ben_w wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People should get to grips with the reality of their mortality and make peace with that. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw

That's nice, but you're still going to die. We all will, and the world is better off for it because progress happens one funeral at a time.

That mistakes academic personal power for all power:

If funerals were in general the only way progress happened, every genocide would cause scientific/technological/economic revolutions.

Recessions are sufficient to clear bad leadership in the private sector; elections in democratic governments.

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