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

https://lafollette.wisc.edu/news/new-research-reveals-longevity-gains-slowing-life-expectancy-of-100-unlikely/

by XzetaU8 • 11 months ago

217 483 11 months ago

lafollette.wisc.edu

Swizec2• 11 months ago

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.

fcatalan• 11 months ago

My grandfather lived to 102 and only the last few months were bad, nothing dramatic, just fading away at home, no hospital.

I'd sign up for the same

PartiallyTyped3• 11 months ago

My grandfather looked in his 50s and had more mobility than 50 year old men well into his 80s it’s only when cancer got to him that he started looking his age.

I’d sign up for that.

xenobeb2• 11 months ago

Yea I would sign up to win the lottery too.

melling4• 11 months ago

Yes, the term is “health span” and that’s basically what everyone is talking about every single time you read an article on the subject.

PeterHolzwarth• 11 months ago

You may feel differently when you get there. Be careful of present you making decisions about future you.

Swizec2• 11 months ago

That’s the best part! Making decisions that keep you in good shape until 89 are also likely to help you live until 100.

At that age if you can avoid cancer the rest is stuff like “Strong enough so you don’t break a hip when tripping on the stairs”

iwontberude4• 11 months ago

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

entropyneur• 11 months ago

Have you been engulfed in flames before?

I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.

animuchan• 11 months ago

This is probably untrue (but you do you!)

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

matwood• 11 months ago

I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt debilitating acute pain. I had nerve pain in the past to where my leg felt like it was on fire. It was then I understood how people get addicted to pain killers. I was able to address the problem and I’ve been fine for many years, but it hurt more than any pain I’ve ever had - and I have had many from sports.

jumploops• 11 months ago

My grandfather had a little saying at each of his birthdays:

88, feeling great!

89, feeling fine

90, less mighty*

91, not yet done!

92, don’t think I’ll hit 102!

He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility.

*note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!

cronelius• 11 months ago

bryan johnson has entered the chat

aaronbrethorst• 11 months ago

For anyone else who didn’t know the name, you may recall the shredded weirdo in the helmet from 2021: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-16/braintree...

meindnoch• 11 months ago

I have this feeling he's going to die way earlier than he would have if he just lived a normal life.

elitan• 11 months ago

I have the opposite feeling.

AstroBen• 11 months ago

I mean he's just marketing eating well, sleeping and exercising.. how on earth would that make him die way earlier?

woadwarrior01• 11 months ago

Water is wet and internet influencers are going to "influence". Regardless of what happens to him, his Blueprint brand will outlast him.

adastra228• 11 months ago

There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature.

wslh• 11 months ago

Are you watching "Alien: Earth" series?

tokai• 11 months ago

It out of my wheelhouse but isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?

andrewflnr2• 11 months ago

I believe the argument would go "there's no fundamental reason we can't fix telomeres".

JumpCrisscross8• 11 months ago

isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?

It’s one component, but not the only reason [1].

Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation” [2]. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer [3]. They nevertheless age.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Theories_of_aging

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6651551/

[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe0174

SoftTalker• 11 months ago

Odd then that every living thing ages and eventually dies?

conception• 11 months ago

This is not true and easily countered by any sort of investigation. Lobsters, flatworms, immortal jellyfish and hydras are all believed to be immortal.

In fact we know how to live forever, control our telomeres. We know it works because cancer exists. We just can’t control it but controlled cancer is effectively immortality.

danielmarkbruce4• 11 months ago

but we haven't really even tried...

VincentEvans• 11 months ago

You haven’t quite come to grips with mortality, I think.

JumpCrisscross8• 11 months ago

You haven’t quite come to grips with mortality

This is unfair, and akin to branding anyone who takes medicine as being unhinged.

There is evidence we can extend our health spans. By how much and how are open questions. And if we can actually stop aging, versus slow it down, has not been demonstrated. Some people engage with this unhealthily, just as many terminally-ill cancer patients unhealthily engage with long-shot treatment options. That doesn’t make everyone taking those treatments delusional.

I’d hope we more mature as a society than decrying real medical research that could materially increase our health spans because they’re heretical.

lossolo2• 11 months ago

I think OP is not entirely incorrect. Reproductive cells undergo processes like epigenetic reprogramming, which basically strips away many of the chemical marks (like DNA methylation patterns) that accumulate with age. That’s one of the reasons babies don’t start with the cellular age of their parents. Researchers can take adult cells, reprogram them back to an embryonic like state using Yamanaka factors (a set of four genes) effectively erasing their biological age.

I think scientists currently are testing ways to "partially" reprogram cells to make them younger while keeping their function. Early studies in mice have shown some reversal of aging signs.

Seems like an engineering problem more than an absolute limitation.

qgin3• 11 months ago

Social shaming is a big way humans deal with unchangeable things. They impose a cost for anyone expressing a desire for that thing to be different.

And it makes sense, really. You can't have a functioning society if everyone is running around freaking out about death all the time.

But we're entering a weird time where we might actually be able to add more good years to our lives. One of the steps towards getting there is being a little more okay with people seriously exploring these ideas.

seydor• 11 months ago

I don't see the point in doing that

goeiedaggoeie• 11 months ago

entropy comes for us all

tristramb2• 11 months ago

But that doesn't mean that it will be economically feasible.

tristramb2• 11 months ago

And I wouldn't expect it to be, given that were are the product of billions of years of an evolutionary process that has relied on 'scrap and rebuild from scratch' as a mechanism to control errors.

BriggyDwiggs422• 11 months ago

The cost of tech tends to fall as a rule. Why wouldn’t it eventually become feasible?

close042• 11 months ago

Physical/chemical maybe not, but biologically there might be strong reasons to not allow a complex organism to live forever. Evolution might be accounting for a lot of the reasons leading to the death of the individual organism. For one it would stimulate evolution itself and also alleviate the inevitable resource pressure.

A species that lives forever must adjust to reproduce relatively slowly to not overwhelm the local environment. A species that lives short lives will reproduce at much higher rates. So at any time the fewer “immortal” individuals would be vulnerable to competition from the many “mortals”, or to predators.

Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans but with implications we can’t even think of now. Maybe our limitation will not be biological but societal.

adastra228• 11 months ago

You are mixing up evolutionary incentives with real chemistry-driven biological constraints. The base incentives of reproduction-driven natural selection may make aging inevitable under natural selection, but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering.

croes2• 11 months ago

There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely

Given that that the universe hasn't an indefinite life span there is at least physical reason why we can't live indefinitely.

c222• 11 months ago

When is the universe definitely going to die?

adastra228• 11 months ago

Indefinite doesn’t mean infinite.

A_D_E_P_T5• 11 months ago

Assuming no proton decay, its life span (for baryonic beings such as us) is far beyond 10^1500 years, so I don't think that "lifespan of the universe" is a limiting factor here. Nobody's speaking of living an infinitely long life.

tietjens• 11 months ago

Interesting claim. Care to state your age?

adastra228• 11 months ago

Why is that relevant.

echelon3• 11 months ago

Oxygen is on oxidizer and evolution only needed to keep our gene carriers optimized to reproduce within our fitness landscape trough.

JumpCrisscross8• 11 months ago

no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old

We don’t know this. We know of no creatures as biologically complex as humans that demonstrate biological immortality. That might be because nature never bothered. It might be because it can’t.

But you are generally correct: we have strong evidence healthspan-increasing interventions are not only possible, but proximate. That research could move faster with more funding, particularly from the public, since if we relinquish this funding to the rich it will not prioritize treatments which may be slightly less effective but much cheaper and thus broadly applicable.

adastra228• 11 months ago

Two points:

(1) Yes we do have an example: us. Why is a baby’s cells young and healthy, and not the age of the parents? Dormant eggs are not the answer as you’d still get accumulating damage over time. Turns out there are mechanisms for cellular reprogramming which rejuvenates cells. There are mechanisms for making ages cells indistinguishable from young cells. We just haven’t fully harnessed this capability on therapeutics yet.

(2) The deeper point is one of logical necessity. No bird flies faster than the speed of sound, yet that doesn’t work as an argument for the impossibility of the SR-71 or Concorde. No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet).

dyauspitr3• 11 months ago

It doesn’t really matter. If you can exist as a 25 year-old, there is some change you can make to your body and cells that will indefinitely preserve that. It may not be within our grasp for maybe even up to another century, but it truly is inevitable.

frankzander• 11 months ago

Good point. Glad someone pointed this out

EasyMark2• 11 months ago

I'm not saying this isn't possible, as some simple lifeforms seem to be basically immortal but our systems are much more complex and consist of many more moving parts and we are just meat machines. Machines wear out and you have to replace the parts. We're no where near being able to replace all of our parts. So there is a pretty good reason why at least the people currently alive aren't going to see what you're saying come to fruition. Entropy is a bitch.

czhu12• 11 months ago

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 doubles life expectancy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empi...

echelon3• 11 months ago

That's 100% on the mark. Infants aren't dying anymore.

Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology.

Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything but the brain.

The tough problems:

- religious ick and luddite ick

- artificial gestation

- deactivating the brain stem without impacting development

- keeping the body physiologically active and developmentally normative

- head transplants that preserve spinal cord function

- lots of other ancillary issues with changes to pulmonary and immune flux.

Earw0rm4• 11 months ago

Won't happen for broadly the same kind of reasons interstellar travel won't happen.

Lab-grown organs is doable, but the brain and spinal column just aren't modular in that way.

In-place system renovation and targeted replacement is a more likely way to yield results.

billfor2• 11 months ago

I think antibiotics also have a lot to do with the initial gains.

somenameforme2• 11 months ago

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/

bigmattystyles2• 11 months ago

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.

KronisLV2• 11 months ago

I feel like we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out.

Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.

bigmattystyles2• 11 months ago

Maybe, but I feel like most would eventually reach same conclusion as the (majority of) protagonists in the good place…

jebarker2• 11 months ago

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!

sixtyj• 11 months ago

In Hollywood, they have 12 types of scenarios. Choose your type of life. Tragedy? Love story? Adventure? Becoming someone? Life is too short to experience all scenarios that is why we want live longer…

After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often.

So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.

gscott• 11 months ago

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

echelon3• 11 months ago

You're not dreaming big enough.

"Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror.

I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero.

I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.

It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking.

And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.

saulpw2• 11 months ago

Consider that some people have gotten past it, and that it's not a "cope". Enlightenment is real even if it horrifies you because you aren't there yet.

hiAndrewQuinn• 11 months ago

Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.

I hear this claim often, but I never hear any particular reason for why it's so important compared to e.g. letting Alpha Centauri colonize where the lightcones overlap.

seletskiy• 11 months ago

You are not alone in this. Though I would say it is absolute horror, not just suboptimal one.

Practically speaking, I have no idea what I _personally_ can do except of accepting the inevitable.

chillingeffect• 11 months ago

It's not our species, it's our culture. Anxiety over death leads to consumption, so it's a consumer society's virtue.

latexr5• 11 months ago

I wonder if as a species we can ever get more comfortable with death.

Psychedelics for everyone!

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-pe...

paganel• 11 months ago

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.

georgemcbay• 11 months ago

In my experience (with both my age peers and people a generation older) as a 52 year old most people who aren't sociopathic narcissists just naturally get more comfortable with the idea of their own death with age.

Not like they long for it or whatever, but anxiety about it goes down, acceptance of it goes up.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

"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.

Intralexical10• 11 months ago

That's the logic of a cancer cell.

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

keiferski2• 11 months ago

It is ironic that many of the people obsessed with life extension are also those deeply involved in creating systems that deliberately waste the time we already do have, via addictive algorithms, clickbait content, unnecessary consumerism, etc.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”

- Seneca

tempodox• 11 months ago

That makes perfect sense, since you’re meant to spend any additional time with the profit-generating pastimes you mentioned.

keiferski2• 11 months ago

Hah, you’re right. I didn’t think about that- of course the extra time gained will be spent the same way it’s spent now.

latexr5• 11 months ago

I was already familiar with Seneca and that quote, but reading it now it sounds condescending. Of course a stoic would say that. Even if we concede that most people “waste” most of life, claiming it is “long enough” and we have a “sufficiently generous amount of it” is just opinion and not something to be prescribed to others. “Long enough” for what? For what Seneca enjoyed, maybe, he had nothing to do and only a fraction of the available world knowledge.

Nowadays one lifetime isn’t even enough to read every book one would find interesting, and reading might be your favourite thing in the world that you do at literally ever opportunity. Long enough… Pft… Seneca clearly wasn’t familiar with the essentially infinite world of fan fiction. He surely would’ve judged it if he had.

Just to drive the point home: The comment is tongue in cheek. I agree with your first paragraph.

ahazred8ta• 11 months ago

There seem to be a few stoics on Royal Road O:-) https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/search?globalFilters=fals...

BriggyDwiggs422• 11 months ago

Well sure but we waste it for circumstantial reasons. Wisdom is scarce by definition. Denying people a second chance because they messed up with literally zero information isn’t something we should condone.

ALittleLight• 11 months ago

This looks pretty trivial. Obviously modern gains in life expectancy were from removing things that killed us in early age. This says nothing about future gains in life expectancy which may come from biological/medical interventions that reduce senescence.

DustinBrett• 11 months ago

That kind of thinking is fuel for the AI accelerationists

dyauspitr3• 11 months ago

Life extension will happen. It’s really just a matter of time with the upper bound being no later than a century from now in my opinion.

elicash• 11 months ago

My understanding was that life expectancy has been declining for like a while, not merely slowing in gains -- first because of opioids and then because of COVID.

Edit: In the U.S. that is.

hollerith• 11 months ago

life expectancy has been declining

Only in the US whereas the OP "analyzed life expectancy for 23 high-income and low-mortality countries".

irrational• 11 months ago

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?

ivape2• 11 months ago

I think it's just plus or minus 10 years for whatever fate (genetics) had in store for you. That plus or minus being the little we can control (diet/activity).

rhyperior2• 11 months ago

So much of the modern US diet that’s being exported to the world negatively impacts life and health span. It’s very much controllable, just harder than the default.

lenkite• 11 months ago

I think you can safely double that to plus or minus 20 years for what "little" we can control.

markus_zhang4• 11 months ago

Wow that’s such a blessing. You are going to have maybe 50% more quality time than many people.

jvanderbot• 11 months ago

You're asking if anyone has bothered to study long lived people to determine why they live a long time?

davnn• 11 months ago

Maybe living the blue zone [1] lifestyle?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone

refactor_master• 11 months ago

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

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

Root_Denied• 11 months ago

I'd be cautious of Blue Zones, they're potentially not actually a real thing and more of a statistical construct.

https://www.science.org/content/article/do-blue-zones-suppos...

whimsicalism• 11 months ago

a familial history of shoddy record keeping?

markus_zhang4• 11 months ago

I think it’s fine. When I get older I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife, whatever it is.

latexr5• 11 months ago

I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife

That’s only intriguing if the answer is “yes”. Otherwise it doesn’t matter.

markus_zhang4• 11 months ago

Yeah the if is where the intriguing is.

qgin3• 11 months ago

When you have general anesthesia, you experience nothing, not even the vague sense of time passing like when sleeping, it's just an edit in time. You basically don't exist when you're under general anesthesia.

If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.

markus_zhang4• 11 months ago

Yeah I did have one and it was as you said, an edit in time. However this is after all still different from real death so we will see.

jart3• 11 months ago

Why would they pull you out of the sim if you're not dead? For all we know you need to sleep up on the spaceship too.

dyauspitr3• 11 months ago

There isn’t, you’re just looking for something as your life comes to an end.

amelius• 11 months ago

Trump administration isn't helping either ...

qgin3• 11 months ago

New research reveals horse-drawn wagon engineering gains slowing, travel at speeds beyond 12mph unlikely.

swaraj• 11 months ago

Exactly

baq3• 11 months ago

Right, we’ll just replace ourselves with humanoid robots. Only half joking

seanmcdirmid2• 11 months ago

You know this is how we will end eventually in the best case. We won’t master our biology, we will simply transcend it by pro-creating offspring that have something better. It’s also a much easier solution than untangling evolved biological systems that are not designed to last for what have been very beneficial reasons (e.g. scientific advances occur via death of the old guard).

Janicc• 11 months ago

Not even that. I guarantee you that once really good brain computer interfaces are a thing, investments into "brain in a vat" companies are going to start being a thing. Because keeping just the brain young and then alive is almost certainly very possible if that's the whole focus.

billfor2• 11 months ago

There are no new modes to switch to. We can’t fly supersonic passenger airlines anymore and haven’t been to the moon since 1972. The new Accela trains run slower than the old ones.

eMPee584• 11 months ago

true now

Earw0rm4• 11 months ago

Half true. You can switch to the mode of not needing to go halfway around the world (or even just across the country) so often, because efficient information flows allow you to accomplish vastly more while mostly staying relatively local.

Sure, we all like to complain about burrito taxis, dating apps and endless Zoom calls, but in terms of quality-of-life per unit of energy, it's a step change.

ziofill• 11 months ago

Oh, crap

userbinator• 11 months ago

In other words, 7 bits is still sufficient to hold the age of a human.

ethersteeds3• 11 months ago

I like my structs packed and my lifetimes finite.

dsign2• 11 months ago

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 life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.

In the political sphere, some countries are tearing themselves apart on the question of immigration and identity. But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce.

So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?

4gotunameagain4• 11 months ago

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

You cannot discount the destabilising potential of immigration, and the lowering of societal trust it comes with. As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule. It will be especially harder to integrate people the way the demographic pyramid is looking right now in "developed" countries.

I would also question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged by the western, "developed" countries that will be hosting them.

I am an immigrant (expat?). I don't enjoy paying contributions for the welfare of the people who played in a huge role in the reasons I had to emigrate.

simianparrot15• 11 months ago

I appreciate you being honest, but I also don't want people like you to immigrate to my country. How are you so sure of the role our old people played in your reasons for emigrating? Even if you're in the US and from a country the US has actively destabilized, how many of the people on welfare -- old and/or infirm -- were instrumental in the actions that led to the destabilization of your country? How many of these people had any active choice?

This is why we need strong vetting of immigrants.

AlecSchueler• 11 months ago

As we saw multiple times, integration is the edge case and not the rule.

Is that true? Are you sure the edge cases where people didn't integrate aren't just bigger stories than the many many people who arrive and live normal boring lives?

question the desire of immigrants to pay for the welfare of the senile of their respective state, given the fact that they are more than likely to feel mistreated and wronged

Maybe we could stop wronging and mistreating them? Or is that an important part of our European heritage?

kruffalon2• 11 months ago

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

Not in a sustainable way.

Immigration is only viable as long as the countries of origin are so bad to live in so it's "better" to migrate. This is not really a world we want, is it?

DrBazza2• 11 months ago

Don't forget that the recipient countries of immigrants are brain-draining the countries they're leaving. Arguably those motivated individuals are precisely those that should stay in their country and make it less 'bad'.

simianparrot15• 11 months ago

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.

oezi2• 11 months ago

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.

ponector• 11 months ago

How it doesn't work if it actually is?

However there is a lack of law enforcement and lack of integration programs for immigrants.

pembrook4• 11 months ago

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 background, and within <1 generation most immigrants become fully integrated.

When European identities are all built around stories from the past, and the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes (climate apocalypse, population decline, social welfare breakdown, economic malaise, technophobia), it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture. I'll enjoy your aesthetic traditions and take your free social welfare, but I'll keep my own culture and values, thank you very much.

When your sales pitch is: "we don't like new things here so there's nothing to create, but life here is easy, you don't have to do much because the state will take care of you!" I don't think you're attracting the best citizens.

hamandcheese• 11 months ago

Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?

Won't that just make the problem worse?

HeadsUpHigh2• 11 months ago

Most longevity enhancing interventions that have worked in mice have extended healthspan and lifespan at the same rate.

HighGoldstein2• 11 months ago

Conceptually no, unless you specifically target end-of-life fatal ailments for some reason. Extending the healthy lifespan is a pretty reliable way to extend overall lifespan.

grues-dinner3• 11 months ago

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 that deal. Aging is brutal and I've just about had enough already!

lblume2• 11 months ago

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.

aspaviento• 11 months ago

I would take that deal without even thinking about it. Heck, I would take it even if it was for only 100 years. Keeping the energy of a body in its twenties, not risking illnesses like Alzheimer's, dementia, a fragile body that can break at any time for the cost of working 8 hours a day (which we are already doing)? Tell me where to sign it.

joelthelion• 11 months ago

So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?

It's controversial, but I think it would be tremendously beneficial to our society if we accepted that death is (currently) inevitable and that past some point, assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.

DoctorOetker• 11 months ago

But then how would you justify the healthcare racket?

A_D_E_P_T5• 11 months ago

assisted suicide is a lot better than artificially prolonging suffering at great cost for as long as possible.

I beseech you to contemplate how badly this might be abused, and how monstrous the consequences could be. Even now MAID in Canada and other forms of assisted suicide in Europe have arguably gone way too far.

a_imho• 11 months ago

I hold the opposite view on this issue. While I firmly believe that everyone should have the freedom to make their own choices about their lives, my primary concern is that certain groups and especially governments are actively promoting assisted suicide. Even if it's merely coincidental, I find the underlying incentives perverse, for lack of a better word. Admittedly drawing from a Hollywood sci-fi perspective, I would much prefer that, instead of programs like MAID, people were offered options such as cryopreservation.

segmondy• 11 months ago

How do you stop forced assisted suicide or do you think it will never happen?

N_Lens• 11 months ago

That conception of God sounds positively Eldritch!

dsign2• 11 months ago

I was in need of a compliment today. Thank you :-) !

lotsofpulp• 11 months ago

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 life if it could give my mom a good life for that long. Her old age is my single biggest source of stress.

That “monetary cost” is not nothing. It represents a share of the finite resources your tribe has (individual/family/city/country) being spent on something with little return for future generations.

Developed countries are asking people who put in the effort to raise kids well to support those that don’t. That works when maybe 1 in 10 people don’t raise kids well, for whatever reason, but it doesn’t work so well when large portions of the population do not.

And there very well may be a justification to not raise kids well, but the math is going to be the math regardless of justifications.

carlosjobim2• 11 months ago

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

Have you ever asked yourself what the purpose is of what you call "workforce"? Exactly what work are they doing that is more important than the survival of the native population? It's completely dehumanizing, and I can't find the logic behind it. If a geographical place needs constant influx of people from other places because the "system" there is slowly killing the population, then for what purpose should that continue?

giardini2• 11 months ago

dsign says "But immigration is the only thing that can replenish their workforce."

should be

"immigration or automation are the only things that can replenish their workforce."

picafrost3• 11 months ago

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.

9dev3• 11 months ago

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.

picafrost3• 11 months ago

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.

psalaun• 11 months ago

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.

Der_Einzige• 11 months ago

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

risyachka• 11 months ago

Natural one maybe.

Humans are biological machines. We know how to replace hearts with artificial ones that can last years. Soon they may start lasting decades.

We can replace many hormones with artificial ones.

I do not see any reason we can’t learn how to replace other organs and systems.

And in this case you may as well live 200+ years

abeppu• 11 months ago

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.

simianparrot15• 11 months ago

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.

nojs• 11 months ago

This is a catch-all dismissal that you could make about any medical innovation throughout history. There are a lot of things we can fix, and we’ve had a lot of success so far in doing so.

simianparrot15• 11 months ago

It’s not. We never fix anything in medicine: We treat and prevent. Removing the appendix prevents or treats acute appendicitis, but it also has a tradeoff in terms of removing a gut biome reservoir.

This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in the past — and then some.

But you can’t fully fix aging. You can’t infinitely improve standard of living.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

Everything can be fixed. There are just things we figured out how to fix, and ones we didn't yet.

The only real, fully enforced tradeoff is "energy is always required to keep the lights on". And it's not like humans are strapped for energy.

Revisional_Sin• 11 months ago

Okay, sure. But it seems reasonable to expect we can keep improving the tradeoffs.

djrj477dhsnv• 11 months ago

Aren't there already large long-living animals like elephants that basically don't get cancer?

simianparrot15• 11 months ago

Their average life expectancy is around 70 years, and yes, cancer is rarer in elephants, potentially due to the species having extra copies of the TP53 gene.

Cancer is also a result of many other factors of which humans are more exposed to than elephants typically are, environmental and pollution being a major one, and food ingredients being another. A life expectancy of 70 years for a human isn't that great; in 2024 in Europe it was 79 years for males and 84 years for women, and that's with all the contributing cancer risk factors in society as mentioned earlier.

A more interesting species might be immortal jellyfish, but the simplicity of the organism might be a contributing factor in why it works the way it does.

speedylight• 11 months ago

The only reason aging can’t be reversed is because we don’t know how to do it, but that doesn’t mean that it is inherently impossible to achieve. The only things that are impossible to do are the ones that break the laws of physics.

londons_explore3• 11 months ago

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.

* Large scale animal and human trials of every chemical used in daily life to find those things like a pacifier which gives you cancer 60 years later. It is far better to do an 'unethical' trial of a chemical than the current system of just putting it in all products and going bankrupt later.

* Prevent spread of other diseases like the common cold with daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone, with the government bringing you food and paying you to stay home if infected with any spreadable disease.

* Work on many more vaccines and give them out for free to the whole world to eliminate more diseases like we did with smallpox (that vaccine has saved around 800 million lives).

* Dramatically reduced effort on individual treatment (cancer, care homes, etc) by putting a 200% tax on healthcare, and funnelling that money into preventative things so the next generation doesn't get the health issues at all.

lblume2• 11 months ago

daily covid-like lateral flow tests for everyone

How would you prevent people from abusing this system? Covid tests were simple to get to show a positive result, and I know some people who would make this instantly unsustainable.

londons_explore3• 11 months ago

I'd have the tests not show a simple line, but instead a complex checkerboard pattern you scan with a phone. The scan results would simultaneously test for 100+ diseases, and be uploaded to some department of health server which would then decide if you specifically should be paid to stay home.

That decision can be made based on fraud risk, but also on the benefit to society of that person not spreading that disease further. For example if a disease has already infected most of the town in the last few weeks, it makes no sense for someone to stay home because local immunity is already probably high and further spread unlikely.

However the first case in a new town would 100% be worth staying home for to avoid infecting thousands of others.

lm284692• 11 months ago

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.

e-topy• 11 months ago

European here. I've been to the US and holy mother of Jesus, you put sooooo much sugar into everything. I had to buy 'European' bread because your normal bread made my gums hurt, and even then that was the sweetest bread I've ever eaten.

Seriously, when your one large oreo shake has 2600 calories, no wonder your obesity rate is 35% and isn't slowing. Driving to the toilet instead of walking also doesn't help. Then your hospitals get overrun with preventable diseases and healthcare gets expensive. This isn't a 'caring' problem when getting fat is the only option for most people, the way most people life is specifically designed to make you obese.

iLoveOncall• 11 months ago

This sounds like RFK's type of "medicine". The number of people dying from transmissible diseases is a lot less than people dying from heart attacks, cancer, etc. which are linked a lot more to lifestyle than to diseases.

londons_explore3• 11 months ago

My hypothesis is most heart attacks and cancer are also caused by transmissible diseases, but ones which are mostly symptomless.

We already know the link between cervical cancer and HPV, various cancers are caused by EBV, hepatitis virus often causes liver cancer, herpes virus also causes some cancers.

Plenty of viruses are also linked to a substantially increased risk of heart disease, including the common cold.

I suspect that nearly all cancers are caused by viruses, and are often just viruses that have no other symptoms and might take decades to cause the cancer. If we can stop the transmission of those viruses, cancer rates will eventually drop.

The challenge is how to do that smartly - not having half the population sitting at home twiddling their thumbs because they have some symptomless virus and 'feel fine'.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

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.

seanmcdirmid2• 11 months ago

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.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

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 vision.

Getting aging recognized as a disease and a therapeutic target, and getting the initial effort on the scale of Human Genome Project would be a good starting point though.

If there was understanding that a drug "against aging" is desirable by the healthcare systems and can get approved, Big Pharma would have a reason to try - as opposed to developing drugs for other things and hopefully stumbling on something that makes progress against aging by an accident.

imtringued2• 11 months ago

This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime.

The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.

Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains.

Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.

sdeframond5• 11 months ago

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.

HeadsUpHigh2• 11 months ago

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

Those will give you at best another marginal decade. By all means worth doing but its not radical life extension. At the same time a young body can take lack of sleep and can physically perform even if not exercising much better than an old one. So there's more to it than just lifestyle.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

Doesn't scale. If you could put "sleeping well, eating well and exercising" into a $0.25 once a week pill and make that available to everyone, it would work. As is, it doesn't.

We want solutions that can be scaled and rolled out broadly, and "basic healthy lifestyle" ain't it.

JumpinJack_Cash2• 11 months ago

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

Kinrany2• 11 months ago

Aging itself is not a disease, it's just stuff falling into disrepair over time.

Age-related illnesses shouldn't be dismissed with "they're just old" of course but there's no reason to expect a single cause. Other than passage of time itself.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

Cancer is "stuff falling into disrepair over time" too. Get enough faulty cells with DNA damage and one of them is going to make itself a problem. The only way to avoid cancer is to have something else kill you before you get it.

That's not a reason to say that cancer is somehow "not a disease". It obviously is. We don't want cancer. We fund efforts to research cancer and funnel money into better cancer treatments, and we get results.

Aging should get the same treatment.

Joel_Mckay• 11 months ago

Longevity in misery can be a form of cruelty in itself...

Someday, I don't think synthetic intelligence will escape this facet of existence. After 84 humans call it the forth age, and things tend to stop getting better for ones quality of life. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

ggm• 11 months ago

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?

nabla92• 11 months ago

Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.

While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.

- Possible in our lifetime.

- Affordable to the faithful.

You remove these two, and the faithful lose their interest in discussing the matter.

brabel5• 11 months ago

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.

arisAlexis5• 11 months ago

Religion is a lie. This is actually a possible science path. Don't get confused.

ben_w5• 11 months ago

Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact.

Did someone prove mice have souls that go to heaven or hell while I wasn't looking?

For all the limits of research that only works in mice and doesn't generalise to humans (I'm *not* going to plan with the assumption of radical longevity) it's not quite as bad as taking everythin on faith.

sherburt32• 11 months ago

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

Intralexical10• 11 months ago

While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence.

I would say it's based on fear. Ego. Maybe disconnection, bordering on solipsism, as if living in this world is only meaningful if you personally live forever.

Hope motivates aspirational curiosity. The attitude from some longevity enthusiasts here seems to lean more towards vitriol and tautology.

oceanplexian• 11 months ago

It has also become popular with billionaires to invest huge sums of money into life extension, or at least cosmetic surgeries to appear younger (Hair transplants, etc).

I have come to the conclusion that no amount of money or technology can cure being spiritually empty inside, as well as unable to cope with your own mortality.

inglor_cz5• 11 months ago

I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future.

An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.

In both cases, technological changes intervened.

YeGoblynQueenne4• 11 months ago

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.

mcswell3• 11 months ago

I read an article somewhere around 1960 that predicted we'd achieve travel at the speed of light in 25 years (I forget the real number, but within the lifetime of many people living then), and exceed the speed of light shortly thereafter. He based his prediction on the increases in speed of travel over decreasing spans of time, starting with people running, then tens of millennia later horseback, then a couple millennia later steam ships and trains, then a century later airplanes, then sixty years later orbital space travel.

StopDisinfo9103• 11 months ago

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.

Isn’t that already the case with a ton of research going into cancer treatment, Alzheimer’s treatment and how to keep people healthy longer?

Honestly, having seen the life of my grand parents once they past 90 and especially the last 2 when they had significant dementia, I would much rather die before.

Give me a good life as long as possible and spare me and my family the worst of the decline.

pfdietz• 11 months ago

Personal longevity is a topic that seems maximally suited to drive wishful thinking.

r_singh7• 11 months ago

The problem is that mistrust is at its highest that it has been. Science and evidence have been used as political tools in the recent past... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Either that or to protect financial interests of some legacy chaebol... so people are losing faith.

In my country people both believe and have some evidence that those that live in an orderly fashion, learn to be emotionally detached and focus most of their energies on flow states and forward escapes end up living longer than those who don't and living beyond 100 is not really difficult if one lives a healthy balanced life as prescribed by Yoga philosophy from the get go.

I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that if life's goal is living, like it should be — and not endless economic growth or an endless compulsion on the hedonic treadmill — it isn't hard to live beyond 100.

When life's goal is living every aspect of it from family, to children to rest get the love and attention they deserve and economic outcomes and status games do not dictate life. But for that to happen one needs to realise that the most precious thing they own is their energy and will. And must learn to see which activities increase their leverage and which ones don't. When one lives that way, the most contrarian thing is that you can achieve a lot more than by chasing because you start to intrinsically do rather than chase — the latter being much more expensive energy wise. I understand if this gets too esoteric for HN. But it's what I believe to be true and is also IMHO the reason why many high performing individuals seem to be unaffected by illnesses even at old age because their energy is continuously and exponentially directed in virtuous cycles and not disturbed easily by external happenings. You are energy and can be understood and defined entirely mathematically. Yoga means union with the universe's synchronicity. It originates from Sankhya Philosophy which simply means counting all energy.

ModernMech• 11 months ago

Science and evidence have been used as political tools for a while... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people.

Yeah, they noticed when their lives kept getting longer and longer thanks to science and evidence-backed policy.

nradov11• 11 months ago

Very few people have the genetics to support living past 100 regardless of lifestyle. In other words, lifestyle choices can help prevent premature death (and improve healthspan) but they can't extend maximum lifespan.

Eextra953• 11 months ago

No amount of good vibes, energy, or flow states are going to guarantee one lives to 100+.

dfxm12• 11 months ago

public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.

Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.

https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293...

camillomiller• 11 months ago

The longevity trend is fascinating. It’s mostly fueled by people who hoard money and power and realize they will just lose it all like everyone else when death will inevitably come. This fear has driven men for a long time, but we used to focus on living through memory. So we tried and gain literary and art fame, if coming for poorer backgrounds, or we built mausoleums and palaces that were supposed to outlive us in the centuries.l, if rich and powerful. Now the shallow uncultured tech billionaires just believe their own simplistic mechanistic lies and focus on living longer themselves. The result is there’s nothing trickling down for all the others. This that we have to all endure must be the most inane and distasteful class of rich and powerful people to ever walk the Earth.

arisAlexis5• 11 months ago

Humans can't grasp the actual possible future with radical lif extension. They like to be contrarians and talk trash on outlandish science fiction like breakthroughs. It's not everyone's cup to understand the limits of science and usually journalists and old scientists are pretty bad at projecting.

giantg2• 11 months ago

There are plenty of longevity things and new meds still being researched. Living longer is possible and there are a fair number of people who make it to 100 all things considered. However, life expectancy reaching 100 does seem unlikely to me. With the issues of drugs and obesity being rampant in many parts of the population, what can we expect?

tossandthrow• 11 months ago

People have been conditioned to think in exponential growth.

Some generations ago that was likely also a reasonable approximation.

But with the hyper growth we see today, it becomes ever clear that we always work with sigmoidal growth.

We can see that because more an more system are in the latter half of the sigmoid.

ck2• 11 months ago

Most longevity supplements and drugs work by pulling biological processes to baseline

That's all they do

So for someone sitting around 24/7 maybe vaguely helpful

For someone active, they defeat stress adaptations, so your "gains" disappear or never happen in the first place

They also do nothing for disease, they may help avoid some disease but once the disease is in progress, they can't cure anything

There's going to have to be a "next gen" of such drugs, years if not decades away

The next-gen will probably deal with mitochondria function, enhancing and restoring/rebooting dysfunction, which actually might cure some disease

So hopefully investment will continue towards "next gen", it's a very long road

lemoncookiechip2• 11 months ago

I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy, considering that by the time you reach 70, most people are already in decline (some worse than others), and the drop from 70 to 80 tends to be steep for many. Those who make it past 80 into their 90s or even 100s often aren’t living particularly fulfilling lives, if you can even call it living at that point.

Losing your vision, your hearing, your mobility, and worst of all, your mind, doesn’t sound very appealing to me.

So unless we find a way to both live longer and to decliner slower, I just don't see the point for the majority of people who will unfortunately live lonely worse lives.

meeks2• 11 months ago

I think this is a huge misconception and I don't think it works this way. have you heard people say 50 is the new 40, etc.? The same thing would work at older ages. Sure the last 10 years are a decline, but you are pushing those years out not adding more of them.

ACCount3725• 11 months ago

This. Expecting a "150 years lifespan" to look like "90 years of aging normally and then staying at 90 for another 60 years" is simply unrealistic.

The very reason you're expected to die in your 90s is that your body has decayed into a complete mess where nothing works properly anymore and every single capability reserve is at depletion. You die in old age because if you spend long enough at "one sliver away from the breaking point", statistics make going over it inevitable. Even a flu is a mild inconvenience to the young, but often lethal to the elderly.

To make it to the age of 150, you'd pretty much have to spend a lot more time as a healthy, well functioning adult.

mathiaspoint• 11 months ago

It really depends on how you live your life. My grandfather on my dad's side never drank or smoked, got a ton of exercise, avoided candy etc. he's in his 80s and still lives in a detached house and walks his two very large dogs daily. My grandmother on my mom's side smoked multiple packs of cigarettes a day, drank a ton of sugary soda, rarely got any real exercise, and died in her 50s after a number of very rough years.

Everyone keeps talking about health care but IMO it's really downstream of you attending yourself. It's almost a spiritual thing really. American health is so bad because Americans don't feel like they themselves are worth taking care of. The contrast between the people who disagree here gets extreme as they age.

boredemployee2• 11 months ago

Exactly. I'm the youngest in my family many aunts and uncles are already dead. those who still live are in a huge decline or completely lonely (sometimes both). Mom is in her late 70s and is in good shape, but she complains a lot about loneliness (even though I and my brothers visit her almost daily for a coffee or lunch). I think the joy of living ends with people around you dying.

meeks2• 11 months ago

Wouldn't the people around you also benefit from these advances so in theory they wouldn't be dead in this scenario?

melling4• 11 months ago

The president of the United States is almost 80. Bernie Sanders is 83. The Stones are still touring, …

Ed Thorpe is well into his 90s. Here’s an interview with him at 89. Seems quite healthy: https://youtu.be/CNvz91Jyzbg?si=VNj61A256ZOBM977

This 10 minutes deals directly with fitness and longevity: https://youtu.be/dzCpUbkC1dg?si=LqV-tUFyxyYMW0qC

abricot• 11 months ago

Mentioning the president is a bit like saying the pope is old. They are both selected/elected old.

lemoncookiechip2• 11 months ago

People thought the President had died just yesterday because of how rapidly his health has declined since taking office in January. Bernie Sanders, for example, has had multiple health emergencies over the past few years.

Using a few famous people as examples is hardly a reliable metric. My aunt is still alive at 103 and will likely make it to 104 if nothing changes. She has fewer health problems than other family members in their 60s if you discount the fact that she’s basically blind, can't hear well, is stuck in a bed 24/7, and has severe dementia that prevents her from recalling things seconds after being told, aside from some specific memories from her youth. Meanwhile, almost all of her children died under very poor health conditions in their 70s and 80s. Her oldest daughter looked like she was a corpse at 80.

Some people just get lucky with their genes, and it doesn’t always pass on to their children or grand-children.

PS: For reference, she had 11 children, almost all dead now while she's alive and can't recall their names or ever having children.

xenobeb2• 11 months ago

The powerball lottery is the greatest investment you can make also if you happen to win.

You have no point.

Alex3917• 11 months ago

I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy

20 years would be difficult, but 10 or so years would be very attainable.

ericmcer• 11 months ago

We still don't have any 80+ year olds who have been striving for longevity since their 20s. Nutrition labels and ingredient lists on food didn't even exist the 90s. An 80 year old was born into a world of nonstop cigarettes, drinking while pregnant, etc.

So our current obsession with longevity through fitness and nutrition is new and we can't really tell what someone like Bryan Johnson will be like at 80. If he is significantly declined in 20 years despite his rigorous longevity routine then we will know.

jandrewrogers• 11 months ago

My own observation is that a lot of decline happens because people stop living and start coasting to the grave, and that can happen decades earlier than 70.

My great-grandfather was physically very active into his 90s, still running his businesses, working in his orchards, and generally being surprisingly productive. He was mentally sharp too; I remember him teaching me about the physics of vacuum energy at length. Seemed like he could go on indefinitely. Then his wife died and he died less than a year later.

I always have him as my model for what I want to be like when I am old. He was still in the game until he wasn’t.

bradley132• 11 months ago

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 well that would transfer to mammals is hard to say, but a substantial increase is certainly possible.

wongarsu• 11 months ago

In modern society there is little evolutionary pressure to extend lifespan, but that's a very recent phenomenon. If my parents watch my kids and do the cooking so I have more time to hunt or work the field that improves the survival chances of my children, and my children share 25% of their DNA with their grandparents. The grandparents living a long productive life is good for the survival of their grandchildren, and thus for the reproduction of their DNA, causing evolutionary pressure. It's mostly the unproductive years (dementia, debilitating illness, severely limited mobility) that are a detriment.

You could argue the same forces are still at play at societal levels. People around the age of 50 have a vast economic impact, having accumulated experience and relationships over many decades. And the average age of soldiers in Ukraine is somewhere around 40-45. If one country had a population that stayed at the mental and physical fitness of a 50 year old for another 20 years that would be a drastic advantage, both in terms of skilled workforce and in terms of military capability. Even just another 5 productive years are a big deal in a world where the time you spend productively working is about twice the time you spend "growing up" and getting an education. And my nation doing well means my children can afford more children, spreading my DNA, making it favored by evolution

Davidzheng• 11 months ago

Not an expert by any stretch of imagination. But it seems to be that not only is there almost no selection pressure on increasing lifespan, bc of medical advances in healthcare there's also less evolutionary pressure on reducing diseases and infertility (i guess there should still be substantial health related evolutionary pressure from sexual selection) in modern society. Why shouldn't we expect long term deterioration of fitness of genome similar to the deer in Yellowstone before reintroduction of wolves?

bradley132• 11 months ago

Sure, but your average 50-year-old already had their children. They have passed on their genetics, good or bad. No evolutionary pressure.

The life-span extension experiments I have read about specifically only allowed older adult insects to reproduce, pushing that age later and later. Adults that died early did not reproduce. Massive evolutionary pressure.

hyperpape• 11 months ago

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.

JumpinJack_Cash2• 11 months ago

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

Ericson2314• 11 months ago

What will happen first, immortal humans, or 100% general purpose desktop computer?

Something to think about, HN.

ben_w5• 11 months ago

Depends on the definition for both. Henrietta Lacks and Turing completeness respectively.

jacquesm• 11 months ago

The only thing life extension will get us is a very powerful class of ancient people that will have ownership of just about everything. The only thing that resets the clock on wealth accumulation under the capitalist system is death. No matter how much of a grifter you are the grim reaper will force you to divide it amongst your heirs. But if that no longer happens and if capital keeps begetting more capital then the end game would be a very sober one for an even larger slice of humanity than it already is.

Interesting story on this theme:

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

Illniyar• 11 months ago

The article doesn't make sense to me. They mention 1900-1938 life expectancy rose by ~5 months per generation. And then say it grew from 62 years to 80. Does that mean each generation is ~2-3 years? What unit of measurement is that supposed to be?

Then for 1938-2000 they say it's 2.5 months per generation. If generation is 2-3 years we should already be at 100 year expectancy.

Also having 1900-1938 and 1938-2000 as the only points in time seem meaningless. Does the entire 1938-2000 have a single graident? What's the slope here?

They also mention that the main advancement in 1900-1938 is infant mortality. Which is really uninteresting for the old age.

giardini2• 11 months ago

Since there's talk of euthanasia: Soylent (green) is now available off-the-shelf (Saw it at Walmart yesterday, in a handy half-gallon container):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF54G8F9/

For reference: the movie "Soylent Green" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/

mcswell3• 11 months ago

But Bilbo Baggins!

And my cat recently had his one hundred eleventieth birthday, based on one cat year = five human years. (He's now about 23.)

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

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