
Is Life Expectancy Finally Topping Out? - headalgorithm
https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethics/is-life-expectancy-finally-topping-out
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DebtDeflation
My understanding is that the doubling in life expectancy over the last 150-200
years was primarily due to the drastic reduction in infant mortality and
elimination of most infectious diseases. If you only look at life expectancy
from the point of reaching adulthood, the change hasn't been nearly as
dramatic.

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bregma
Yes. When most people say "life expectancy" they mean "life expectancy at
birth." Even in the depths of the middle ages when life expectancy at birth
was around 30 years, most people who lived to adulthood lived into their 60s
and 70s.

~~~
toasterlovin
I think the OP is specifically trying to say that most lay people do not
actually mean "life expectancy at birth" when they use the term "life
expectancy", but instead mean "how long I, a person who has reached adulthood,
can expect to live". I agree with OP, FWIW.

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chriselles
I remember seeing the horrible decline in life expectancy when the Soviet
Union collapsed.

At the same time, the Soviet client state of Cuba saw a dramatic reduction in
economic activity and caloric restriction. Cuban dietary belt tightening led
to a massive reduction in cardio vascular disease with a correlated massive
reduction in obesity.

I’m not a doctor, nor a data scientist or economist.

But I suspect we will see bifurcated life expectancy moving forward.

In the distant past when there was great wealth divide, one common denominator
was similar life expectancy.

Moving forward, that same wealth divide can now be leveraged by those who can
afford it to exploit the entire spectrum of longevity incremental
opportunities:

Nutrition Clean water Clean air Mitigating physical wear & tear Sleep Stress
Well being Microbiome Supplements Pharmacology Stem cell therapy Gene therapy
CRISPR

I predict a continued flattening of average life expectancy as developing
world life expectancy slowly improves and some developed countries possibly
see some attrition from systemic obesity, economic disruption, and continued
wealth divide.

But I see the top few % of most wealthy begin to see enhanced quality of life
in their later years, as well as incrementally more years.

Longevity tech is the ultimate market.

How much will people pay for a Tesla Model Y(assuming it makes it to market)?

Something.

How much will people pay for an extra 5-10 years?

Everything.

Apologies, social “scientist” talking fiction!

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lm28469
> How much will people pay for an extra 5-10 years?

> Everything.

Yeah as long as it doesn't require any effort.

Exercise every day, stop alcohol, stop smoking, start eating well. You might
not live longer but you'll live in good health longer, which is all that
matter in the end. I'd take living until 60 in full physical and mental shape
over slowly rotting in a retirement home until 90.

If we truly cared about health we wouldn't accept ICE cars inside our cities,
fast food, sodas, fat acceptance movements, &c. We're not killed by diseases
anymore, we're killed by sloth and gluttony.

~~~
chriselles
I do agree with you about the majority unwilling/unable to invest sufficient
effort into their physical wellbeing.

But I strongly believe there is a small minority of people who are making
consistent choices that positively impact longevity.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing it with my cohort of friends and family here in NZ as
well as when visiting the US.

At the age of 50, I’m already seeing clear indicators of the bifurcation
between those who are taking active steps to enhance their longevity compared
to those who are not.

My personal opinion is that we will see single digit percentage of people who
consistently take drive steps to enhance their health and well-being to
enhance longevity,

~~~
machinecoffee
Also important will be quality of life in the later years.

If you're unhealthy, lonely and constantly in pain then why bother?

I've read that having a good network of friends & family into old age can keep
you feeling better, having hobbies and keeping active are also very
beneficial.

It's something I'm actively thinking about now I'm approaching 50 myself.
Swimming and yoga beckon :)

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alexpotato
My grandmother was born in 1912 and live to 97.

She:

\- was born in a time with no antibiotics

\- lived on a farm with all of it's inherent risks

\- lived through World War 1 (granted in the United States)

\- survived the "Spanish Flu" (although as someone under 10 whereas hardest
hit were adults)

\- lived through the Depression

\- started having children post World War 2 (now with antibiotics available).

I've often thought, just making it to age 10 showed that she had a strong
immune system. When she started having children, she benefited from having
access to antibiotics at a time when there was no drug resistance.

Looking at my parents generation (the baby boomers) and suddenly you have a
generation of children where infant mortality etc goes way down (again thanks
to antibiotics). In other words, children that wouldn't have survived in 1912
are now living into adulthood. We applied selection pressure to have children
(and then in turn adults) with weaker immune systems. (Not saying this is a
bad thing).

Because of the above, I wonder how much of the life expectancy increase has to
do with a kind of winning the demographic lottery of: "When I was little, my
immune system kept me alive. When I was an adult, medicine took care of what
my immune system couldn't."

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lotsofpulp
I haven't come across any information that would indicate that we can
generalize a person's immune system to be better than another's, outside of
specified immune system disorders that have been defined. The immune system
and the body in general are such a complex mechanism that it's impossible to
claim one or a few persons surviving in one or a few instances and
environments indicates they will have greater odds of future survival.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>I haven't come across any information that would indicate that we can
generalize a person's immune system to be better than another's,

There's definitely people who seem to get sick all the time and people who
don't. Ask any schoolteacher and they'll tell you that for every
cough/cold/whatever that goes around there's a couple kids that always get it
and some that never do. Of course there's other variables like hand washing
and whatnot but there's probably still some differences between people.
Whether these are genetic or environmental (e.g. nutrition) I don't know.

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midgetjones
Never mind the decline in improvement, I think we're going to see a sudden
sharp drop very soon. It may be hidden by the long-lived generation before,
but the baby boomers have eaten, drunk, and medicated themselves into oblivion
compared to their parents.

And who knows what's to come for the next generation, with an increasing
wealth divide and heck knows what else.

~~~
Aromasin
My parents, baby boomers themselves, are starting to see the effects of this.
Funeral after funeral of friends and family dying in their early to late 60's
- almost always due to heart disease, liver failure or some sort of cancer.

Every time I join them it's the same "he seemed so healthy/ it was so
unexpected/ she was gone so quickly".

In my head I can't help but think "he ate nothing but meat/ she drank a bottle
of wine a night/ they haven't broken a sweat in years".

~~~
drdeadringer
> dying in their early to late 60's - almost always due to heart disease,
> liver failure or some sort of cancer

In a "Death and Dying" psych class I took in university, the professor
remarked how we went from dying from infectious diseases to dying from
lifestyle issues.

I'm not sure how true or false this is, but when one isn't going to die from
the flu you might live long enough to die from consuming too much bacon and
alcohol.

I'm interested in learning more about this idea.

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saint_abroad
> If we are still far from the limit to the human life-span, then the largest
> survival gains should be recorded among the oldest people.

Trends in outliers cannot be used to extrapolate trends in mean, unless for
_very_ small populations (such that outliers are unreliable).

The article just seems to be an opinion piece to explain away falling
improvements in average life-expectancy rather than tackle rising inequality.

[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-
expe...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/for-life-expectancy-
money-matters/)

Being poor in the United States is so hazardous to your health, a new study
shows, that the average life expectancy of the lowest-income classes in
America is now equal to that in Sudan or Pakistan.

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AstralStorm
30% gap between known maximum and highest average is interesting in and of
itself. We have barely attacked aging as opposed to diseases of age.

~~~
chmod775
"Aging" is not singular thing.

After development, the age of a human body is just an accumulation of many
many different kinds of failures over time.

~~~
mschuster91
And we will be able pretty soon to replace failed organs - anything but the
brain itself should be replaceable in 30 years at the latest, I bet. With the
progress that is being made right now, I'd say prototypes should exist in a
decade, and another 20 years to let the economies of scale work.

What has _not_ caught up with reality yet is society: how are people living
100+ years supposed to be financed? Do we expect people to work in their 80s
fulltime? Will we be mandating organ replacements for those above a certain
age?

How are we supposed to _feed_ all those people? It's barely working out right
now with current mortality rates and only not collapsing because the rate at
which resources like fish are exploited is way beyond the sustainability
threshold?

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wsc981
I feel food production shouldn't really be an issue, of course depending on
the food type. But the tiny country of The Netherlands is a huge food exporter
[0]. Certainly other countries could learn a thing or two [1] on food
production from The Netherlands.

\---

[0]:
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-
agriculture-sustainable-farming/)

[1]: [https://www.wur.nl/en/Education-Programmes/master/MSc-
progra...](https://www.wur.nl/en/Education-Programmes/master/MSc-
programmes/MSc-Food-Technology.htm)

~~~
mschuster91
The Dutch mainly produce plant stuff - which is indeed easy to scale up. The
problem is that veggies are not the part that causes problems... it's meat,
both land animals (cattle, pigs, poultry) and water animals. The rising meat
demand especially in the exploding middle class in formerly poor countries
such as China and India has to be produced somewhere, and animals have the
problem that they create massive amounts of feces which:

\- for land animals are carted across half of Europe as both Germany and the
Netherlands produce more feces than can be brought out to fields

\- for fish, contaminate the farms and the freshwater in which the farms are
set. In addition the fish food that does not get eaten by the fish causes
algae and other pest blooms in the waters, plus the attraction that fish farms
pose to predators.

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wccrawford
I don't doubt that we're approaching the max life expectancy that you can get
from natural means... By that, I mean curing diseases and maintaining the
right balance of nutrition.

But I think we'll start to see improvements that aren't about just staying
healthy, but instead are about actually reversing "the aging process" and the
things we barely understand about what makes us change as we get older.

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tonyedgecombe
We seem to have got a lot worse at nutrition over the last thirty years.

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ido
I don't know where you were in the 80s but 30 years ago nutrition was as bad
or worse than now from my perspective (except in countries that were
previously too poor to eat badly) - white bread, lots of sugar, etc - all
stuff people nowadays avoid a lot more than my parents' generation did at the
time.

~~~
bostonpete
Well in the US at least there was much less obesity, which I think says
something about nutrition, no? I don't think people were particularly more
physically active 30 years ago...

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RankingMember
I think it's both. People were notably more physically active in decades past.

"Lower levels of physical activity, both in organized sports and at play,
account for a lot of the rest, they say. U.S. health authorities say children
should be getting 60 minutes of active play a day, but only one-third are
getting that.

Children are much less likely to walk, bike or skate to school than they were
in the 1970s, at least in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
Neighborhoods are increasingly suburban, especially in Asia, and people are
driving more.

And from the 1970s till now, the number of global households with TVs, VCRs,
computers, Internet access and video games has soared."

\- [https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2013/11/20/2463167...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
shots/2013/11/20/246316731/kids-are-less-fit-today-than-you-were-back-then)

