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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?

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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?
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.

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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.
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.
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

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.
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.
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?
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.

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.
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.

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.

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.
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...

That kind of thinking is fuel for the AI accelerationists
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.)

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/

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

Something to think about, HN.

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.

I think it’s fine. When I get older I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife, whatever it is.
Trump administration isn't helping either ...
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

Oh, crap
bryan johnson has entered the chat