Life expectancy rise in rich countries slows down: took 30 years to prove

I'm actually a little surprised at the framing here. I didn't realize anyone thought we could overcome aging. I thought the goal was to live longer, but not to completely overcome aging. That sounds somewhat foreign to me. Is that a commonly reasonable goal for folks?

That is to say, I'm not clear that "beating aging" is what is required for "long life." Is that definitionally required and I'm just being dense?

I'm assuming this is a tiered discussion? In that nobody thinks we should freeze aging at baby stages for someone. Such that we would still want some aging, but would then try and fix a point where all aging can be stopped?

I honestly thought the whole point was beating aging. Whether that's longer life or cancer or whatever. The point is to stay 20-40 forever, from what I can tell.

But, by the time you hit 20-40, you have already done a ton of aging?

Fair that I don't expect to be as strong in my 60s as I am now. Or when I hit 70+. If I get that far. Light weight training is plenty to get to be in good physical shape, though? Get to where you can do 10-30 pushups and run a continuous mile, and you are probably doing fine?

> Is that a commonly reasonable goal for folks?

Why not? Humans have been pursuing immortality for time immemorial. "The Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the first known stories, features such a pursuit.

I think it is just a difference in how you view it? I'd expect ancient person to be noticeably ancient. Not necessarily frail, but just as an old tree has signs of aging that younger trees don't necessarily have. Not that they stopped aging entirely.

So, if you limit aging to "getting frail," I am fully there. But there are other things that happen as you age.

But why would you not want to beat aging in a medical sense? I don't really understand your logic here.

But this gets to my question, essentially? Is "aging for the elderly" different than "aging for the middle aged?"

So, what does it mean to "beat aging in a medical sense?" If it is just definitionally to not have any of the bad effects of aging, then sure. Of course I would want that. What are the names for the good things that are generally along for the ride with aging?

Going back to my earlier quip, if you could turn off aging for babies/toddlers, how would that be a good thing?

It's the bit of life where you can dress yourself and control your bowels that most people would like to extend. I think nobody gets into longevity research hoping they'll be able to dodder around a nursing home with a walker for 25 years instead of 15.

It wouldn't. So you wouldn't do that. It would be like giving an insulin pump to someone who wasn't diabetic. Why would you?

This may somewhat surprise you, but I would ask the same for people in the 30s. 40s even, at this point. Freezing someone at that age doesn't sound appealing to me. At all.

So the heart of my question is why do we view "defeating aging" as the same as "living longer?" Or is this something where the target age that people would want to be generally coalesces on a common number?

But you could do that by extending the bit of your life where you can do those things. Not necessarily turning off aging?

As I said down thread, this could just be a potato/potahto thing? If this is just definitionally beating getting frail, then that makes sense. But I don't know that I could pin down an age that I would want to freeze progress at. Nor do I think I expected that there would be a general age to freeze aging at. Let me keep my strength longer, but I expect I will be/look/appear older and older the older I get.

Now, granted, I'd be delighted if I have the same strength my 90 year old grandfather in law did. In his 70s, I'm pretty sure the only thing I could beat him at was a race. Lifting things or doing manual work outside, and he was far beyond what I was in my 30s.

"Aging" in the context of "defeating aging" refers to the phenomena of declining metabolism and deteriorating genetic data.

Wrinkling skin, graying hair, loss of muscle mass and bone density, loss of mental acuity, decline of libido, late-life diseases (eg: cancer, Alzheimer's, type-2 diabetes), and so on.

It's scientifically proven that our bodies spend enormous amounts of energy up into our 20s when we reach sexual maturity and then glide through on momentum through our 30s into our 40s when we are raising our children.

Once we're in our late 40s to early 50s we're done spawning new life and our bodies throw in the towel, starting the slow but inevitable deterioration culminating in death.

It's that whole physical process that we as a species want to overcome, we want to defy being just machines for spawning more machines. Life is fucking evil.

Growing wiser from more and more life experiences is also part of aging, but it's not what we refer to when we say "defeat aging".

> That is to say, I'm not clear that "beating aging" is what is required for "long life."

Ageing is not a perfectly understood process, so what it would mean to overcome aging wasn’t clear, and there was some hope decades ago that maximum human lifespans would just keep going up indefinitely as medicine slowly eliminated the various causes of death.

But now this research concludes what has been suspected for a while - that even under perfect conditions the average human lifespan isn’t going to hit 100. Even if you eat and exercise well and have the best medical treatment, and avoid all the other things that might kill you, ageing will get you.

The medical term for this is “mortality compression”, the idea that as we remove all the ways people die early, the ages of death for everyone end up being squashed up against a limit.

It will take significant breakthroughs in technology (probably some combination of gene therapy, cancer treatments and nanotechnology) to actually stop, or reverse aging.