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

(www.nature.com)
146 points andsoitis | 1 comments | 15 Oct 24 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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taeric ◴[15 Oct 24 22:17 UTC] No.41853681[source]▶
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?

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1. mr_toad ◴[16 Oct 24 00:25 UTC] No.41854471[source]▶
> 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.