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

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...

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.

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

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/

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.