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

(lafollette.wisc.edu)
215 points XzetaU8 | 5 comments | 30 Aug 25 16:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.94s | source
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picafrost ◴[31 Aug 25 05:58 UTC] No.45080711[source]▶
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.
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1. 9dev ◴[31 Aug 25 06:12 UTC] No.45080782[source]▶
This realisation is by definition wrong, or coincidence. You can’t know the future, so you’ll never know whether something will eventually come around and change everything.
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2. picafrost ◴[31 Aug 25 06:22 UTC] No.45080829[source]▶
I think this is a great point. It's not a robust counter-point, but Gödel's incompleteness theorems come to mind. We do know there are limitations to formal systems, we think there may be limitations to computational complexity. Maybe we haven't developed the tool set to make similar claims about biology (or maybe such tools cannot exist) or technology in the abstract. But these may also come in the future.
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3. 9dev ◴[31 Aug 25 07:02 UTC] No.45080999[source]▶
Fair enough. If we reach a point where we’ve discovered all fundamental truths of the universe and no more knowledge is helping towards solutions we need, then yes, that may imply awareness of the plateau; I’ll give you that. It also seems fantastically far away, so much so that it seems an exercise in futility to speculate about it.
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4. DiscourseFan ◴[31 Aug 25 09:04 UTC] No.45081650{3}[source]▶
Its so far away, in fact, considering that we cannot even observe most of the universe, or even have a fully coherent notion of what the universe is.
5. picafrost ◴[31 Aug 25 14:38 UTC] No.45083468{3}[source]▶
We didn't need to discover every mathematical truth to discover that there are limits to what we can mathematically prove. Nor did we need to discover every algorithm to know that we can't determine if a program will halt. Both of these have helped understand where plateaus exist in their respective domains. We don't need to enumerate every truth to understand that there are some things we cannot do.