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

(lafollette.wisc.edu)
215 points XzetaU8 | 2 comments | 30 Aug 25 16:15 UTC | HN request time: 0.414s | source
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ACCount37 ◴[31 Aug 25 07:14 UTC] No.45081066[source]▶
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.

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1. imtringued ◴[31 Aug 25 07:47 UTC] No.45081270[source]▶
This would require extreme amounts of embryo selection and getting results will require multiple generations, nothing in your lifetime.

The biggest bottleneck is that humans evolved to have children in their 20s. After that age, the old compete with the young for resources, so there is no evolutionary incentive for humans to live indefinitely.

Aging past fertility is like momentum in stochastic gradient descent.

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2. ACCount37 ◴[31 Aug 25 07:57 UTC] No.45081320[source]▶
I'm sure there are longevity gains that can be attained with embryo selection or direct embryo genetic editing. Might even be some low-hanging fruit there. But I see no reason to believe this to be the only possible source of longevity gains.

Sure, the evolution may oppose longevity, but evolution can go eat shit and die. It still works on humans, but it works too slowly to be able to do too much - we can't rely on it to fix our problems, but it also wouldn't put up this much of a fight if we fixed our problems on our own.