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

Remarkable hostility and strange circular logic from some people posting here. Clearly belief outstrips evidence.

If research suggests there's an observable asymptotic trend, public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.

The posts saying an atom of oxygen is potentially infinitely long lived (ignoring radioactive decay?) As a "proof" that life extension has no limit is about as reductively silly as it is possible to be.

Bills of mortality bootstrapped Financial investment in annuities. You think the money people aren't tracking this trend now, when they have for the last 400 or more years?

I don't have to be hostile to be somewhat skeptical about mechanical extensions of current trends into distant future.

An analyst living in 1825 could analyze the traffic stats to conclude that the era of increasing land travel speeds is coming to a close because the horses can't run any faster, and an analyst living in 1975 could analyze the telecom stats to conclude that international calls are always going to cost much more than local calls and remain somewhat of a luxury, particularly in the developing world.

In both cases, technological changes intervened.

And in 1968 an analyst may conclude that space travel could never become routine and still be perfectly on the money even after the moon landings.

So what? We can't see into the future. The future is never like the past, not least because a lot of present tends to intervene.

And that is precisely why I don't find that much value in articles such as "New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely".

Declaration such as:

“We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone."

is too self-confident. Their youngest cohort is born in 2000. It is impossible to predict how longevity technology will look in 2070 or 2080, and yet the authors make such bold statements.

To be fair, the study authors explicitly say that their forecast only holds, “In the absence of any major breakthroughs that significantly extend human life," and, "The findings of this study are not intended to be interpreted as evidence in favor or against a biological age limit to human life."

Isn't that completely circular then? E.g. "if there are no technologies which change $X, then we predict that $X will stay the same."

Let's use "time travel" for `$X` and see if we come to a useful forecast: Sure, one could hope that someday we'll have enough major breakthroughs to achieve either one. But "maybe we'll discover something we don't currently know or understand and it will change everything and we will go back in time" isn't a very promising or useful forecast if your aim is fixing a current problem.

You could perform the same exercise substituting "perpetual motion" as `$X`, and come up with an forecast equally useless for solving current problems.

Also: you replaced "major breakthroughs" with "technologies" when paraphrasing. What do you think the difference is between those two different terms? Do you feel your refutation would be as strong if you spoke to the original point, rather than rephrasing it and responding to your own, differently-phrased version (essentially responding only to yourself) ?

This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible.

On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later.

We can already rejuvenate individual cells and smaller samples of tissues in vitro. That is not yet a recipe for a functional treatment of a living organism, but it is a (necessary) step in that direction.

There is also Sima the rat, breaking the longevity record for Sprague-Dawley rats by living for 1464 days after Katcher's treatment. Out of 8 subjects total.

Could be a random occurence, but the chances to break the longevity record in just eight rats are very, very low. And if it wasn't a random occurence, we already saw a meaningful life extension in an ordinary mammal.

The study takes all the advancements you mention into account, and says that even with that rate of progression, the specified life extension target (100y) is unlikely. Just like perpetual motion or time travel.

On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.