Half the people in human history who reached the age of 65 are alive now. | Hacker News Reader

Half the people in human history who reached the age of 65 are alive now.

newscientist.com

95 pointsabstractbill47 comments

I'm surprised this statistic isn't brought out more in articles that call cancer, heart disease, etc. diseases of the developed world vs. the modern world, the difference being that instead of living in a pure time of organic everything, many people simply didn't live long enough to develop our modern diseases.

The way we eat in the 'developed world' is not necessarily the reason that people are living longer. Advances in medicine, sanitation, personal hygiene, etc probably have played a larger role.

That said, being in 'the developed world' doesn't necessarily mean that we are eating worse than in previous years. IIRC, the Irish Potato Famine happened because most of the farmers in Ireland ate a diet that mostly consisted of potatoes, so they were starving when the crops were bad (I believe the potatoes that they grew for themselves were different than the ones they grew for the land-owners, and it was the type of potato that they grew for personal food that suffered causing starving farmers). I can't imagine that a diet that largely consists of potatoes is necessarily healthier than eating McDonald's everyday. Just saying...

Actually, you could survive solely on a diet of potatoes and milk, with all the essential nutrients provided - http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2828/could-i-surviv... (This includes more potato famine info as well).

I doubt fries and a shake would work as well. Then again, maybe it's just evolving 'essential nutrients' to 'essential nutrients with optional cholesterol'.

IIRC, the life expectancy of people who lived past 40 hasn't changed much in the last few thousand years. Early life expectancies were low due to childbirth (for women) and accidents + infections (for men). If you reached old age, then you were likely to hang around until cancer or heart disease got you; the same as today.

Cancer treatments and heart pills extend people's old age a little, but I'd imagine that modern diets (increased meat consumption and refined carbs) take their toll.

That's often asserted, but what evidence I've read about leans the other way. E.g.:

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-among-i... http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-...

There is very good evidence for short lifespans until quite recently, including the remaining bones from Pleistocene times. Much of the evidence is reviewed in The Nature of Paleolithic Art,

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

a book full of interesting information on how our ancestors lived.

That does sound interesting.

Stephan Guyenet also discusses some of the literature at http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/paleopathology... and http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/life-expectanc...

Uhm, that article says that the average life expectancy for inuit, not counting infant mortality was 43.5 years old. Sure, some of the people lived to older ages, but it's hardly the apples to apples comparison they're trying to make.

"Keep in mind that the Westerners who were developing cancer alongside them probably had a similar life expectancy at the time." I don't have figures for that exact comparison, but grabbing _A Farewell to Alms_ off my bookshelf, it's got for England, 1750-99: life expectancy at 20: 34 (i.e. living till 54). That's not dramatically different. (Looking at the graph, I think "excluding infant mortality" means to take life expectancy from age 4 instead of 20, though I haven't checked.)

Infant mortality doesn't obviously bear on how common cancer is among adults.

An average 10 years longer life expectancy is huge.

The question we started with: are so-called diseases of civilization caused by something about lifestyle, or is it people living longer revealing an underlying rate that's screened off by early death in the other cultures? These figures say there were plenty of older people; usually when I see the latter claim made it lumps in infant mortality. On the other hand, the reported differences in rates of things like cancer are huge.

Also, the 10 years leaves out age 4-20 mortality, if I understand it right.

It's kind of out of control in Japan, but lower birth rate seems like a good thing. The world could use a little population decline, and that's the best way to go about it imho.

It will unbalance the age distribution, and as a relatively young person I don't love the idea, but it's better than other forms of population decline...

edit: Seriously? You guys think lower birthrates are bad? "world fertility has halved to just 2.6 babies per woman"... if we kept up at 5.2 the world population would almost double every 20 years. Believe it or not, that will cause problems.

I don't think this shift has anything to do with people wanting to reduce the birth rate, though I agree that this situation is something we were going to have to deal with eventually.

We live in a world with finite resources. I've seen a few scientists point out that you can never continue exponential growth in a finite system. Whether it is the population or the economy, we have to level-off at some point.

Sadly, the ecological limit is imposed by starvation. I'd like to think we're smart enough to stop before that.

World population growth is not exponential, but logistic. A logistic curve looks exponential until you pass the inflection point. IIRC, we did that in the '80s.

Yes[1]; most of the current population estimates show the world population leveling off in the 9-12 billion range. Percentage growth rate actually peaked in the mid 1960s (about 2.2%), and absolute growth peaked in the late 1980s (about 85 million people per year.) This is completely expected from logistic growth models[2].

Different species reach logistic growth in different ways. As the grandparent post noted, "reduced birth rate" is better than alternatives like "mass starvation". Lower birth rates are not a bad thing from a population growth perspective, though the demographic shift they bring about will require changes to our expectations regarding retirement. It's rather unfortunate that we're still using a retirement model designed when life expectancy was lower and birth rates were higher.

[1]"Who's that insightful person who posted about logistic growth and stole my thunder? Oh, hi, honey!"

[2]The image at http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image... shows actual world population data following a logistic curve, compared to an exponential curve above.

Fortunately, another limit is imposed by women getting access to education and then birth control. That has played a huge part in bringing the birth rate down.

So we know that people are living longer and longer. We also know that yearly health care costs are rising. We also seem to think we can keep the latter in control while continuing with the former.

The fact is that older people incur much larger healthcare costs over their lifetimes [1]. In fact, "[those 85+] consume three times as much health care per person as those 65–74, and twice as much as those 75–84." If we keep inventing new treatments to keep you going until the next crisis, or another drug to take to prevent yet another fatal condition, then we're going to have to realize that health care costs per life-time are going to increase, and that is going to be spread through the population through insurance.

Unless our lifetime earnings increase as fast as the cost of medical technology, we will reach a point where we cannot afford to live longer even though the treatments exist. We may get to a point where we have to make the hard decision of how long we want to wait until we retire and how long we really want to live after we retire.

I don't know what the solution is, but I can't help but notice that we are not in a sustainable situation.

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/

"So we know that people are living longer and longer. We also know that yearly health care costs are rising. We also seem to think we can keep the latter in control while continuing with the former."

This is a lie spread by the medical guild to convince you to give them more money. In face, the increase in life expectancy has leveled off during the past thirty years (citation: http://daveeriqat.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/us_life_expect...), the time period during which medical costs have risen so much. All of the extra trillions we've spent on medicine have done very little.

"The fact is that older people incur much larger healthcare costs over their lifetimes [1]."

This is, in large part, because older people have less energy, and are therefore easier to bully into handing all their money over to the medical guild.

"We may get to a point where we have to make the hard decision of how long we want to wait until we retire and how long we really want to live after we retire."

This is, again, BS spread by the medical industry to inflate prices. The US spends twice as much on healthcare as any other country, yet ranks 42nd in life expectancy (citation: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,293008,00.html, from Fox News, no less). The obscene amounts of money are not working.

There are several reasons why US healthcare costs are higher than other countries, and there is certainly a lot of inefficiency that should be fixed. But one of the major reasons is that the US effectively subsidizes drug development for the rest of the world. US buyers generally have to pay full market rate, and then in other countries prices are fixed artificially low by government fiat. The US probably can't continue paying that subsidy forever, so eventually either other countries will have to pay more, or the US will also start fixing prices and thus research funds will dry up.

We're subsidizing marketing campaigns by paying market rates, not pharmaceutical development.

the increase in life expectancy has leveled off during the past thirty years

Untrue in most countries. I have already posted the journal articles in this thread before you posted, but here they are again.

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7288/pdf/nature08...

Professional demographers usually don't publish on WordPress blogs, and it looks like too few WordPress bloggers read scientific literature carefully.

That's why curing aging should be both a fiscal and moral imperative.

Just because we want to do something, doesn't mean we can.

Unless you are a scientist.

Demographics is destiny. It's inevitable that retirement ages will have to increase further, and advanced medical care paid for by government and insurers will be rationed. Hopefully the rationing will be done based on QALY analysis backed by hard data.

Which government are you talking about?

How about the British government?

If I have to work until eighty - I might as well not wait and start relaxing now. Fortunately I don't plan to take that long.

This brings a very interesting point. If pensions are a modern invention then they are not necessary something permanent. The logical way to approach the problem is an open-ended way: no more pensions means no more living for retirement. Life should simply be lived the best way possible. Savings are of course necessary, but it's everybody's decision if/when/how they start using them.

For that to work, ageism in hiring practices needs to be illegal.

I didn't see in this article a fact I am checking now,

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a916131954&...

that fully one-half of girls born this year or later in the developed world will live to the age of 100. Male life expectancy for boys born after the year 2000 is also well into nine decades of life.

Here's the full text of the article (no registration or cost, as opposed to the previous link):

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2772142/

That's not a fact, it's a prediction.

Yeah, I know what you mean, but if you accept the statements that

a) global warming will continue

b) human population will continue to increase for a few more decades

c) the sun will rise tomorrow

you know in what sense I can take a statement about the future as a fact.

Here's a link to a popular account of research on this issue:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8284574.stm

Here are links to research articles:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7288/pdf/nature08...

There was a rant here recently that, in passing, noted that there's more blacksmiths alive today than ever in history and that more people are making neolithic arrowheads today than at any point in history.

The point of the article is that we're living longer, but the headline stat is probably mostly due to the fact that there's lots of us about.

A New Scientist headline in 10 years: Half the people in human history who reached the age of 75 are alive now.

Onion headline: World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent.

This reminds me a bit of the Bruce Sterling novel Holy Fire, in which soaring life expectancies and prolonged professional careers create a new, more severe generation gap between the "gerontocracy" and the younger generations. Sterling's speculative future didn't include a birthrate decline, though. What happens to our society when younger people become an increasingly marginalized minority?

You would see political gridlock over pension/social security programs cutting back on anything, health care becoming an entitlement program, a casual disregard for running up debts that future generations have to pay, and education costs drastically out-pacing inflation.

So business as usual.

The world can live on hemp seeds, edible mushrooms and giant silkworm moth larvae. You can power a laptop by biking. You can power a bike by biking.

If every person had just one child, the world population would drop by 50% in thirty years, disregarding wars, catastrophes and epidemics.

The world won't end. It'll just change... when you notice it may end.

"Half the people in human history who reached the age of 65 are alive now."

It's an interesting comment, but the article offers nothing to back it up. How would they know that?

Nobody will live to 65 in a road warrior type apocalypse.

I don't think peak oil is likely to bring that about any time soon.

Several countries seem quite well on their way to bringing about the world of Children of Men, though.

"... world of Children of Men, though." ah great movie. I almost cried on the scene where all the soldiers and the insurgents stop fighting to protect the baby.

I hope you're being ironic.

[citation needed]

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