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Comment by neolefty | Hacker News Reader

Note that this is a purely statistical analysis of the situation:

> “You’d need 10,000 worlds like ours to have the chance that there would be one human who would become 125 years,” said Dr. Vijg.

It says nothing about medical breakthroughs, which could have nonlinear, bell-curve-defying effects.

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It does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much.

This is not to say that a medical breakthrough which changes the limit is impossible, but it has to compete against an exponential mortality curve.

> It does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much.

Given that those who are 115 today were 85 when breakthroughs were made three decades ago, I'd say that we simply don't have the data yet to make that assessment.

Gompertz's law looks very grim. The death RATE grows exponentially with age. And it's such a nice straight line on a semilog plot, from age 40 through 100. I don't see how medical advances can budge that one.

“We don’t know yet what the impact will be of new pharmaceuticals, new technologies,” said David Sinclair, an aging researcher at Harvard Medical School. “The past doesn’t predict the future when it comes to technology.” https://www.statnews.com/2016/10/05/human-lifespan-limits/

This would be the breakthrough of all breakthroughs to move the tail end of the curve.

And you won't be able to pay for it!

Imagine someone invents a treatment that prolongs your healthy life in 30 years. How much would Gates, Buffet, and Slim pay for it? For how much would he would sell? Do you think some middle class guy would be able to pay for it?

The argument that BioViva makes is that it would be cheaper at scale and if they can eliminate age related disease, it would be financially beneficial for a government to pay for their population to be treated.

An infinitely growing population with increasing health concerns does not sound cheap.

So let's say the price is 1 billion dollars, how many people could pay? If the price was lowered to 1 million dollars how many people could pay, and how much more they make than if the price is 1 billion dollars. If the price was then lowered to 100,000 dollars how many people would pay and how much more would they make than if the price is 1 million dollars? So anyway the price that gets you the most money if you have a product that everyone wants is not necessarily the highest price you can possibly charge ( the price that allows you to sell to say, the top 20 richest people on earth)

Finally, if you charge too much people might just wait for your patent to expire and say we'll pay for the cheaper version later (at the risk of dying from age related disease in meantime)

So, given my age, if there was a cure for most age related disease in the next 10-15 years then I expect that the price would be definitely low enough for me to afford it when I needed it.

I was thinking the same thing. What of black swan events? They (the authors of this study) might be right for the next ten years then, BSE... we gain another 30 years on average.

But as far as I know, such a BSE has never happened in medicine. There have been many developments that have reduced mortality for people below the maximum lifetime, but there has never been a medical breakthrough which dramatically increased the longevity of the very oldest people. If something is developed that allows us to have as many 130 year old people as we now have 100 year old people, it will be qualitatively different than anything that came before.

And there's a significant delay between breakthrough and signal in the data he's looking at. The accuracy of the predictions vary greatly with your age.

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