Hacker News Reader

Say what? Absent warfare and epidemics and with proper hygiene someone who had survived childhood could expect to live to 70.

Compare Psalm 90: "The days of our years are threescore years and ten"

View on HN

For most of Western history commoners lived to 28F/32M. Average age rose to around 40 by 1800 in France. I used to work for Futures Group in the early 90's (inherited Robert Tappan Morris's code) spending US taxpayer dollars on global demographic engineering. Human biomass is now way too high. Being fruitful multiplying is not such a great game plan anymore. Adjust lifespan expectations for pathologies we fuel with VAST profitable supply chains consumers only imagine are personal moral failings. We run full court presses against more making of us. I signed no security clearances. These are not really secrets. Maybe security via obscurity was more popular before the Net became popular.

If female: survived to 40 - dying in childbirth was a very large risk until the 1930s in the US and other western countries.

Granted, most of the risk was due to midwives and doctors (especially doctors) not understanding or carrying out proper hygiene.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com