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Comment by throw__away7391 | Hacker News Reader

No it doesn't.

I'm a good bit younger than 200 and barely remember large portions of my earlier life already. What's so special about 200 that makes it any different?

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In another comment I spoke about how many more people are able to reach 60+ years of age, and that the amount of people living longer have exponentially grown. Our world population reaching another billions milestone at faster timeframes. Scarily, life expectancy was always at around 20-30 years for a large portion of history for humans.(most who reached 15 years of age were capable of living to 50 years albeit they were considered to be outliers) Around neolithic times, we had moved towards increasing population density and promoting growths. This time period was odd as it lowered the overall life expectancy because there were more humans that died from other methods as lifestyles changed from hunter-gatherer to more sedentary lifestyles. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles required loads of land for a single human to survive, which the neolithic era had been able to fix with the introduction of farming. Due to density, more people started attacking one another for variety of reasons and heavily relied on farm crops to sustain increased human populations. Societal growth of centers such as towns and cities then countries continued. Excluding many outliers, life expectancy only started to rise in the 1950s and has kept further increasing past 50+ years and 60+ years.

So yes there is something special about reaching 200 years of age. As it will singal a milestone no other human has ever reached from all of history. On the other hand, life expectancy growing at an alarming rate is putting a lot of strain on resources and land availability.

So by your logic we should be trying to reduce human life expectancy?!

But honestly I really don't think these arguments are motivated by/a consequence of real belief in them, it's more a kind of cope with the current situation that we've become acclimated to, something in the vein of "if god intended men to fly they'd have wings".

It is ignorant to not plan on methods of habilitating more people. There is an unsolved problem of space constraints and transportation costs of essentials and optional resources. Reducing life expectancy and population will not solve these fundamental issues. If these two constraints are able to be solved sufficiently enough, then people will be able to live in larger swaths of land or in outer/near orbit space or within the oceans. It all depends on how we progress from here. Right now we are having the same issues that plagued the neolithic era. Our increase in population and life expectancy will end up hurting us because of the unsolved logistical issues.

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