No limit to maximal lifespan in humans: how to beat a 122-year-old record (2022)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Her husband had died some years before, and she had just been diagnosed with the early signs of dementia. She decided she had had a good life already, and that now was the right time to go, while she was still in control of her life.
The process and safeguards have been formalised and are uncontroversial in the main. Some doctors opt not to be part of this for their patients. That's their right. Usually a colleague steps in to guide the patient through the process.
In our friend's case, her children supported her in this decision. Her friends were also aware she was planning to end her life. Her funeral was a celebration of her life, not shock at her death.
Whenever I suggest adults should be in control of their own lives, I get a response along the lines of “we’d see mass suicide if people had an easy option to end their life”.
Ok, so let’s think about that. There may be thousands of people whose lives are so bad they’d take an easy way out if it were available. So the idea is to keep that option off the table, so those people are forced to live out the rest of their lives suffering?
To anyone who holds this opinion, I’d really like to know why. What reason could you possibly have to prefer someone you don’t even know to live in suffering opposed to them having control over their own life?
We already see what a catastrophic mess there is when people can buy instant feel-good fentanyl pills that wreck the rest of their entire life.
* Reduced suffering, the methods available for assisted suicide are as painless as you can get. You go under anesthesia and just never wake up.
* Less room for accidentally surviving. I can't even imagine the horror of surviving a gunshot to the skull.
* Less trauma for those around you, no body hitting the street or washing up on shore, no discovering your friend or kid who has bled out in the bathroom.
* Closure, some methods of suicide the family has no way to know for sure what happened and might assume they disappeared or otherwise foul play.
* More opportunity to help people find alternatives. They don't have to take them but you have a more structured opportunity to talk people off a ledge and have a cooling off period to avoid rash decisions.
* You have documentation of freely-given informed consent. Someone who commits suicide by more painful methods when easily accessible painless death becomes inherently suspicious.
* Estate planning can be built in so it's less of a mess for next-of-kin.
Seeing everyone scrambling to drag life out without doing anything about its quality is just absurd.
If mortality age is a normal distribution, you would see someone 125+ years old every now and then even just naturally. And you don't.
By contrast, standard deviation for height is somewher between 2 and 3 inches. If 70 inches is roughly median, 5 standard deviations is not unheard of. That's roughly 85 inches. 7' 2" is not exactly rare in the NBA and there are players a notch even above that--7' 5" is getting pretty rare.
Standard deviation for mortality distribution is about 8 years. If median is 75 years old, 115 shouldn't be that unusual and 123 should pop up occasionally. Yet, 115 is a staggeringly rare age to live to, and 123 is simply unheard of.
Life is effectively a mixture model combining two Poisson point process of things that can kill you (roughly, causes of infant mortality and causes of adult mortality)[0]. We've thankfully been able to shift the mixture weight pretty hard away from infant mortality with modern medicine and improved living conditions globally, but we're still linearly chipping away at an exponential problem (because events in Poisson point processes occur with exponential frequency - the most likely time for an event to occur is always, "now", even if the mean is every 79 years).
Even were we to completely eliminate all causes of death except things that can kill a healthy person in under a minute, we'd probably just end up with a prettier (probably a few decades shifted, possibly amplified[1]) Poisson distribution. It probably wouldn't be hugely different than what we have now, either - all the top causes of death have a "quick" option, and it doesn't take much cumulative probability of death to massively increase the probability your life will end before a certain age.
The article may be right that there is no cap to maximal age, but the likelihood of achieving ages greater than those seen may require significant time, even with the current population level, even if we started intervening generically. I would guess it will always be rare that people live to extreme age, even if that age manages to shift up another decade (shifting the average age of death into the high 90s).
[0] The resulting Poisson distribution of deaths is damped and left-skewed because deaths are not independent (saying which is to eliminate significant real-world detail), which is technically a requirement of Poisson point processes.
[1] Life saving measures are also not independent, which could be a significant factor if we could really recover from anything that required more than a minute to die.
Why would all-cause mortality be normally distributed? The causes of death at the low end and high end tend to be different, so I don't see why we would expect them to occur at similar rates.
Erm, that is my point? They're not.
The human body has systems that break down. The immune system, for example, relies on a fixed number of stem cells that eventually die. Once you have zero of them, you're pretty much done. Also, I seem to remember that our ability to replace fat cells also declines with age (probably for similar reasons).
Consequently, outside medical interventions (or lack thereof) aren't really defining human lifetimes.
My mother and late grandmother both independently voiced that they experienced medical ageism and disrespectful, dismissive treatment by doctors, hospitals, and care providers.
FWIW, USA is ~47th globally in life expectancy.
Regardless, the USA is only a couple years behind and, with the way life expectancy is measured, that's much better explained by inner-city violence than it is by healthcare.
Recently in the news for lifesaving drugs that cost $330k annually for the rest of your life and also make you hella fat. But let's focus on the positive: You might be allowed to live now.
Now we only need to program the spirit of the AI to focus on healthspan instead of disease management..
This has given me a lot to think about.
Human bodies seem to pack up with age regardless of how much you spend on healthcare.
I suspect major change may come more from a merging with AI scenario rather than better healthcare.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-cal...
Despite all the good reasoning about it being impossible to live that long, what does it for me is that people in her town, where she was well known, would have had to have not noticed Jeanne die and her daughter take her place. Including her doctor.
Not saying she definitely isn't a fraud, but the evidence against her is more hypothetical and the evidence for her is more solid.
It might have been fraud for 15 minutes of local fame. This wasn't national or international news and nobody had any interest in a book of records. But it seemed real to me.
This guy mostly publishes solo. It’s a bit unusual.