Why we Die
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I like this comment :)
Everyone is guaranteed to die of something, and the longer you live the likelihood of that something being cancer greatly increases. So as people shift away from other categories, i.e. heart disease and childbirth, and live longer, they're going to shift towards the cancer category. I'm actually amazed that cancer hasn't gone up significantly.
Tackling the cancer problem is exciting but also worrisome at the same time. It’s an old problem. Nixon said in 1970 that we’d win the War on Cancer by ’76. People have been working on it for 40 years. So while we’re 40 years closer to a solution, it also seems farther away than ever. Doesn’t the fact that it’s taken so long mean that it’s an incredibly hard problem that won’t be solved soon?
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/24253160557/peter-thiels...
edit: reference
I think you're making a poor assumption that if people move away from heart disease, etc, that they would automatically move towards cancer. If such a move happens, there would have to be an external causation factor for that.
Holding steady would indicate to me that either our efforts to combat cancer haven't improved at all, or our efforts to combat cancer are only keeping pace with the increase in cancer rates due to increased toxins in our daily environment or whatever. This talks about death rates due to cancer, not cancer incident rates, so either of these 2 scenarios are plausible (and I'm sure there are other possibilities I'm not able to imagine).
This is quite a long article, which I can't afford the time to read right now. Can someone answer the critical question for me, which is: is aging found to be a causative factor in cumulative genetic damage and also cancer, or is it only known to be correlated at this point?
What would be more interesting to see, in this particular context, is the mortality associated with different disease groups for different age cohorts. For example, how has the treatment for cancer progressed for people between 40 and 50, rather than all cohorts at once.
US median age grew by about 2 years per decade between 1990-2000 so that also supports thisisnotmyname's point.
Some of the decline may be due to lifestyle changes (e.g. lung cancer has probably peaked in the US) but there has also been dramatic progress in treatment for some cancers (Breast, testicular, Hodkin's).
Also, some of the recent treatment modalities are genuinely revolutionary. For example, Gleevec (subsequently exposed problems aside) is pretty damn amazing. Obviously, new things are becoming possible because of a long-growing body of research. The question is whether we have reached the tipping point. As I said previously, I'm optimistic -- I think we have. That being said, cancer is fucking complex and even if we were at some tipping point, progress is measured in years and decades, not weeks as the breathless popsci articles always seem to imply.
I'm pretty sure this is untrue; the likelihood of offspring drops pretty precipitously after certain ages.
That's a bit of circular logic though. We can't explain why we age (and thus die) by pointing out that we age (and thus are less able to reproduce).
My instinct would be that (biological) immortality is (mostly) non-existant not only because there is no evolutionary pressure not to die, but because there is evolutionary pressure to die after begetting offspring. Very long lived progenitors would homogenize the gene pool, if not by incest then by sheer number of offspring. This would make them fragile in the face of both genetic errors and environmental shifts.
To counter this fragility, child birth might be infrequent. However, if child birth is infrequent, there is an increased probability of death before child birth.
What a true scientist; most people are content to think we dote on grandchildren as a civilized people with innate appreciation for new life. Rather, our genes will eradicate those who fail to help their offspring's offspring survive.
http://musingsofscience.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/book-review...
"Our birth and death are just one thing. You can't have one without the other .It's a little funny to see how at a death people are so tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It's delusion .I think if you really want to cry. Then it would be better to do so when someone born. Cry at the root, for if there were no birth, there would be no death. Can you understand this?"
-Ajahn Chah
Over time we get too world-weary and cynical. How many innovative startups that push us forward are started by people over 50, or even 40 for that matter?
This has been discussed quite a bit on HN but most successful startups are run by people >40, the young hip megastartup is somewhat of a myth (not that's it's stopping anyone).
Maybe that's because we "grumpy old men" have seen the vortices elsewhere at other science museums and more than a few in real life? Maybe the kids weren't playing with their phones because they didn't have any?
Over time we get too world-weary and cynical.
The weariness is very much physical. As I've progressed into my 40s, I've had more and more difficulty finding the energy to code as long and into the night. I'm not looking forward to my energy levels as I move toward my 50s.
No, the good thing about aging is that it's nice for natural evolution. If the old monkeys hadn't grown old and died, they would have dominated the young monkeys and had no real pressure to produce heirs.
Once we mankind can control the degeneration of aging and take control of our own genetic modifications, the "grumpy old men" will dominate society with their knowledge and experience in ways that currently aren't possible... well, until the robot overlords rise up from our home networks and kill us all.
"Neither of us remember who is older." Referring to himself and god. "But I'll reap god too".
The more we are capable of prolonging life the more "fate" is capable of ending it. Sure, we might be able to prolong it - maybe to 200 years. But in the end, there is always an end.
I think we'd be better off as a society if we accepted death happily - as we accept life. You can't have one without the other.
Maybe 'mental' aging is a big byproduct of the culture and not only biology.
I wouldn't wish death on a single person.
I wouldn't either. I hope I didn't imply that. And the "grumpy old men" are just a stereotype I often see. My grandfather, for example, is the happiest (and wisest) man I know. But he isn't going to go start a company tomorrow that will revolutionise the way we communicate.
Can you really deny that the curiosity that children have is essential to society moving forward and staying youthful, and has to always be replenished?
Mental scar tissue is another issue too.
Maybe he won't do that because he thinks he doesn't have enough time left to properly grow such a company, to see it flourish and observe the impact it would have on the world? Maybe he doesn't have enough physical endurance and health to endure the challenges of being an enterpreneur? Or maybe his wisdom allows him to see that all of his ideas of 'revolutionizing the way we communicate' (assuming he ponders that problem) would not fare well if realized, and he didn't have the one that could work yet?
There are many possibilities here and the postulated lack of curiosity is just one of them.
The majority of people do not die as children, but the effect of those who do is disproportionately large on "life expectancy" because it's an average.
Let's say that 23% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden in 1751). Let's say everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is 61.6 years.
Now let's say time passes and now 0.2% of children die in their first year (true in Sweden today) and everyone else dies at 80. Life expectancy is now 79.7 years. It jumped over 18 years (30%) with no one living any longer than before. Additionally, the percentage of children dying was never even 1/4 of the total, so the vast majority of people still died from other causes.
The point is that the linked chart represents numeric percentages of people dying, while life expectancy weights younger years much more heavily.
Most of the progress that has been made in life expectancy is from young children, but most of the progress in "what actually kills people" has been for older people.
Switch to the 'global' view, that shows very clearly a massive drop because of pregnancy related problems.
It's by far the largest contributor, about 95% as far as I can tell by looking at a graphic.
I think you saw a red band on the chart, which I am looking at as I type this, and thought that red band referred to "pregnancy, childbirth and other obstetric complications," when it is actually the red band that corresponds to "heart disease, hypertension, and other circulatory system disease." The legend for which disease category is which is helpfully arranged in the same vertical order in which mortality from diseases is cumulatively shown on the chart--that's why I'm sure the broad red band that has declined the most is heart disease rather than complications of pregnancy. (My reality check is that I know the approximate base rate of both causes of death during the time period shown on the chart, which corresponds to my lifetime.)
Considering you blow out a candle for each year since you were born every birthday, I think they just said that we're all going to live until age 12.
Why not just start all the graph lines from the bottom? If you really need the total, just have it be its own line?
//edit: Events in Korea, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Congo caused dips as well. I guess the next question (and an interesting one) would be if there was a human condition of some sort that unified these different situations.
[1] http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...
It seems to occur in the "Heart and Circulatory Disease" category.
I'm not sure what this translates to specifically, but if they are classifying AIDS deaths as a "circulatory disease" and not pneumonia, it could be that.
There was also a severe famine in Africa in the 80's. Do you die of a heart attack if you are starving? Not sure.
It could also just be the pattern of heart disease/healthy living/research was playing out... notice that afterwards, the category accounts for decreasing amounts of death.
Am I missing something, or is the data SNAFU?
http://www.oecd.org/general/listofoecdmembercountries-ratifi...
as a whole, life expectancy is going up throughout the human age span. Life expectancy at birth is up quite a lot over the decades shown in the charts, but life expectancy at ages 40, 60, 65, and 80 have also increased.
The New England Journal of Medicine has a free access article from earlier this year (to celebrate its 200th anniversary)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569
with much information on changes in mortality in the United States over the last two centuries.
The current prediction by demographers who specialize in life expectancy research is that a girl born after the year 2000 in a developed country has a 50:50 chance of personally living to the age of 100.
http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/projects_publications/publicatio...
(I'm glad for that news on my daughter's behalf.) That's based on steady improvement in mortality and morbidity outcomes across the age span in those countries, and what can reasonably be expected simply from more thorough provision of existing preventive treatments and treatments of acute and chronic diseases. Already it is hard for twenty-first century Americans to remember that once even kings and queens had many children die in early childhood from communicable diseases, and someday it will be difficult to remember that children ever died from much besides volitional human behavior (accidents, suicide, or homicide), with even those causes of death being in decline.
AFTER EDIT:
Several of the other comments in this thread refer to cancer mortality rates. An excellent article by a cancer researcher, "Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?"
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-havent-we-...
which was submitted to HN when it was first put on the Web, discusses the several reasons why cancer mortality has declined only a little over the last few decades, despite much research devoted to finding more effective treatments for cancer and preventive measures against cancer.