A growing body of research shows that life gets better as we get older | Hacker News Reader

A growing body of research shows that life gets better as we get older

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55 pointssoftdev1235 comments

Many of us also live in countries that favor older generations.

http://www.openpop.org/?p=583

> Among the least intergenerationally just countries were the USA, Japan, Italy, Greece and Canada (Vanhuysse 2013: 37).

>. . . not reforming current policy patterns would simply mean that a high degree of injustice will be inflicted upon non-elderly citizens.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical, but could this effect be explained by survivor bias?

True!

Source: Am old

Well, sure. Being older is so absolutely amazing in terms of experience, assurance, wealth, power, confidence, and so forth, that all those similar things can actually for a time outweigh the crumbling of your health and your increasing frailty and pain.

But only for a time.

It is a measure of how much people are predisposed to accept the status quo that we don't see far more engaged in serious, scientific efforts to apply modern biotechnology to build rejuvenation treatments. Certain death and present pain is more acceptable than effort, uncertainty, and change.

People have been looking into 'life extension' for at least 10,000 years.

It's a hard problem and despite what snake oil salesman say we are unlikely to make real progress in the next 100 years.

PS: Drugs for example are a completely useless approach long term. (Short term gains might be possible though.) Realistically we would need to disassemble someone without killing them or do the equivelent without taking them apart which is probably harder.

People had been looking for a cure for infection for at least 10,000 years, and then we came up with antibiotics.

Science has progressed amazingly during the past centuries. There is no reason to give up hope.

There where actually a wide range of effective treatments for infections before antibotics. EX: Hunny works as a topical treatment. Dioscorides (c.50 AD) (http://www.worldwidewounds.com/2001/november/Molan/honey-as-...) The problem is Aging is a single word discribing thousands of individual problems. It's like someone saying they can solve 'network secuirty' with a simple patch. Cancer is a similar issue because what's being discribed is a symptom not a unified underlying breakdown.

EX: Cantagious cancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

On the other hand we have zero effective treatments for aging.

    > The problem is Aging is a single word discribing 
    > thousands of individual problems

...

    > On the other hand we have zero effective treatments for 
    > aging.

Sure. We just have treatments for many of the thousands of individual problems, and we're developing new ones all the time.

> There where actually a wide range of effective treatments for infections before antibotics.

Antibiotics have been a key vehicle for human life extension. If you think the effect of honey(not sure what hunny is) on a topical wound is anything close to what a modern antibiotic is capable of, you are not paying attention.

    > It's a hard problem and despite what snake oil salesman
    > say we are unlikely to make real progress in the next
    > 100 years.

Why?

When people express these sentiments, I like to remind them that about 100 years ago Penicillin was discovered. About fifty or sixty years ago hip replacements became a thing.

Sure the problems we have to solve are getting progressively harder, but we are also getting progressively better at solving them with new platform technologies like genetic manipulation and finer control of immune biotechnology. I think medicine is going to be substantially better in 50 years seeing as nearly all of the development in medicine has occurred in the last two or three hundred years at an accelerating pace with most of the development occurring in the past 100.

In response to your PS, I'd like to note that stem cell therapies are just starting to be approved. That field has an incredible amount of promise for developing replacement parts. Sometimes all it takes is an injection of the stuff prepared in the right way rather than wholesale surgical replacement.

Actually, despite increasing chronic conditions and obesity, people are living longer lives, with morbidity compressed into a shorter period of frailty and pain at the end. Boring incremental progress has made real gains.

And for dramatic, status quo changing efforts, we now have Google's Project Calico.

Timothy Salthouse is the dean of researchers on cognitive changes over the course of human lifespan.[1] So Hacker News readers who would like to know more about their futures (we already know we are getting older, not younger, as the years go by) would do well to read some of his publications[2] to find out what's inevitable and what's not inevitable as we all age. Most of us can readily count on living a lot more years, as human life expectancy at adult ages (like mine) is steadily increasing around the world.

Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[3] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[4]

An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why"[5] Provides some of the background.

Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[6]

P.S. Some of the specific lifestyle observations and tips in this article are immediately useful for me and other middle-aged people, so the submitted article is well worth a read.

[1] http://faculty.virginia.edu/cogage/lab-members/director/

[2] http://faculty.virginia.edu/cogage/links/publications/

[3] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

[4] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

[5] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[6] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

> In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years.

Not sure if you used the correct word (and if I interpret it correctly), but I find the expected age of 100 a bit hard to believe, given that (1) humans don't live longer than about 120 years, and (2) many die much younger than 80.

I have aunts and uncles who have lived a long time, with two of them in fine health above age 90, so I find this a bit more believable. My maternal grandmother, their mother, lived to be 99.

Anyway, on the issue you doubt, Vaupel and other professional demographers "show the work" in their professional publications.

>humans don't live longer than about 120 years

That's not a hard limit. There are a number of promising avenues of research likely to push human lifespan substantially higher.

Actually, it's a pretty hard limit based on cell death. You can never predict when an amazing breakthrough will come about, but without it you're not going to see people living to 150.

Life expectancy simply means that 50% of those people will be dead by 100. It could be that 99% of them are dead by 110.

That's a perfectly plausible distribution. Japan, for example, has over 50k 100+ inhabitants (and probably 0 over 120).

No, it doesn't. From Wikipefia:

> Life expectancy is a statistical average of the number of years a human lives

Therefore, if 3 people live until 110, and the fourth dies at 30, life expectancy is 90 years.

In another part of his comment, tokenadult mentioned another estimate that means what you're describing:

> Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100

In the past half century, the life expectancy for the UK has risen a decade to 81.5. And that's across disparate demographics. I expect it will rise more in the next half century.

Do people younger than 80 die of old age?

I would hope that over the next 50 years, heart disease and cancer, for example, become treatable. We should be lifting weights and maintaining our strength into our 80's:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/28/77-year...

> Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100,

You have posted this false statement multiple times in the past on HN. Please stop. This is what I wrote last time:

> the support for this supposed fact is very dubious. You link to one article by Vaupel in Nature who, in making this claim, cites only this paper

> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2810516/

> by Christensen et al. The paper says, in the abstract,

   If the pace of increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the past two 
   centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 in France, 
   Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan, and other countries with long life 
   expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays.

>Very few medical researchers are likely to find that "if" statement at all plausible, so this claim about most newborn girls living to 100 is bogus. If you have a better source for this claim, please present it. Otherwise, stop posting it.

Anyone wanting to read your very unconvincing rebuttal can go back to that thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7533774

Vaupel is a respected voice in the field. You might look through his publication history.

I don't think it's particularly controversial at this point that life expectancy at birth is trending upwards at ~2.5 years/decade and adult life expectancy at ~1 year/decade. Vaupel is far from the only researcher publishing studies of life expectancy trends, and the actuarial community is in a state of what passes in their staid halls for great upheaval for some years now, issuing ever more politely alarmed statements about their growing inability to predict the future longevity upside.

But none of that is relevant, as it is the result of medical advances in absence of any attempt to intervene deliberately in the aging process. What will distinguish the medicine of the past fifty years from the medicine of the next fifty years is exactly that. In the future researchers will be trying to slow or reverse the causes of aging, whereas in the past they achieved life extension through only inadvertent impact on those causes or expensive compensation strategies for the end results that do little to fix things.

> ...and the actuarial community is in a state of what passes in their staid halls for great upheaval for some years now, issuing ever more politely alarmed statements about their growing inability to predict the future longevity upside.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it sounds like you're admitting that essentially all actuarial tables, across many nations, industries, and governments, agree that this trend cannot continue.

Hi Jess -- good on you for being skeptical. Honestly curious about two things:

1. Why do you think OP's wrong? You don't really state, in either this thread or that one.

2. What our your sources for OP being incorrect? Semi-anonymous internet posters can keep trashing each other ad infinitum, and without any sources (that I saw, maybe I am wrong) you don't present a convincing argument against.

Thank you!

I wasn't citing a source that conflicts with tokenadult's claims, I was just pointing out that if you actually track down his citations you find that none of them point to actual data supporting his broad claim. Rather, he takes a speculative statement based on a hypothetical scenario that is very unlikely to hold, and then presents it as fact.

That's all I should really need to do to convince a reader that they can't trust him to represent his sources fairly, but for completeness you can just read that the World Bank's life expectancy predictions for a child born today in the US is 79 and in the UK 82.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN

Indeeed, this news article

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10511865/Two-th...

explicitly describes where the funny business arises:

   The most commonly quoted life expectancy figures for the UK say that the current 
   generation of baby girls will live on average until they are just 82.7 while boys 
   will survive just 79 years. But using the ONS’s alternative “cohort life
   expectancy” method – which assumes that survival rates will continue to improve 
   at the current rate – today’s baby girls are already expected to live to 93.9 
   years while boys would reach 90.6 years, taking them well into the 22nd Century

The only way to get this ridiculous claim about people routinely living to 100 is by assuming that the historic rise in life expectancies will continue, but this is extremely unlikely to happen as confirmed by any official source or actuary table you care to consult.

> Semi-anonymous internet posters

I know what you mean, but I think I'm about as non-anonymous as you can get on the internet. My HN user page contains a link to my personal website, which has my legal name, photographs of me, my place of employment, email address, and mailing address. (And my personal webpage links back to my HN account.)

Hey, that's really helpful. Thank you for the well thought out answer.

Define "life".

I think that definition here is: subjective well being.

"Subjective" and "well" are redundant.)

Depends how you want it defined - in the completely objective sense - a "state of existence".

In a subjective way, it's whatever you make of it.

A sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate.

not true. Currently only about 95% of people who have ever lived have died.

We might be the lucky 5%!

I doubt that. The remaining population are all in terminal condition.

The point was that such meme-science is good for Cosmopolitan, but not HN.

What they are trying to say, that change in hormonal levels will produce different behavioral patterns? Or that weaker and uglier body will form a new set of habits? That changes in the brain will result in less cognitive load. That watching stupid TV because there is no better alternative is what they call "better life"? Come on.

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