New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely

The Hacker News discussion revolves around the concept of lifespan and healthspan, exploring the biological, technological, and philosophical aspects of aging and mortality.

The Desire for Extended Healthspan Over Mere Longevity

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the distinction between simply living longer and living longer healthily. Users express a preference for extended periods of vitality over extended periods of decline.

• "Swizec: What about quality of life adjusted life years? I don’t want to live to 100 and be miserable for the last 30"
• "But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then then that’s just fine."
• "melling: Yes, the term is “health span” and that’s basically what everyone is talking about every single time you read an article on the subject."
• "fcatalan: My grandfather lived to 102 and only the last few months were bad, nothing dramatic, just fading away at home, no hospital. I'd sign up for the same"

The Debate on the Possibility and Nature of Immortality/Indefinite Lifespans

The core of the technical discussion centers on whether indefinite lifespans are biologically or physically possible, and what mechanisms might achieve this.

• "adastra22: There is no physical/chemical/biological reason you can’t live indefinitely with the health and vitality of a 25-35 year old. Aging isn’t a law of nature."
• "chpatrick: Isn't the reason cancer? Eventually the DNA copying errors add up."
• "sodality2: Cancer is not fundamentally unsolvable (AFAIK?). This is a tough question to answer though. Can we prove cancer to be solvable without solving it?"
• "andrewflnr: There are a handful of animals, mammals even, that essentially don't get cancer (some/all large whales and naked mole rats IIRC). So that might be solvable other ways."
• "conception: Lobsters, flatworms, immortal jellyfish and hydras are all believed to be immortal."
• "JumpCrisscross::.. Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation”. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer. They nevertheless age."
• "latexr: Technically “immortal” means “never dying”, it has nothing to do with age. You could be unable to die but continue to age and become ever more decrepit (although the Oxford dictionary does list “never decaying” in its definition), for sure there’s a sci-fi short story about that out there."
• "lossolo:... Researchers can take adult cells, reprogram them back to an embryonic like state using Yamanaka factors (a set of four genes) effectively erasing their biological age."
• "simianparrot: Senescence is a tradeoff to ward against cancer earlier in life. Eventually it will lead to cancer as a side effect, but optimally something else has failed before then. You can’t patch it out completely without breaking something else."
• "ACCount37: Aging isn't even recognized as a disease yet, and it well should be. Once it gets at least the same kind of focus cancer or heart disease does now? Then we'll talk about how it's 'impossible to fix'."
• "simianparrot: That’s a naive take on what senescence is. Look it up. You can stop it, but be prepared to then have to figure out how to deal with all the side effects it prevents. And then you can fix those but be prepared to deal with those side effects. And so on. My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs."

The Role of External Factors and Societal Implications

Several users touched upon how societal factors, technology, and even philosophical outlooks influence the pursuit and perception of longevity.

• "danielmarkbruce: We need ECC for DNA, I could probably use a deep scrub."
• "BriggyDwiggs42: The cost of tech tends to fall as a rule. Why wouldn’t it eventually become feasible?"
• "croes: Given that that the universe hasn't an indefinite life span there Is at least physical reason why we can't live indefinitely."
• "aaronbrethorst: For anyone else who didn’t know the name, you may recall the shredded weirdo in the helmet from 2021: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-16/braintree..."
• "rhyperior: The number of supplements and treatments he’s taking are probably too much, and some are quite experimental. He’s definitely rolling some dice."
• "anigbrowl: It's the 'indefinite' part that I react negatively to. I don’t have a good impression of people who are obsessed with abolishing death, as opposed to your example of maximizing quality of life (or minimizing illness) without getting too hung up on overall age."
• "chillingeffect: It's not our species, it's our culture. Anxiety over death leads to consumption, so it's a consumer society's virtue."
• "kiba: That's just terror management of death... That's why we say things like "death gives life meaning". Utter bollocks."
• "sixtyj: In Hollywood, they have 12 types of scenarios. Choose your type of life. Tragedy? Love story? Adventure? Becoming someone? Life is too short to experience all scenarios that is why we want live longer…"
• "ACCount37: We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved."
• "Intralexical: That's the logic of a cancer cell."
• "keiferski: ...people obsessed with life extension are also those deeply involved in creating systems that deliberately waste the time we already do have, via addictive algorithms, clickbait content, unnecessary consumerism, etc."
• "“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” - Seneca"
• "grues-dinner: Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?"
• "dsign: So, we are paying an extremely high cost for letting God go on with His Slow Tormentous Cooking of Souls before Consumption, and things are only going to get worse, given the demographic expectations. Wouldn’t it make sense to put a big chunk of budget into creating life-extension tech?"
• "pembrook: America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every background, and within <1 generation most immigrants become fully integrated. When European identities are all built around stories from the past, and the only vision of the future being offered is one of impending doom and urbanist intellectual memes (climate apocalypse, population decline, social welfare breakdown, economic malaise, technophobia), it's no wonder that immigrants wouldn't want to buy into your culture."
• "simianparrot: The assumption that everything can be “fixed” is one I will never understand. It’s so obvious when studying organisms in all their shapes and forms how everything is a tradeoff, and nothing can be stable. The fundamental truth of the universe is change."
• "ACCount37: There is no physical or biological constraint that says "senescence absolutely has to happen". In some species, it doesn't seem to happen at all. In others, it happens extremely slowly. Clearly, there are massive longevity gains left on the table - ones we'll never pick up if we keep whining about "life" being "a balance of tradeoffs"."
• "simianparrot: I find it peculiar that you interpret my statements as "whining". I specifically wrote: My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs"
• "ACCount37: There is no "fairness enforcement" in life, and biology is no exception. The closest we get is conservation laws, and those do not forbid living healthily well into your 500s. You're out looking for "tradeoffs" that may not be there, or may not be worth caring about."
• "simianparrot: ~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's hubris. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because so far that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology."

The Importance of Historical Data and Misinterpretations of Life Expectancy

A segment of the conversation addressed the historical context of life expectancy, noting that significant gains have been due to reduced childhood mortality rather than a fundamental alteration of the aging process itself.

• "czhu12: ... The main claim is that life expectancy improvements in the past century are mostly due to decreases in childhood mortality."
• "echelon: That's 100% on the mark. Infants aren't dying anymore. Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology."
• "somenameforme: ... If one only looked at e.g. Roman aristocracy ... then their life expectancy would likely be similar to our own. This exact study was carried out on the Ancient Greeks [1], even prior to the Romans, and found a life expectancy of 72 years."
• "bigmattystyles: ... we should be ok with living 80ish or more years and then clocking out."
• "kiba: Immortality is a long time to waste on shit that don't matters."
• "jebarker: For me, the sad part about dying isn’t the loss of agency in the world as much as missing the rest of the movie."
• "ACCount37: ... We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved."
• "hollerith: >life expectancy has been declining Only in the US whereas the OP "analyzed life expectancy for 23 high-income and low-mortality countries"."
• "irrational: Is it just genetic? On my father’s side, people typically live to 100 at a minimum and are perfectly healthy mentally and physically right up till a week or so before they die."
• "jvanderbot: You're asking if anyone has bothered to study long lived people to determine why they live a long time?"
• "davnn: Maybe living the blue zone [1] lifestyle?"
• "refactor_master: The lifestyle with olive oil and fish, or pension fraud?"
• "Root_Denied: I'd be cautious of Blue Zones, they're potentially not actually a real thing and more of a statistical construct."