Life expectancy won’t keep going up the way it has. Is that such a bad thing?
Your scribe still hasn’t stopped laughing at the finding that won Australian researcher Dr Saul Justin Newman an Ig Nobel prize: the world’s “blue zones” stocked with healthy centenarians coincidentally also have lots of pension fraud and poor birth records.
As Dr Newman put it – in verse, for reasons of his own:
“… the secrets fell over like a lover in clover when I checked the government books.
The blue zones are poor, the records no more, the 100-year-olds are all crooks.
The secret, it seems, to live out your dreams and make sure you keep living, not dying,
Is to move where birth certificates are rare, teach your kids pension fraud and start lying.”
The government of Japan, the most often cited nation when it comes to longevity, has long since twigged to the con, with a 2010 review finding 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan were in fact dead.
At least the fraudsters and undead pension claimants aren’t kidding themselves the way this guy is. Bryan Johnson’s attempts to defeat death and prolong life apparently include not only contributions from his “blood boy” (ugh) but also sleeping “with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections”, which is worthy of a Back Page in itself.
Completed my first total plasma exchange (TPE). Removing all the plasma in my body and replacing with Albumin.
— Bryan Johnson /dd (@bryan_johnson) October 14, 2024
This is different from what I did last year: removing 1 L of plasma from my body and then replacing it with 1 L of plasma from my blood boy @talmagejohnson_ . I gave… pic.twitter.com/mrKsKt3zrg
A new study in Nature suggests radical life extension pioneers like Johnson should use the precious time they have left on another hobby, as the 20th-century trend of life expectancy gains is slowing down.
The team used demographic data from the eight longest-lived economies, topped by Australia, plus the US and Hong Kong, to adjudicate between two 90s hypotheses: that human lifespan is inherently limited, and that radical – even indefinite – extension is possible.
They found that “it has become progressively more difficult to increase life expectancy … old-age mortality has not been declining since 1990 at a pace that is even close to the rate of improvement required to achieve radical life extension in this century”.
Between 1990 and 2019, only South Korea and Hong Kong achieved the 0.3-year annual improvement in lifespan that defines radical lifespan extension. Even Hong Kong stopped achieving this in 2000, with all countries showing decelerating improvement in the past decade than in the 90s, rather than the acceleration predicted by some.
The US is one of a few countries where life expectancy at birth has dipped, thanks to “a combination of increases in mortality at middle ages during the period 2010–2019 and then exacerbated by covid-19 in 2020”.
The average probability of all countries’ current birth cohorts surviving to 100 is 5.1% for females and 1.8% for males.
For life expectancy at birth to reach, say, 110 years, “death rates at all ages from all causes of death combined – up to age 150 years (for example, decades beyond the observed survival distribution for humans) – would need to be 88% lower than the observed death rate at age 109 in Japan in 2019. This level of mortality would require the complete cure or elimination of most major causes of death that exist today.”
OK, then.
It’s not clear whether these authors were aware of Dr Newman’s work concerning the old folk of Japan et al., which might make their outlook even less optimistic.
Radical lifespan extension, as defined here, may still be achievable, the authors say, by some low- and middle-income countries “as a product of experiencing the first longevity revolution in which death rates at younger and middle ages can still be reduced dramatically”.
Personally, and we’re aware this view might change as we approach three score years and 10, this Back Pager has never aspired to live much past the Bible standard.
But if this news disappoints you, your next read could be Kurt Vonnegut’s short story 2 B R 0 2 B about a “perfectly swell” world where disease and ageing have been eradicated. The problem of planet overcrowding has been solved with a sensible one-out-one-in policy: if you have a baby and want it to live you have to find a volunteer willing to report to one of the municipal gas chambers run by the Federal Bureau of Termination.
Vonnegut’s scenario is a tad grim. It may just be better to know when our time is up.
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