The actuarial table is based on an extrapolation of 2007 mortality rates for the rest of the population’s lives. That sounds like a pretty shaky premise.
Why would you think that? Mortality rate have, in fact, gone upwards in the past few years for many subpopulations (eg. some female demographics have seen their absolute lifespan expectancy fall), and before that, decreases in old adult mortality were tiny:
life extension from age 65 was increased only 6 years over the entire 20th century; from age 75 gains were only 4.2 years, from age 85 only 2.3 years and from age 100 a single year. From age 65 over the most recent 20 years, the gain has been about a year
(And doesn’t that imply deceleration? 20 years is 1⁄5 of the period, and over the period, 6 years were gained; 1⁄5 * 6 > 1.)
Which is a shakier premise, that trends will continue, or that SENS will be a wild success greater than, say, the War on Cancer?
I didn’t say that lifespans would necessarily become greater in that period, but several decades is time for the rates to change quite a lot. And while public health has become worse in recent decades in a number of ways (obesity epidemic, lower rates of exercise,) a technologies have been developed which improve the prognoses for a lot of ailments (we may not have cured cancer yet, but many forms are much more treatable than they used to be.)
If all the supposed medical discoveries I hear about on a regular basis were all they’re cracked up to be, we would already have a generalized cure for cancer by now and already have ageless mice if not ageless humans, but even if we assume no ‘magic bullet’ innovations in the meantime, the benefits of incrementally advancing technology are likely to outpace decreases in health if only because the population can probably only get so much fatter and more out of shape than it already is before we reach a point where increased proliferation of superstimulus foods and sedentary activities don’t make any difference.
Right, my point is that SENS research, which is a fairly new field, doesn’t have to be dramatically more successful than cancer research to produce tangible returns in human life expectancy, and the deceleration in increase of life expectancy is most likely due to a negative health trend which is likely not to endure over the entire interval.
The actuarial table is based on an extrapolation of 2007 mortality rates for the rest of the population’s lives. That sounds like a pretty shaky premise.
Why would you think that? Mortality rate have, in fact, gone upwards in the past few years for many subpopulations (eg. some female demographics have seen their absolute lifespan expectancy fall), and before that, decreases in old adult mortality were tiny:
(And doesn’t that imply deceleration? 20 years is 1⁄5 of the period, and over the period, 6 years were gained; 1⁄5 * 6 > 1.)
Which is a shakier premise, that trends will continue, or that SENS will be a wild success greater than, say, the War on Cancer?
I didn’t say that lifespans would necessarily become greater in that period, but several decades is time for the rates to change quite a lot. And while public health has become worse in recent decades in a number of ways (obesity epidemic, lower rates of exercise,) a technologies have been developed which improve the prognoses for a lot of ailments (we may not have cured cancer yet, but many forms are much more treatable than they used to be.)
If all the supposed medical discoveries I hear about on a regular basis were all they’re cracked up to be, we would already have a generalized cure for cancer by now and already have ageless mice if not ageless humans, but even if we assume no ‘magic bullet’ innovations in the meantime, the benefits of incrementally advancing technology are likely to outpace decreases in health if only because the population can probably only get so much fatter and more out of shape than it already is before we reach a point where increased proliferation of superstimulus foods and sedentary activities don’t make any difference.
Which is already built into the quoted longevity increases. (See also the Gompertz curve.)
Right, my point is that SENS research, which is a fairly new field, doesn’t have to be dramatically more successful than cancer research to produce tangible returns in human life expectancy, and the deceleration in increase of life expectancy is most likely due to a negative health trend which is likely not to endure over the entire interval.