Comment on The 1900s
grue@lemmy.world 1 day agoThe increase in average lifespan in the modern era has come almost entirely from a reduction of people dying during child birth and childhood. The life expectancy for people who’ve already reached adulthood (and for women, who’ve stopped having children) hasn’t really changed much since prehistory. Maybe we are “on the cusp” of that changing, but it hasn’t actually done so yet.
Dasus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No, yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying for a few comments now. That maybe it is so. I’m not saying it is so. I’m saying it’s a possibility.
Like I don’t believe I can read minds, but if I asked you to think of a number between one and ten and just guessed, I’d still have ~10% hitrate if we did it long enough. Perhaps even more.
Had you been a doctor in the 1920’s and talked about people some day perhaps living forever, you’d have been ridiculed in any decent science circles. Now it’s a novel thought that might even become reality. Might
You’re referring to the “two score ten” and yeah, if you reached adulthood, you’d probably make it well into your fifties, with high probability that you’d actually manage to around 70.
My dad made it to 70. Insanely bad living habits. Like genuinely can’t remember when he ever did a single thing like taking a walk or eating moderately or not drinking and smoking while doing that all. His mom (my grandmother) is now 93. She too has lived an exceedingly sedentary life and is obese.
If someone actually lives healthily, cares for themselves and has access to healthcare, 70 is extremely low for a life-expectancy. More like 100 for people who are now 30-40, and that’s just a guess because I used to drive a taxi and would see a lot of very healthy 90-year olds. Like not even health-nut healthy, just “do my own chores and don’t smoke and drink only rarely”.
I think the biggest problem is solving things like dementia more than keeping people physically alive.
I imagine a more realistic compromise here would be to assume that when my gen is at the very end of it’s life, it’s gonna be closer to 130-150 years. Am I being overly optimistic? Probably. Can we know before we get there? Not really. Is there any point in arguing what will happen? No, I don’t think so. Were I doing that? I was not. Was I pointing out that it’s not totally insane to suggest that one perhaps remote possibility is that we might actually develop crazy medicine. However we’d also need radical social reform to get that to everyone prolly but still.