Life Expectancy 200 and Beyond

By | November 28, 2010
6 Comments

Christian Henrik Nesheim of I Look Forward To wrote me last week inviting me to participate in his latest futurist survey, this time on the subject of life expectancy.
 
The question was as follows:

In which decade do you think medicine will enable a human life expectancy of 200 years, and why in this particular decade?

I was swamped with pre-holiday work and then the holiday itself, so I didn’t get my answer back to Christian before he published responses from Aubrey de Grey (cautiously optimistic) and David Brin (skeptical).

My own response was:

It’s very difficult to pin something like this down to a decade, or even a quarter or half century. I think there are people alive today who will live to see 200 — I would like to be one of them. But when does that possibility begin to materialize? I think we might see life expectancy pass 100 by mid-century, and 100 years after that (2150) we’ll have many individuals hitting the 200 mark, and good reason to believe that others will do so.

Of course, the arrival of molecular nanotechnology or strong AI (either or both of which could happen before 2150) will make those time frames obsolete.

As always, I’m interested to learn what you think.

Before the question comes up, yes I DO believe that it’s possible to establish a life expectancy of, say, 300 even if no one has yet reached that age. If you disagree, please choose time frames that you think are appropriate.

Survey Results are here.

Welcome Instapundit readers, and thanks for taking the survey. Here’s some late-breaking news that might give you cause to reconsider your answers. 

 

“Other” responses below.

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  • https://me.yahoo.com/a/QJc1ars2xtyg8_HamezpRq6vslfI6cw-#06cd1

    Hi, I’m Sally Morem

    I responded to the first 3 questions with 2050 because I believe nanotechnology will steepen the acceleration of cell repair machines well before 2050, but after 2020. These will enable us to achieve effective “emortality” (Brian Stableford’s term) by 2050 by fixing everything that ails us, and by keeping us thereafter in tip-top shape.

    How old would I like to live to be? I said other, because it depends on how a raft of things turn out. If we can reverse aging so I can be a superbly fit twenty-something, I would love to live a very long time that way, perhaps several thousand years. My interest in living a long time with an old body is virtually nil.

    Also, if we do figure out how to upload our personality, memory, interests, skills, talents, and a fully robust sense of self, and gain the kind of mental powers Kurzweil was describing in the noosphere, living billions of years constantly learning and growing seems quite feasible and I would expect, enjoyable.

  • holyspiritdenier

    These futuristic “life expectancy” predictions display confused thinking: We don’t know if a 200 life expectancy can exist until people living several centuries from now can observe a substantial sample of individuals amongst them who have lived to at least 200 years of age. The first such individual might just represent an outlier, like Jeanne Calment with her 122 year lifespan. Once a crowd of people celebrates 200th birthdays, then future actuaries will have to come up with new actuarial tables based on the changed data about human life expectancy.

    Therefore people who say we’ll have even more ambitious “500 year” life expectancies by, say, 2035, speak nonsense, unless several people out there, in our mysterious, far-future year 2010, have already lived at least 475 years, like characters from “Highlander.”

  • bowermaster

    HSD –

    No confused thinking, just using the term Life Expectancy to mean “how long can one reasonably expect to live” not “how long do the actuaries calculate one can reasonably expect to live?” As I wrote:

    “Before the question comes up, yes I DO believe that it’s possible to establish a life expectancy of, say, 300 even if no one has yet reached that age. If you disagree, please choose time frames that you think are appropriate.”

    Disruptive advances in medicine may render actuarial estimates useless. If people are routinely living for hundreds of years they don’t need to wait for actuaries to tell them that. And even before that, if aging is eliminated or reversed, life expectancy comes down to how well we avoid diseases and accidents. Cure most of those diseases, and you’re left with accidents and foul play.

    BTW, that’s where the 800 came from. It is estimated (can’t find the source right now) that average human lifespan would be roughly 800 years if aging and disease were eliminated as cause of death — that’s how long it would take for us all to be murdered or hit by busses. If it makes you feel any better, that 800 year figure was a projection from actuarial data! :-)

  • https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawk4bpEgP3ML8tptpfdd6EPvJrkpTLFfcj0

    The interesting thing is that only one significant increase will be necessary, because the accelerating pace of science and technology will use that increment to make further jumps, ad infinitum.
    The uninteresting thing is that the Baby Boomers may be the last generation to die a natural death.
    Then there’s the matter of that comet heading our way…

  • https://me.yahoo.com/a/QJc1ars2xtyg8_HamezpRq6vslfI6cw-#06cd1

    If 60-year-olds have twenty-something bodies and doctors can measure this happy state of affairs year after year, decade after decade, this will be a strong indicator of the existence of very long life, perhaps true emortality.

    So, it will be unlikely to be necessary to wait hundreds of years before we know for sure.

    Sally Morem

  • The Truth

    What people don’t realize is that unnatural long life would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Even if you COULD live to be, say, 800 years old, you’d never make it a quarter that far. There’s a little problem with population and available space. People don’t die, but there’s a constant increase in births each year. With space completely restricted is leads to many, many things. Wars to destroy other cultures and countries for living space. The destruction of all available “wild land” which leads to environmental failure, not enough farm land to produce food, military states that sterilize people and have harsh mandates to follow. That’s no future I want to be part of. And to suggest we’ll move to another planet, there is NO planet in our solar m to support human life of traveling to a distant system such as Sirius is so far beyond our technological capabilities it’s foolish to think we’d advance that far in 10,000 years. I don’t doubt advances in medicine and technology will eventually increase lifespans, but never to the point many of you are talking about. And we’re talking about “human life”. Not some Sci-Fi mutated cyborg which is ridiculous to suggest. The fact is, everyone in this discussion will die, and sooner than later. We’re no different than any other segment of the last billion years. We just like to think we are. That little issue of human arrogance.