Humans Can’t Live Much Longer, New Evidence Suggests
Lifespan advances are near biological limits, the thinking goes. So we should focus instead on healthspan.
Enjoy your time on this good Earth. And don’t expect a whole lot more than what’s currently being offered.
Despite all the hullabaloo around anti-aging technologies and age-reversing medicines, nobody has set a new record for longevity since Jeanne Calment of France died at age 122 in 1997. That’s 27 years of zero advancement in the actual human lifespan.
We were doing so well there for a while.
Improvements in sanitation coupled with advancements in medicine starting around the beginning of the 20th century ushered in historically unprecedented advances in human life expectancy — how long, on average, a newborn is expected to live given current known death rates. The phenomenal improvements since the year 1900 — from around 48 in the US then to 77.5 today — led some futurists in the 1980s and 1990s to predict that by now — in 2024 — people would routinely be living for centuries, not decades.
But the radical pace of those advancements has been slowing over the past three decades, new research finds, and some scientists say we are at the end of the era of radical improvements in…
