For most of the 20th century, human life expectancy skyrocketed. Advancements in hygiene science, a wide variety of medical innovations and discoveries, and, frankly, not living in the wilderness where your baby can be stolen by a wolf or die of tuberculosis, have all helped our collective life expectancies tremendously. According to a new study, however, we may have topped out.
In the study, published in PNAS and spotted by Science Alert, an international team of researchers crunched the numbers on people born between 1939 and 2000 in 23 high-income countries, using six different forecasting models.
For as much as some of our world’s most immortality-hungry dictators publicly chat about the potential of living forever, researchers concluded that life expectancy increases are slowing down significantly.
If you were banking on blowing out 100 candles while your great-grandkids ask what the sky looked like before we blotted it out to starve the deadly machines of their power source, it’s probably time to make some alternate long-term plans because, statistically speaking, it’s not happening.
The golden age of human longevity was largely powered by keeping babies and young kids alive, an area where modern medicine did a stellar job in the early 20th century. Now that we’ve mostly maxed out those gains in wealthy countries, there’s less room for improvement.
Unless you’re cryogenically freezing your body or sleeping in a hyperbaric time capsule for bathing in the blood of the young or stealing someone’s youth through dark magic, the longevity boom is over.
From 1900 to 1938, life expectancy rose by about 5.5 months per generation. After that, it slumped to somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 months. The trendline is still moving up, just way slower than before.
Life expectancy now hovers around 80 in developed countries, and no one in the studied cohorts (even those born in 1980) is projected to hit triple digits on average. Even if we made serious gains in adult survival starting tomorrow, we’d still fall short of the early 20th century’s turbo-charged progress.
Other than disrupting your plans to live to 200, this actually has a practical, real-world effect, as governments, healthcare systems, and even your 401(k) projections rely on these numbers being accurate. If we’re not going to live as long as we hoped, we need to rethink how we age, what health systems we invest in, what kind of end-of-life care we prepare for, and maybe how soon we should start actually enjoying the tail end of our lives.
Humanity has made tremendous strides in increasing life expectancy and longevity. But if we want to make any more, we’re going to need to make some massive advancements in medicine and technology. Otherwise, you’d better start penciling in your appointment with the cremator about 20 to 30 years earlier than you planned.
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