New Research Reveals Longevity Gains Slowing, Life Expectancy of 100 Unlikely
Original: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
Key topics
As researchers cast doubt on the likelihood of humans living to 100, the discussion veers off the beaten path to explore what truly matters: not just longevity, but "health span" – the quality of life in one's later years. Commenters enthusiastically share personal anecdotes about grandparents who lived well into old age with remarkable vitality, sparking a lively debate about the trade-offs between length and quality of life. While some joke about the hypothetical appeal of winning the longevity lottery, others soberly reflect on the complexities of suffering and the value of remaining alive, even in challenging circumstances. Amidst the varied perspectives, a consensus emerges: it's not just about living longer, but living better.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
1h
Peak period
78
0-6h
Avg / period
17.8
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Aug 30, 2025 at 12:15 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Aug 30, 2025 at 1:25 PM EDT
1h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
78 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 1, 2025 at 9:32 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
But if you can get me 90 years where I feel like a spring chicken until 89, then that’s just fine.
I'd sign up for the same
I’d sign up for that.
At that age if you can avoid cancer the rest is stuff like “Strong enough so you don’t break a hip when tripping on the stairs”
I've definitely experienced mental states that were worse than being dead. I don't regret remaining alive because of all the positive experiences I've had afterwards. But if we are talking about extending suffering that's only followed by death, I don't see the point.
Beginning at some acute level of pain you actually want to detach from the failing body.
88, feeling great!
89, feeling fine
90, less mighty*
91, not yet done!
92, don’t think I’ll hit 102!
He died a couple years later, just a few months after getting my grandmother into an assisted living facility.
*note, I struggle to recall the rhyme for 90, so this one might not be accurate!
It’s one component, but not the only reason [1].
Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation” [2]. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer [3]. They nevertheless age.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Theories_of_aging
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6651551/
[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe0174
In fact we know how to live forever, control our telomeres. We know it works because cancer exists. We just can’t control it but controlled cancer is effectively immortality.
Lobsters aren’t truly biologically immortal. They “continue to grow throughout their lives,” with “increasing amounts of energy” being needed to mount ans they grow larger [1]. “Eventually the cost is too high and lobsters can die from exhaustion.” (That said, if our cells aged like lobsters we’d live something like thousands of healthy years.)
For true biological immortality, look to some jellyfish [2]. You literally can’t tell if a cell is taken from an old or juvenile.
[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-lobsters-immortal.html
[2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/immortal-jellyfish-secret-to-...
Technically “immortal” means “never dying”, it has nothing to do with age. You could be unable to die but continue to age and become ever more decrepit (although the Oxford dictionary does list “never decaying” in its definition), for sure there’s a sci-fi short story about that out there.
The mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate, or they do but regenerate.
Hence my use of the term biologically immortal.
> mentioned creatures all age, they do get older, it just so happens their bodies don’t deteriorate
Were you really confused that OP was talking about stopping physical time?
That’s the second paragraph. I was specifically addressing only the first (the one I quoted). In that one you seem to be saying that “immortal means not aging”. That’s the only part of your post I wanted to address, the rest was very clear.
What is the oldest known living individual for each of these species, and for how long are they alive?
For the jellyfish, we don’t know. Their cells are indifferentiable by age and they’re bastards to study, with only one scientist in Kyoto having managed to culture them [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii
This is unfair, and akin to branding anyone who takes medicine as being unhinged.
There is evidence we can extend our health spans. By how much and how are open questions. And if we can actually stop aging, versus slow it down, has not been demonstrated. Some people engage with this unhealthily, just as many terminally-ill cancer patients unhealthily engage with long-shot treatment options. That doesn’t make everyone taking those treatments delusional.
I’d hope we more mature as a society than decrying real medical research that could materially increase our health spans because they’re heretical.
The fact that something happens doesn't mean it's a law of anything. Cars didn't exist before we built them - no law of "no cars". People died of TB before we had a cure - no law of "TB". Same for various types of cancer.
In practice when someone says "live forever", they don't mean to imply they'll live the 10^100 (or whatever the guestimates are) years to the end of the universe. They mean they'll stop aging in the sense that we do now. Maybe we could live to 10,000 or 50,000 or whatever. You can always get hit by a bus, or get some strange disease from a bat, or whatever.
I think scientists currently are testing ways to "partially" reprogram cells to make them younger while keeping their function. Early studies in mice have shown some reversal of aging signs.
Seems like an engineering problem more than an absolute limitation.
This doesn't help overall. Mixing two roughly equally broken things just yields the mean of the two. But the trick is that roughly 60 to 70% of conceptions will not survive to birth. This rejection sampling is ultimately what makes children younger.
If you had a population of single cells that didn't undergo this rejection sampling at some point, entropy and Muller's ratchet would actually age the entire population and kill it.
What scientists usually mean by "cellular age" isn’t mutation load, it’s the epigenetic and functional state of cells. During gametogenesis and early embryonic development DNA undergoes extensive repair, telomere maintenance and global epigenetic reprogramming that wipes and rewrites methylation patterns. This resets the cellular "clock" even though some mutations are passed on.
So while mutation load drifts slightly each generation, the reason babies start biologically young is this large scale reprogramming. That’s also why researchers are trying to mimic this process in adult cells (Yamanaka factors etc) to reverse aspects of aging.
The only truly troubling one is the brain, and we're very much not sure if it actually is one or for example, suffers degradation from the degradation of the body its attached to - likely both - but we also know that the brain is not a static structure, and so replacement or rejuvenation of key systems would definitely be possible (certainly finding any way to protect the small blood vessels in the brain would greatly help with dementia).
If not, the point in doing that is the enormous amount of suffering you create while thrashing against an inevitability.
That is not to say you should take naps and wait patiently for death, but it's a line to walk.
This is absurd. Of course mortality is inevitable -- eternity is a very long time -- but working to increase lifespan, prolong one's youth and vigor, and delay the inevitable doesn't cause an "enormous amount of suffering" (far less than the diseases of aging cause) and it's unfair to characterize it as "thrashing" when it can be approached in ways which are thoughtful and reasonable.
I tried to convey that I'm not saying "this is as good as it gets and it's wrong to try for longer life". Your "thoughtful and reasonable" approach was exactly what I had in mind.
What I say leads to suffering arises from denying that mortality is inevitable and tarring those who say otherwise as defeatists. Death is another part of life, as you acknowledged. It unnerves me to see denying that truth cast as a virtue.
And it makes sense, really. You can't have a functioning society if everyone is running around freaking out about death all the time.
But we're entering a weird time where we might actually be able to add more good years to our lives. One of the steps towards getting there is being a little more okay with people seriously exploring these ideas.
A species that lives forever must adjust to reproduce relatively slowly to not overwhelm the local environment. A species that lives short lives will reproduce at much higher rates. So at any time the fewer “immortal” individuals would be vulnerable to competition from the many “mortals”, or to predators.
Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans but with implications we can’t even think of now. Maybe our limitation will not be biological but societal.
> but that says nothing of artificial selection or bioengineering
Feel free to be specific. Start from here and describe your revelation about my “confusion”:
>> Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans
Natural life o overwhelmingly selects for well defined, limited lifespans. Engineered human life likely won’t see any natural pressure but rather societal pressure to set a well defined, limited lifespan.
I truly don’t know how to respond to this. If you want to die on a rigid time table, fine. Don’t take the rest of us out with you.
[0]: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/the-fable-of-the-dragon-tyran...
Given that that the universe hasn't an indefinite life span there is at least physical reason why we can't live indefinitely.
We don’t know this. We know of no creatures as biologically complex as humans that demonstrate biological immortality. That might be because nature never bothered. It might be because it can’t.
But you are generally correct: we have strong evidence healthspan-increasing interventions are not only possible, but proximate. That research could move faster with more funding, particularly from the public, since if we relinquish this funding to the rich it will not prioritize treatments which may be slightly less effective but much cheaper and thus broadly applicable.
(1) Yes we do have an example: us. Why is a baby’s cells young and healthy, and not the age of the parents? Dormant eggs are not the answer as you’d still get accumulating damage over time. Turns out there are mechanisms for cellular reprogramming which rejuvenates cells. There are mechanisms for making ages cells indistinguishable from young cells. We just haven’t fully harnessed this capability on therapeutics yet.
(2) The deeper point is one of logical necessity. No bird flies faster than the speed of sound, yet that doesn’t work as an argument for the impossibility of the SR-71 or Concorde. No physical law prevents restoring tissue to healthy young state. We just haven’t developed the tools to do so (yet).
You’re speculating too far beyond what we know to speak so definitively. Plenty of biology and even thermodynamics suggests there may be limits. That doesn’t prove they exist. But it’s in the same category as saying there are no know physics which prohibit time travel or transcending the human condition into a state of pure consciousness. Like, sure, there aren’t, but to use your analogy, ancient Romans didn’t know about the speed of light.
Diseased old cells have accumulated damage in a multitude of different forms, as well as accumulated junk. Fix the errors and remove the junk. It is as easy and as hard as that.
Nothing in thermodynamics or organic chemistry prevents this from being possible in principle.
Thermodynamics is not a limit on an intelligent agent reconfiguring atoms on Earth for the next several billion years.
During the Roman period, the average life expectancy was only 22-25 years old because so many babies were dying prematurely.
If you could make it past the age of 10, then you were expected to make it to about 50, which almost doubles life expectancy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Roman_Empi...
Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology.
Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything but the brain.
The tough problems:
- religious ick and luddite ick
- artificial gestation
- deactivating the brain stem without impacting development
- keeping the body physiologically active and developmentally normative
- head transplants that preserve spinal cord function
- lots of other ancillary issues with changes to pulmonary and immune flux.
Lab-grown organs is doable, but the brain and spinal column just aren't modular in that way.
In-place system renovation and targeted replacement is a more likely way to yield results.
And while I know some will contest the source, while intentionally conflating the mystical with the historical, even the Bible hits on the average age of man: "The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away."
Notably that is in Psalms, Old Testament, and so it was like written over the time frame of 400-1400BC. And I think it's fairly self evident that that segment was written in the context of plain historical observation with no mysticism implied or stated. Basically life expectancy once you leave childhood, let alone peak longevity, hasn't changed all that much over thousands of years.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18359748/
Some people would very much prefer if their consciousness wouldn't have an end date, after which they'll never experience or think anything and will just cease to exist.
Utter bollocks.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them.
Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often.
So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.
"Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror.
I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero.
I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.
It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking.
And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.
I hear this claim often, but I never hear any particular reason for why it's so important compared to e.g. letting Alpha Centauri colonize where the lightcones overlap.
Practically speaking, I have no idea what I _personally_ can do except of accepting the inevitable.
We should get less comfortable with death, and we should attack the problem until it's solved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
In the N-dimensional gradient from homeostasis to oblivion, N is high enough and the ground shakes often enough that it is not statistically feasible for there to be local minima. Only saddles, in one dimension or another other.
Cells from cancerous tumors do not prove biological immortality is technologically viable for humans, nor do hydras nor Greenland sharks, because the tradeoffs they have to make in order to obtain "immortality" (in only a very technical sense) would be wholly unworkable for the complexity and the experience of a human, as well as extremely destructive to human society.
Just think about this for a moment. "Cells from deadly tumors full of mutant hair and teeth refuse to die (until they kill their entire environment), therefore humans can be immortal?" Really? That's the argument you're going with?
People have been trying to explain this to you through this entire thread. But despite leaving 22 comments, you seem impervious to it. Personally, I think we should strive to be less like cancers, not more.
There is no Authority on Biology that says "if you want good X, you'll have to take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". It's just hard to get "good X, good Y, good Z" at once, and nature never really tried. That's up to us then.
That little "cancer" metaphor of yours is a worthless fluff piece meant to make you feel better about dying a protracted, miserable death before you hit the age of 100.
Personally, I think we should be coping less, and doing more about the problems we're facing - of which aging is one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...
So… You're just approaching this with, like, zero reference to actual science at all? "My mind imagines I can have eternal life, and therefore I can, and anybody pointing out flaws with my position is worthless miserable fluff"?
Look, I don't like the limits of thermodynamics more than anyone does. But I think it says a lot that there are, you know, actual real diseases that people suffer from and we can make a cost-effective amelioration of with focused effort. And instead you're here raging that we as a society aren't spending billions of dollars trying to make you immortal.
I'm baffled by your desire to defend the status quo that involves you and everyone you love dying a long and miserable death before the age of 100. Even more so with the amount of "actual real diseases" that loop back around to aging.
Not like they long for it or whatever, but anxiety about it goes down, acceptance of it goes up.
Psychedelics for everyone!
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-psychedelic-drugs-can-help-...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/taking-psychedelics-helps-pe...
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
- Seneca
Nowadays one lifetime isn’t even enough to read every book one would find interesting, and reading might be your favourite thing in the world that you do at literally ever opportunity. Long enough… Pft… Seneca clearly wasn’t familiar with the essentially infinite world of fan fiction. He surely would’ve judged it if he had.
Just to drive the point home: The comment is tongue in cheek. I agree with your first paragraph.
Edit: In the U.S. that is.
Only in the US whereas the OP "analyzed life expectancy for 23 high-income and low-mortality countries".
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_zone
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/04/are-blu...
https://www.science.org/content/article/do-blue-zones-suppos...
That’s only intriguing if the answer is “yes”. Otherwise it doesn’t matter.
If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.
339 more comments available on Hacker News