Bad news for people who plan to live forever. First came Dr. Saul Newman's research on super-agers - those 110 and older.
In an article titled "Supercentenarian and Remarkable Age Records Show Patterns Indicative of Clerical Errors and Pension Fraud," Newman reports that the high concentration of extremely old people occurs, oddly enough, in places with the highest poverty rates - a harbinger of the worst health - and no birth certificates. In the U.S., the number of super-elderly has declined by between 69% and 82%, depending on the state.
For all that spending a fortune on jasmine tea while following the Okinawan diet, Newman's study also challenges the idea of "blue zones," pointing to the high rate of error and fraud in these mythical, delightful areas with high concentrations of centenarians. In 2010, more than 230,000 Japanese centenarians turned up missing, imaginary, or dead; in Greece, 72% of centenarians counted in the 2012 census turned up dead ("or, depending on your point of view, committing pension fraud").
But we will still live longer than our grandparents, won't we? On that point: we may be reaching peak longevity. New research analyzing international demographic data suggests that the "life expectancy constraint hypothesis" (according to which we are approaching the upper limit of human life expectancy) may be true. Clearly, "there is no evidence to support the assumption that most newborns today will live to be 100." "We assume that as long as we live now, we will live in the future," said study leader S. Jay Olshansky told the New York Times.
At first glance, this seems disappointing, especially when it turns out that maybe the super-agers probably aren't as old as previously thought.
Accepting that no biohacker will make us immortal may help us focus on how to improve our limited lives by addressing our real problems. Including the one most likely to shorten our life expectancy: the climate. Even from a purely selfish standpoint, why would you want to live to be 120 years old, cooped up in the service quarters of a billionaire's bunker, explaining to your surviving great-grandchild what a bird is while sharing the family ration of dried worm gruel? And if you are the billionaire in question, what is the appeal of living forever on a dying planet? We need to do something about that.
It might help us focus on quality rather than quantity - something we struggle with. New research in the UK shows that today's people aged between 50 and 70 are at greater risk of chronic disease and disability than their predecessors, with rising rates of cancer, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. This is striking, given all the medical advances in the post-war period. "These worrying trends could lead to younger generations spending more years in poor health and living with disabilities," explained Laura Jimeno, the study's lead author.
In addition, a study last year reported that one in five adults over 65 in England feel lonely, a condition that often leads to a decline in physical and mental health. With an ageing and atomised population, 68,000 people are expected to die this year from Japan's chilling 'lonely death epidemic'.
We do not want to die, but we have allowed our world to become a place where aging is an unattractive, even frightening prospect. Maybe we'd do better if we focused our energies on everyone being here, living well, and not for a (terribly) long time? | BGNES
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Emma Beddington, The Guardian
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