Articles on rising life expectancy will be a lazy journalistic staple in the mainstream from here on out - they write themselves, and you can push one out on autopilot every six months or so. The statistics even come superficially pre-analyzed these days; no thought needed by the media outlet at all. We'll ponder the irony inherent in this post while looking at the statistics:

Life expectancy rates in the United States are at an all-time high, with people born in 2005 projected to live for nearly 78 years, a new federal study finds.

The finding reflects a continuing trend of increasing life expectancy that began in 1955, when the average American lived to be 69.6 years old. By 1995, life expectancy was 75.8 years, and by 2005, it had risen to 77.9 years, according to the report.

Life expectancy is a subtle statistic - it doesn't measure quite what you might think it measures. But medicine is becoming more effective; we are indeed in an upward trend, the result of massive investment in medical and biotechnological progress.

It's a slow boat of a trend when it comes to additional years of life, however, and people are overly focused on trivial regional and cultural differences - half a year here, a year there. These are meaningless, useless exercises in comparison in the face of what is possible for medical science. We can see paths to extending healthy life by decades, to repairing aging in the very old to give them additional youthful years. Given the necessary support and funding, this technology could be mere decades away.

Ignore the slow trend upwards in health life; that trend is not the one to be watching. Keep an eye instead on the development of a research and funding community centered around real rejuvenation technologies. That is where meaningful healthy life extension will start.

Technorati tags: life expectancy, life extension

Posted by Reason at September 14, 2007 10:45 PM | TrackBack (0)