And This Is If We Largely Fail
Watch the actuaries - or indeed anyone with a great deal of money on the line - if you'd like a higher class of prognostication on the future of life expectancy. From IFAonline: "As many as 50% of 30 year-olds could live to age 100, according to Paternoster, the insurance company that takes on responsibility for defined benefit (DB) scheme risks. Paternoster based its findings on DB scheme members' data and its study follows research from The Office of National Statistics, which shows a 90-fold increase in the number of people living to age 100." Given that this is based upon present trends, this extrapolation is also based on the assumption that we fail. By which I mean that the biotechnology revolution withers on the vine, producing no great leaps forward, that the prospects for regenerative medicine turn out to be false, that we never get SENS underway, that the cancer research community falters. In short, that trillions invested in research and development infrastructure, presently moving at a very fast rate in a hundred different directions, fails to deliver in any meaningful way. I find that outcome to be highly implausible.
Link: http://www.ifaonline.co.uk/public/showPage.html?page=ifa2006_articleimport&tempPageName=478937