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A comment on What's the Longest Humans Can Live?. Parent comment

Re:What's the Longest Humans Can Live? by draaglom on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @03:49PM (#12647162)
It does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much.

This is not to say that a medical breakthrough which changes the limit is impossible, but it has to compete against an exponential mortality curve.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gompertz%E2%80%93Makeham_law_o...

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Re:What's the Longest Humans Can Live? by theli0nheart on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @06:10PM (#12648401)
> It does say something about medical breakthroughs -- since they're happening all the time and not shifting this upper bound very much.

Given that those who are 115 today were 85 when breakthroughs were made three decades ago, I'd say that we simply don't have the data yet to make that assessment.

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Re:What's the Longest Humans Can Live? by alejohausner on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @11:16PM (#12649975)
Gompertz's law looks very grim. The death RATE grows exponentially with age. And it's such a nice straight line on a semilog plot, from age 40 through 100. I don't see how medical advances can budge that one.
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