Do people younger than 80 die of old age?

I would hope that over the next 50 years, heart disease and cancer, for example, become treatable. We should be lifting weights and maintaining our strength into our 80's:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/28/77-year...

In the past half century, the life expectancy for the UK has risen a decade to 81.5. And that's across disparate demographics. I expect it will rise more in the next half century.

I have aunts and uncles who have lived a long time, with two of them in fine health above age 90, so I find this a bit more believable. My maternal grandmother, their mother, lived to be 99.

Anyway, on the issue you doubt, Vaupel and other professional demographers "show the work" in their professional publications.

Life expectancy simply means that 50% of those people will be dead by 100. It could be that 99% of them are dead by 110.

That's a perfectly plausible distribution. Japan, for example, has over 50k 100+ inhabitants (and probably 0 over 120).

No, it doesn't. From Wikipefia:

> Life expectancy is a statistical average of the number of years a human lives

Therefore, if 3 people live until 110, and the fourth dies at 30, life expectancy is 90 years.

In another part of his comment, tokenadult mentioned another estimate that means what you're describing:

> Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100

>humans don't live longer than about 120 years

That's not a hard limit. There are a number of promising avenues of research likely to push human lifespan substantially higher.

Actually, it's a pretty hard limit based on cell death. You can never predict when an amazing breakthrough will come about, but without it you're not going to see people living to 150.