A growing body of research shows that life gets better as we get older

Re:A growing body of research shows that life gets better as... by exratione on Monday December 01, 2014 @08:57PM (#8685271)

Vaupel is a respected voice in the field. You might look through his publication history.

I don't think it's particularly controversial at this point that life expectancy at birth is trending upwards at ~2.5 years/decade and adult life expectancy at ~1 year/decade. Vaupel is far from the only researcher publishing studies of life expectancy trends, and the actuarial community is in a state of what passes in their staid halls for great upheaval for some years now, issuing ever more politely alarmed statements about their growing inability to predict the future longevity upside.

But none of that is relevant, as it is the result of medical advances in absence of any attempt to intervene deliberately in the aging process. What will distinguish the medicine of the past fifty years from the medicine of the next fifty years is exactly that. In the future researchers will be trying to slow or reverse the causes of aging, whereas in the past they achieved life extension through only inadvertent impact on those causes or expensive compensation strategies for the end results that do little to fix things.

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Re:A growing body of research shows that life gets better as... by jessriedel on Monday December 01, 2014 @11:50PM (#8685771)

> ...and the actuarial community is in a state of what passes in their staid halls for great upheaval for some years now, issuing ever more politely alarmed statements about their growing inability to predict the future longevity upside.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but it sounds like you're admitting that essentially all actuarial tables, across many nations, industries, and governments, agree that this trend cannot continue.

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