Life extension predictions that seem too optimistic, from “The Coming Death Shortage,” Charles C. Mann’s provocative 2005 Atlantic article:
“In the past century U.S. life expectancy has climbed from forty-seven to seventy-seven, increasing by nearly two thirds. Similar rises happened in almost every country. And this process shows no sign of stopping: according to the United Nations, by 2050 global life expectancy will have increased by another ten years. Note, however, that this tremendous increase has been in average life expectancy—that is, the number of years that most people live. There has been next to no increase in the maximum lifespan, the number of years that one can possibly walk the earth—now thought to be about 120. In the scientists’ projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.
Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward ‘engineered negligible senescence’—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have ‘a good chance of success in mice within ten years.’ The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. ‘In ten years we’ll have a pill that will give you twenty years,’ says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. ‘And then there’ll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born.'” (Thanks TETW.)
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Cocoon trailer, 1985:
