Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but that conclusion is not supported by the article (or by other data). No human being has a "great shot at 130" no matter how modern the medical care is. The longest documented human lifespan is 122 years. Living past 110 years puts you in a VERY exclusive list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_living_people Why this is true is one of the great medical mysteries of our times, which we haven't solved yet.

View on HN

It's true that the oldest verified person lived to 122 years - many of those years lived before antibiotics, before smoking was widely known to be unhealthy, before organ transplants, before widespread use of vaccines. The people on the lists of 'oldest living people' grew up in a significantly tougher world and thus many of their peers probably died young from entirely preventable or curable diseases.

If those people had lived with today's medical technology and knowledge available to them for their whole lives, that list of people living to 110 would be much longer and undoubtedly you'd see an increase in the number of people giving to 120 and probably to 130.

If you read the article, they explictly rule out the "poisson sequence of life-ending events" model of mortality. If this model was true, a 120-year-old living in the age of vaccines, antibiotics, and organ transplants should have as much chance of living to 130 as a 20-year old has of living to 30. They don't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com