About three or four slides in you get the take-away message, which is often missed in discussions about mortality here on Hacker News: "If you divide the population into separate age cohorts, you can see that improvements in life expectancy have been broad-based and ongoing." And this is a finding that applies not only to the United States, but to the whole developed world. I have an eighty-one-year-old mother (born in the 1930s, of course) and a ninety-four-year-old aunt (born in the 1920s) and have other relatives who are quite old and still healthy. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[1] An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here’s why."[2] explains what incremental improvements have led to better health and increased life expectancy at all ages in the United States. The very fascinating data visualizations in the article submitted today highlight the importance of research on preventing suicide, reducing drug abuse, and preventing senile dementia such as Alzheimer disease, which is where some of the next progress in prolonging healthy life will have to come from.

Professional demographers try to think ahead about these issues, not least so that national governments in various countries can project the funding necessary for publicly funded retirement income programs and national health insurance programs. Demographers have now been following the steady trends long enough to make projections that girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100,[3] with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing"[4] by James Vaupel, originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."

I was in a local Barnes and Noble bookstore back when I was shopping for an eightieth birthday gift (a book-holder) for my mom, and I discovered that the birthday card section in that store, which is mostly a bookstore, had multiple choices of cards for eightieth birthdays and even for ninetieth birthdays. We will be celebrating more and more and more birthdays of friends and relatives of advanced age in the coming decades.

[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

[3] http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

[4] http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...