The ultimate measure of Longevity Technology is how long people live.
One of the great successes in human history is the relatively linear growth of global life expectancy from 30 years pre-1870 to 73 years in 2019[1].
Globally, we increased life expectancy by 143% in 149 years. This is roughly an additional year of average lifespan every 3.5 years.
But that's just a global average. If you focus on specific populations, longevity technology does better. Take Japanese women, for example, with an expected life expectancy of ~89 years. That's great. Further, the top decile of Japanese women are likely expected to live close to 100 years.
Thus, our global measure of Longevity Technology is 73 years of global average life expectancy. Plus, we have pockets of early adopting populations with ~100 year median lifespans.
Are you or I likely to live to 100 years? We don't have good data or models on this (this is a gap). Lifespan is a backward-looking metric because it can take decades or even a century to know what happened.
There are relatively proven Longevity Technologies, and there are ones that are likely coming soon.
Relatively proven technologies:
- Eat a mostly plants, fruits, nuts and legumes vegan diet and avoid added sugar. There was a recent meta study suggesting this would give ~10-13 years of additional expected lifespan vs. a typical (not even a terrible) Western diet. Simply doing a mediterranean diet probably gets you most of those years.
- Exercise 7+ hours per week. Include some resistance training to reduce muscle and bone loss.
- Sleep 7-8 hours per night.
- Enjoy life, enjoy work, enjoy family, and have a solid social life.
- Don't smoke or use opiates. Occasional or no alcohol.
- Avoid accidents.
This on its own probably gives an expected lifespan of around 90-100. I try to do all of these, though don't always succeed. They have become part of my routine, and I don't feel like I'm making any compromises on my happiness. That said, we don't really know what doing all the "right" things get us. Once again, we need better data on this.
Technologies that may be coming soon:
- Gene editing to enhance longevity genes and remove deleterious genes. For example, a woman in New Zealand recently had a deleterious cholesterol gene edited out. There is significant, untapped opportunity here. What genes do Japanese women have that might be helpful? What genes do centenarians have that might be helpful?
- New drugs, like Rapamycin or Metformin, that promise
- New treatments for diseases like cancer, stroke, heart attack, dementia, etc.
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New centenarian treatments. The number of centenarians is growing rapidly, and we will likely pass 1 million centenarians globally shortly. This will give us the opportunity to test many new treatments for this age group to help them live longer and healthier.
It's not hard to imagine in 10 or 20 years the early adopters of Longevity Technology will have an expected lifespan of 120 years. Though, it might take a few decades to really know.
References:
[1] Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Hannah Ritchie. "Life Expectancy." Our World in Data. First published in 2013; last revised in October 2019. Accessed July 22, 2022. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy